A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

You’re listening to a Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Dr. Naomi Oreskes.

Uh, she is professor of History of Science at Harvard University. She’s taught at Stanford, also at the University of California in San Diego. And, uh, has an illustrious career, has written a number of books, and it’s a widely published author. Her, her, uh, articles have been cited hundreds of times in scientific journals, maybe thousands of times. Uh, and, uh, so welcome to the program, Naomi. Naomi, sorry, sorry.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Uh, so tell us, uh, about your, your story. I mean, a fascinating journey to get to where you’re at now. You had, uh, academic career did not necessarily start off in environmental science. Where, uh, uh, tell us how you ended up, uh, studying what you studied as, uh, undergrad and graduate, and then how it evolved.

Sure. Okay. Well, my undergraduate degree is in geology. I started my professional life as a geologist. I worked as an expiration geologist in the outback of Australia. And I love geology. I love being outdoors. I loved rocks and minerals, and I especially love the stories that rocks and minerals tell about the history of our planet.

But I also had a lot of other interests. I was one of those people who found it really hard to choose a major because I was also interested in history and philosophy and politics, and I liked reading novels. And so when I was in graduate school, I decided to take a course in philosophy of science. Just out of interest.

And that was a choice that changed my life because I discovered a whole world, an academic world of who studied science as a thing. like instead of doing science, they were studying science, trying to understand the relationship between scientific knowledge and culture and politics. Trying to answer questions like, well, how do we know scientists are right?

How do we judge scientific information? What is it that scientists do to try to ensure that the knowledge they produce is reliable? And that for me was sort of a eureka moment. I just thought those were the kinds of questions I really wanted to dedicate my life to. Uh, and so I ended up doing a joint PhD at Stanford in geological research and history science, a lot of philosophy of science classes, and that’s pretty much the path I’ve been on ever since.

Well, just kind of timely in, uh, in, not necessarily. Not necessarily a good way in that we see that the EPA is, uh, rolling [00:03:00] back the endangerment finding, uh, which is basically saying that greenhouse gases are endangering the planet. And the scientific consensus has been, has been, I mean, for decades that this, uh. That the greenhouse gases do endanger the planet. Um, you know, talk to us about that.

Well, first of all, just like to clarify the endangerment finding isn’t really about the planet. I mean, the planet is a lump of rock that has been around for 4.5 billion years. Continue to be around for a long time to come. The issue really is about the danger to us, to human beings and to all of life on earth.

And I think that’s important to emphasize because I think sometimes when people hear environmentalists or scientists talking about saving the planet, it sounds like something that’s very peripheral to our lives and our concerns. But I think what’s really crucial to emphasize, and we’ve seen it with our own eyes this year, the floods in Texas, the fires in California, the incredible heat that we’ve been experiencing across the northeast of the United States last several weeks. This is about impacts on us and our lives, things that are leading to property damage, to loss of life, uh, and just to. Making a lot, a lot of aspects of life. More expensive for everyone.

So, so that’s the core of the argument. And scientists have been working on this for half a century. We published a paper this year, we, being my students and I, um, showing the arguments that scientists had made in the 1960s to the US Congress to try to explain to senators and Congress people. What climate science was telling them, and this is why the words weather and climate are in the Clean Act, because members of Congress had already been educated about this issue, and they already knew in 1969 when they were developing the act and having hearings regarding the Clean Air Act, they already knew that.

The scientific evidence showed that if keep burning fossil fuels, you put more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That carbon dioxide will heat the planet, and that sooner or later that will happen. And scientists were already saying that in the 1960s. The only thing they weren’t really sure about was the sooner or later part.

How soon would this all occur? And so because they did in fact, effectively communicate that to Congress, the words weather and climate in the report because congressmen understood that pollution. Including carbon pollution can change the climate of planet. And so this is a really important argument for understanding the whole debate over the endangerment finding because some people have tried to argue that there’s no way Congress could have meant the Clean Air Act to apply to climate change.

Cause no one knew anything about that at the time. So in this recent paper that we published last year, we showed that that was false, that Congress absolutely knew about climate change, and that’s why these words are in the act. And so that’s why Congress does have authority under the Cleaner Act to regulate carbon dioxide as the pollutant that it is.

But as we all know, um, powerful forces in this country have been fighting back against science for a long time. And one of the interesting things we’ve shown in our work is that. People were not finding the science in the beginning, in the 1960s and seventies when the science was still coalescing.

And as long as climate change was a prediction about the future, something that would happen sooner or later. The fossil fuel industry didn’t really pay that much attention. Uh, right wing think tanks didn’t really pay that much attention. Conservative politicians. Weren’t really worried about climate change, didn’t deny that it was real.

But in the late eighties and the early 1990s, something really important changes, and that’s something is that climate change went from being a prediction to being a [00:07:00] fact. Until 1988, most scientists, practically all scientists thought that climate change was something that was going to happen in the future.

The big change comes when Jim Hansen. The climate modeler at nasa, at the Godden Institute for Space Studies and his team find data to show that the climate is in fact already changing. And when that happens, two things occur. The scientific community gets more concerned and they create the Intergovernment mental panel on climate change, the IPCC to look more closely at the issue and to try to sort out.

The details about when you could expect different changes to occur and the fossil fuel industry begins to fight the science, and we’ve been dealing with that, the opposition and frankly, disinformation from the fossil fuel industry that has been saturating our airwaves since the early 1990s.

Well, it seems as though even the petro states and the oil companies have admitted, admitted that, Uh, climate change is real. Uh, it seems like they are further ahead the Trump administration in terms of, uh, admitting that there is a problem. Now, of course, they have denied it. Quite, uh, vociferously for decades. Uh, but you know, I was at the COP28 in, in Dubai, and, and it seemed as though there was consensus even among the petro states, that there was a problem and it needed to be solved and that, uh, we were going to have to get off of oil and gas and fossil fuels, but they were just looking for a wind down period.

Um. But the, the problem is that, um, you know, many of the players in the oil and gas industry, you know, are still fighting it vociferously. I mean, you and, uh, many of them are big funders of, uh, the Trump administration and a lot of, uh, frackers down in Texas who are emitting gargantuan amounts of methane.

Uh, I, I remember reading one Fracker that’s fairly modest sized. Frackers is emitting more methane than all of exons. Emissions in the, in the Permian Basin. So, uh, you know, small operators can have a huge impact. Um, so you’ve, you’ve written a book, the Big Myth. How does that tie into all of this?

Well, there’s a lot to unpack there. So let me just say a few things. First of all, um, you have to be really careful when you’re talking about emissions because the fossil fuel industry wants. Just to focus on what is known as operational emissions. So how much CO2 or methane is emitted into the atmosphere when they drill for oil and gas.

And so it is that a small wildcat. Fracker could be [00:10:00] emitting more emissions in a month or a year than a bigger company that maybe has more efficient operations. But that’s not the most important thing at stake here. The most important thing at stake is not the operational emissions, it’s all the emissions that happen when we burn the product.

That is to say oil and gas, and that’s what you’re talking about. The gigatons, the billions of tons of carbon pollution, uh, that are going into the atmosphere and continue to go into the atmosphere. And that’s where the issue of, you know, what they say versus what they do comes up. And so I always say to people, we have to really focus our attention, not just on what they say, but what they do.

So it is true that in recent years we’ve seen a shift from what I like call hard denial to soft denial. So hard denial is just rejecting the science, saying it isn’t true. It’s a hoax. You know, nobody knows the science is too uncertain. And the fossil fuel industry did that for decades. And we’ve documented that in our work, particularly my first book with Eric Conway, Merchants of Doubt.

But what we’ve seen in recent years is a shift to what I’d like to call soft denial. So in public. Major. The CEOs of major oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Chevron, bp, uh, will say that they accept climate change is real. And they’ll even often say that they’re aligned with the Paris Climate Agreements.

But if you look at what they’re actually doing, that is simply not true. They are continuing to explore for, develop, sell, and use. Oil, gas and coal in ways that are completely inconsistent with the Paris Agreement and what these companies are doing. And it’s not a secret. You just read their annual reports.

It’s, there in black and white. The development that they are into the future is completely inconsistent with keeping climate change below 1.5 degrees or even two degrees. So they say one thing, but they do another. They also make a lot of false claims about their commitment to renewable energy to biofuel.

So we have a lot of [00:12:00] evidence that’s come out, in the last few years, that many of these companies have spent a lot of money on advertisements, uh, advertising their commitment to biofuels. So, for ex example, shell boasts about how they’ve developed biofuels to use at the Indianapolis 500 race course.

But actually their private correspondence show that first of all, you know, the Indy 500, it’s a big public event, but it’s. Trivial compared to all the oil and gas that’s used in the world, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s really just a public relations stunt. also that in their own private correspondence, they’ve acknowledged that there’s no way that biofuels can scale up to really be a significant replacement for conventional fossil fuels.

So again, they’re saying one thing or implying one thing in their advertising, but doing something else. In their businesses. And then there’s the whole larger question that, uh, our new book is about. So one of the things that Eric Conway and I have studied over the years is the role of third [00:13:00] party allies.

So these are groups that are not necessarily oil and gas companies or coal companies, but who have an interest for. A variety of different reasons in preventing regulation of fossil fuels. And one of the key parts of of this alliance are groups that oppose regulation as a general principle who think that, uh, government regulation of the marketplace is just bad.

And one of the things we became interested in, well, why would people think that? Because. Obviously there are many things that need to be regulated, toxic substances, arsenic, mercury, need to be regulated. Pesticides need to be regulated. Uh, workplace safety needs to be regulated. Anyone who knows anything about the history of capitalism knows that you know, if you just let the marketplace do what Ronald Reagan liked to call it’s magic, you end up with a lot of sick people, injured workers, and a very polluted environment.

And that’s not a secret. It’s no, you know, it’s not a radical thing to say that. And in fact, even Adam Smith knew that and said that. So we became interested in why there would seemed to be this alliance between climate change, denial, anti-regulatory attitudes.

And so that led to our new book, and it’s called The Big Myth. How American business taught us to loathe government and love the free market. And it’s really a history of the political ideology that has led us to this present moment where you have, uh, president Trump trying to dismantle regulation across the board, trying to dismantle federal science agencies real and trying to massively shrink the size of the federal government.

Um. And, you know, use the money to give tax cuts to billionaires. So, so we wanted to better understand that. And it’s a big book, it’s 500 pages. My husband always says, be sure to tell people they don’t have to read the whole thing. We tried to write it so individual chapters could be read alone. But what we’ve shown is that it’s really about the [00:15:00] failures of capitalism as currently practiced.

And by what that I mean is if you think about the Adam, the capitalism that Adam Smith. Wrote about and envisioned it was a capitalism of small businessmen. You know, the famous baker and butcher that in that famous line that everybody quotes about self-interest. So you imagine a baker who has a bakery and he wants to make a living, so he sells bread and it’s in his interest to sell good bread at a fair price because if he doesn’t, then you’ll go to a different baker.

But that’s a very different world than we live in today. We live in a world of massive corporations. In many cases who have monopolistic or near monopolistic control on markets, we often don’t really have the choice to go to the other baker, right? Like if we wanna, if we’re on social media or using the internet, um, very often there aren’t a lot of good choices.

And we also live in a world where corporations saturate the airwaves with advertising marketing. Some, or much of which is misleading and actually active disinformation. So why, how did that happen? How did we get there? And again, because if you read Adam Smith, he actually says markets need be regulated.

He says, can’t assume that self-interest of individuals will always serve the greater good. And the example he gives. Banking, he goes on great length about why banks need to be regulated. Something that’s been much in the news again recently. So what we saw saw is that by the end of the 19th century, people recognized that unregulated capitalism was creating a world of hurt and suffering.

Huge numbers of workers were being killed on the jobs in dangerous factories. Huge numbers of children. Children as young as two years old in Massachusetts were working in factories, textile mills, mines, and it was a really brutal system. And there was also a lot of toxic industrial pollution in cities like Manchester.

You know, [00:17:00] um, Stuttgart, you know, Monheim, the places that had industrialized early in the 18th and centuries. And so reformers began to say, look, this isn’t okay. It’s not okay. When factory owners kill their workers, it’s not okay. When they exploit children as young as two years old, it’s not okay when they dump.

Toxic chemicals into rivers, lake streams and the atmosphere. And so a movement began to develop both in Europe the United States, to regulate capitalism, to have rules of the road to say, yes, we want the products that factories produce, but we also want workers to go home at the end of the day alive.

And so in the United States, that’s known as the progressive era. It has different names in different countries, but we see the same basic pattern in Germany, in Britain, and in the United States, and then later in France and other industrialized countries. What happens in response to this is that a sector of the business community, not all of it, but an important sector, fights back and how do they fight back?

Do they say, we want to kill our [00:18:00] workers, we think it’s good to kill children? No, they don’t say that. They say. Oh, but wait, if you do that, it threatens freedom. It threatens personal liberty. It threatens individual choice. And so they begin to build this argument to claim that free market capitalism, unregulated unbridled capitalism, protects personal freedom.

And so the new book this, is this story, this story of amerit nutritious argument where the business community used freedom. and The idea of quote, limited government to claim that they were defending the freedom of individuals, when in reality they’re actually justifying deadly and horrible industrial practices.

Yeah, I like to bring up the point of like the SECI mean, nobody would allow stock trading without some kinds of limitations. Uh, we need to have regulations in the market and everybody accepts those as even capitalists that you that, hey, if you had people who could lie without, with impunity, that they would, and, uh, or at least some would, and.

But if, if I can interrupt there, but I think this is really the crucial point when you say everybody accepts that. I think most of us do, because most of us understand the basic intrinsic logic of saying, yeah, no selling fraudulent securities is just a bad thing and we know that. Fraudulent business practices contributed greatly to the crash 1929 that we all learned about in school.

But in fact, there are people in America who would like to see the SEC abolished, who there are people in the Trump administration who would like to see. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation abolished, and there’s a whole cadre of tech billionaires in Silicon Valley who even as we speak, are making the case for the abolition of all regulations.

In fact, Elon Musk, when he was running the so-called Department of Government efficiency, which of course wasn’t actually a department at all, uh, had no basis, uh, he said that Regulation was the enemy, and if it were up to him, he would eliminate all regulations. So there is a kind of extreme version of this that is not just exists, is actually quite influential and powerful and very influential in the Trump administration.

And so the argument we’ve made in our more recent work is if you ask the question, why are they attacking science?

I mean, again, you might say, everybody recognizes that science makes our life better, gives us medicines that cure disease, vaccines to protect us from disease, better technology. You know, the technology that we’re using to talk to each other today.

But it’s also true that science forms the basis of a great deal the the environmental and public health regulation. Also workplace safety regulation that we have in this country. And so if you don’t want to see environmental regulation, one way to undermine it is to eliminate the science that creates the basis for it, and that’s the part that links.

It’s this whole story to [00:21:00] this new threat to the endangerment finding at EPA, that the current, uh, people who are running the EPA who have extremely close links to the fossil fuel industry, they would like to eliminate the endangerment finding. They are in fact going to eliminate the endangerment finding, uh, because it threatens their economic and political interests.

But they’re not just doing that. They’re also wiping out the science that is. That proves the endangering your finding is correct. And so we just saw an announcement, uh, just a few days ago that the EPA is massively cutting the scientific workforce and eliminating most of the scientific capacity at that agency.

Well, I had read, uh, a while back that, uh, the Koch Industries, uh, had something like a trillion dollars in, in, um, fossil fuel. That had not been tapped yet, and so they have a tremendous interest in. Continuing, you know, allowing that, that asset to be tapped. And of course, Trump’s, uh, drill, baby drill, you know, and his comments of, Hey, if we’ve got oil on the ground, we definitely want to use it.

I mean, because it’s money. Uh, and we, we love money. And money what makes the world go round. And it’s, it essentially goes back to not valuing the cost of pollution. And Adam Smith really didn’t have the way we had it, so he probably didn’t, you know, think to write about it at the time. But as you said, he wrote about regulating banks.

But, uh, regulation obviously needs to be done regarding pollution, and if we don’t, we’re, we’re gonna poison ourselves.

Well, exactly, I think you’ve said a couple of really important things there. So the one is about all the oil and gas that’s still in the ground, and this is what is sometimes referred to. as stranded assets, and it’s super important for all of us to understand stranded assets this is really a huge part of what’s driving all of the denial about climate change.

So. Many years ago, people thought, well, the fossil fuel industry can transition. They can just do something else. And there were even some good examples from history, like the DuPont Corporation transitioned away from, uh, producing the chemicals that destroyed the ozone hole, the so-called chlorinated, fluoro carbs.

So it’s possible for corporations to change and do other things, uh, but. It’s hard, it’s not easy, and we’ve seen many corporations like the tobacco industry really resist trans transitioning less harmful products. But it’s particularly maybe even uniquely difficult for the fossil fuel industry because the fossil fuel industry has to explore many years in advance, sometimes decades advance.

And this something I understand really well ’cause I used to be an expiration geologist. So when I worked in expiration, we were working on a project back in the early 1980s that didn’t actually become a mine until. Like about 20 years later, and the expiration for it had begun before I had even joined the company.

So it can often be 10, 20, even 30 years of expiration before you actually start pulling minerals or oil or gas out of the ground and actually making money. And so there’s a very long lead time. all of the major oil, gas, and coal companies, all of the big companies have what’s known as proven or probable reserves.

Deposits of oil and gas or oil and gas fields that they have already sunk a lot of money into discovering and beginning to evaluate. And, and so these are assets and often they’re on their books. So when they do their annual reports, they’ll say there’s like, you know, I don’t know, $2 billion worth of oil and gas in this particular field, or whatever the number is.

So these assets, if the world. Concludes can’t afford to burn more oil, gas, and coal, which is what the scientific community has essentially said. Then these assets become stranded. They become useless, and they have to be written off. And we’re talking about many, many billions, um, or possibly tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.

So this is not, this is not chump change. And so you understand why these companies are fighting tooth and nail to continue to use these assets. Even though scientists proven that this is already doing enormous damage, and if anybody’s in doubt about it, just think for a minute about the people who have just died in Texas.

Those floods are absolutely the result of climate change because climate change makes the atmosphere hotter. That means the atmosphere can hold more water and so you get more intense rainfall that leads to more flash flooding. And so a lot of people think about climate change in terms of coastal sea level rise and damage to coastal properties, which is also happening, but it’s also causing flash floods in all kinds of places.

From Texas to Vermont to North Carolina. Homes are being wiped out. People are dying. This is all happening right here, right now. And so we’re facing these powerful corporations trying to protect billions of dollars of assets, but what’s increasingly becoming billions of dollars of damage from climate change.

Well, one of the things I was thinking about as you were talking is that these, uh, oil and gas companies, other fossil fuel companies, are not necessarily disclosing all the potential liabilities in their SEC filings, filings. And, uh, there’s a lot of litigation around the world, uh, linking. Now the science is caught up to attribution of, of these events to, to the fossil fuel companies and the, the, uh, liabilities have to be in the trillions or tens of trillions, or hundreds of trillions of dollars, and they’re not disclosing ’em, ’em, which is a fraud.

So it’s a fraud upon the market. And, and, uh, do you see a shift there? And what, what do you do you, is that any part of your studies as far as you know, companies, fossil fuel companies disclosing things on their books?

Well, I’m not an expert on securities law, obviously, but yes, I think this is an issue that many people have raised that the liabilities are potentially very great. And this is of course, one reason why the fossil fuel industry is fighting tooth and nail. against the idea that they have responsibility for the this damage.

But two important things to have happened, as you’ve already just suggested. So one is that the science has really caught up. So 20 or even 10 years ago, it was difficult to say scientifically that any particular event, so particular hurricane or a particular flood or particular heat wave, had been caused or made worse by climate change.

Now we actually can say that, and if you read chapter 11 of the latest IPCC report, it goes into some quite, uh, compelling detail about how [00:28:00] the scientific evidence shows, particularly for heat waves, how we now have a whole class of heat waves. Uh, what my colleagues and I are calling hyper events that simply would not have happened or had been, would’ve been the probabilities, would’ve been vanishingly small, you know, in a world without.

Carbon pollution induced climate change. But now these kinds of heat waves are becoming increasingly common. So the science has now essentially proven that, you know, to beyond any doubt, and this raises the possibility of legal responsibility for the damage associated with this. And there are now cases being brought across the world, more than a hundred cases around the globe, um, related to climate damage.

And the most important development there is the decision. I I don’t know when the show is gonna be aired, but just last week, so I’ll, I’ll say, uh, in July of 2025 by the International Court of Justice. So this was a case brought by the I Pacific Island Nation of Vanuatu, where they are facing very severe damage already from sea level rise caused by climate change.

And by the way, the science of related to sea level rise, that’s been very firm for a long time, uh, because it’s. Basically physics, it’s basically high school physics. When you heat water, it expands, and so when you heat the ocean, it expands and sea level rises, and that’s very, very straightforward scientifically.

So Pacific Island nations like Vanuatu are facing really serious challenges related to sea level rise from climate change to which they contributed almost nothing. I mean, Vanuatu is a. A very relatively poor country. They don’t use a lot of fossil fuels. So what we have done in the industrialized west, in North America and Europe also in uh, countries like Japan, and now China has caused climate change that is hurting the people of Vanuatu.

So they brought a case to the International Court of Justice, and in July of this year, the International Court of Justice agreed with Vanuatu, and in a very strongly worded decision, said that the industrialized nations who [00:30:00] have caused climate change. Can face legal liability for the damage, and I’m proud to say that I wrote one of the expert reports for that case.

Oh, that’s fantastic. Uh, yeah, we, we obviously see that that, uh, damage occurring in real time. And, uh, one piece as an attorney that I have honed in on, you know, that seems like it would be a basis for not only just the economic. Damage being, um, compensated, but punitive damages being. Uh, awarded against the fossil fuel companies are reports like the one done by Exxon back in the late seventies and early eighties showing that they knew that this was happening and they knew exactly that the, uh.

CO2 levels would rise into the four hundreds and that all a cascading set of consequences would result from this. And yet they continued to, to sell their products knowing that they would be, uh, having such an adverse impact, which is, I just outrageous.

Well, exactly, and this has now been documented. Uh, both by academics and investigative journalists. So I think a lot of people know the Exxon new campaign came out of work done by investigative journalists at Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times. Uh. My own team and I, we followed up on some of those claims to see if we could, uh, quantify them.

And you probably know one of the papers I wrote with my postdoc, Jeffrey Suran, who’s now professor at the University of Miami. We looked specifically at the models, the climate models that Exxon scientists, or it was Esso in those days, but, uh, es so, or Exxon scientists build to try to predict what the effect of increase in carbon dioxide atmosphere would be.
be.

Um, you know, going forward into the future in terms of temperature changes and what we showed in this paper was co-authored with a famous climate scientist, Stefan RomsDorf, was that the models that they built back in the late 1970s and 1980s were incredibly accurate. They were actually more accurate than some of the academic models that were built at that time.

So Exxon as a corporation absolutely was aware of the prom. The evidence of that is very clear. Uh. So, yeah, I’ll just leave it at that. The evidence is very, very clear that their own scientists inside company were building climate models that were highly accurate, and we have quite a few pieces of documentation that show that those results were communicated within the corporation.

Have you, uh, been following any of the litigation, uh, regarding the hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and, and, uh, the case against, uh, fossil fuel companies there and, uh, the attribution science connected with that?

Yeah, I am. I’m not involved in that case. Personally. I have been following it, you know, at a distance the way many people have been. But again, you know, the Gulf of Mexico is a really important area because we’re seeing historic high temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. And again, science of hurricane, you know, what’s known as Cyclo Genesis, the genesis of cyclones, the science is complicated.

There are certainly details that. You know, require a pretty sophisticated understanding, but the basic thermodynamics, the basic drivers of hurricanes. Is the heat in tropical regions. That’s why you don’t get hurricanes at the North Pole or Antarctica, right? You get hurricanes in places where water gets very warm and then the evaporation of that water releases energy into the atmosphere.

And we know that the Gulf of Mexico is now at historic, uh, warm temperatures, which provides the energy to drive, uh, these either more or stronger hurricanes like Hurricane Maria.

Right. So, uh, what, uh uh, What actions are you taking to kind of deal with this, uh, you know, current set of circumstances we have kind of in the government and, uh, policy wise? Uh, and what are your recommendations on how to maybe best, uh, deal with a, um, a government that is denying and endangering the population?

Well, fundamentally, I’m an educator. I’ve spent, you know. know. Since leaving the mining industry back in the 1980s, I’ve been an educator for nearly 40 years now. Uh, so I, I feel like the main role I can play is to explain to people both the science, so people understand what the connections are between climate change broadly and the specific events that affect our lives.

Like Hurricane Maria, like the recent floods in Texas, like the terrible fires in California. Um, it is important for people to understand that because we do live in a world where we’re saturated by competing claims and disinformation and also just confusion. And so I feel like. A major role I can play is, is as an educator and then of course doing the research that informs the education.

So, you know, I’ve published lots and lots of papers now, and by the way, it’s not thousands of citations, it’s tens of thousands of citations. So, you know, our work has got out there and it’s something we’re proud of because in my group in my team, one of the things we’re always trying to do is we’re trying to do the best possible academic research we can do, you know, to check all our facts, to cross every I and.

You know, cross every I cross every t and dot every I usually three times, you know, every footnote in every article in book is checked twice or three times. We try to do the most accurate, most reliable research we can do, and then use that as a basis for educating, not just. My own students at Harvard, but you know, anyone who’s willing to pick up a book, read an, read an article, um, attend a lecture.

And also one of the things that we make a point of doing is whenever we publish a peer review paper, which is the foundation of all academic work, but we also try to find a place to communicate that as well. So I’ve just recently published what I think is a really important, uh, paper with [00:36:00] my current postdoc Sasha Ov about, um, how the peer review process gets manipulated and distorted by.

Certain corporations. And that paper, uh, was like a year’s worth of work. And we just wrote a piece about it in the conversation. So if anyone’s interested in corporate manipulation of information, um, that article is on the conversation. So if you just look, type the conversation, orcus, uh, you can find that piece.

And so we do, we always look to try to find ways to explain what we’re doing in plain English for our podcasts like this to reach as many people as we can.

Well, tell us about, uh, what’s going on at Harvard and has any of, uh, that affected you in terms of the current administration putting academic pressure on Harvard? Um, and is it trickling down into, uh, your department or, or the work that you’re you’re doing?

Well, yeah, of course it’s affecting every department because the university is facing massive budget cuts, so that will affect everyone. Um, the school of Public Health and the medical school are the most affected because that’s where most of the targeted grants are, but we’re all concerned about our students.

25% of the students at Harvard are from overseas. It’s something that we’ve always been proud of. We think that we’re a richer. More interesting place because we have students from all over the world and that’s threatened now by the current administration. Uh, so yes, absolutely, and I think it shows how these attacks.

It’s not just about climate science anymore, it’s spread to be kind of general attack on science and intellectualism because we find out the truth about things that prove that the current administration is lying, that prove that fossil fuels are endangering people. And so, you know, the phrase truth to power is kind of cliched, but I think in this case it’s true.

You know, we’re working hard to find out the truth about a lot of important and complex issues that affect people’s lives, and not just people at Harvard, but people across the. The country and the world, and that’s threatening to the interests of some very powerful people in corporations in this country.

So, um, you know, I always tell my students, my grandmother used to say, if someone’s trying to shut you up, it means you have something to say. And so as a principal, it’s really helpful to remind you that if you’re being attacked, it actually probably means that, you know, you’ve hit, you’ve, you’ve hit a raw nerve.

But on the other hand, it’s also can be quite, um, yeah, what’s the word I want? I mean. It’s sort of shocking when you, you know, when you do academic work, when you choose to have a life in academia, the worry you have typically is that no one will care about what you’re doing, right? That you’ll just be in some ivory tower having no impact on the real world.

Well, that has not turned out to be true for us, right? We’ve done work that clearly has had a lot of impact. We’ve ruffled some fairly powerful feathers, and so, you know, people are trying to. Are trying to shut us up. So it’s empowering, but it’s, it can be frightening as well. Certainly not a place I think any of us would have chosen to be, but I think at the same time, we also know how important it’s that we stand up for academic integrity, the independence of private universities.

Academic freedom and, and also to call out the preposterous claim that the current administration cares at all about antisemitism because it is so patently obvious that none of this is really about antisemitism. If they really cared about. Intellectual diversity on campus. There are way more better ways they could have gone about this.

And the same with the whole issue of government efficiency. I mean, I’m sure there are branches of the US government that are not efficient, but there are lots of companies and universities that aren’t efficient either. But if you really cared about government efficiency, you wouldn’t just unilaterally fire all kinds of people, many of whom were doing excellent work.

You wouldn’t unilaterally. Order people back to the office, who in many cases were working in the field because there was no office to work at. I mean, so, so many of these claims are, are really false claims. And, uh, well, again, not to make a shameless plug from my book, but yeah. Actually to make a shameless plug, I mean the, the new book, the big myth is really all about that, about why these powerful people are attacking universities attacking science, uh, in order to protect their economic interests.

Well, another shameless way that they’re doing it is to, uh, say this is regarding free speech in the First Amendment, and yet they’re shutting down, uh, certain types of speech they don’t like, it. you know, off of the NOAA website. I guess climate change and references to climate change throughout the governmental websites.

Well, if this is free speech, why are certain words like diversity, equity, and and inclusion can’t be spoken? Well, how is that, uh, free speech? Where, where do my free speech go? Uh, diversity, and equity and inclusion are, are such toxic words that I can’t say them then I don’t have free speech.

[00:40:55] Naomi Oreskes: Well, of course. Exactly. And this is not about free speech. I think that’s pretty clear. And this is a moment where anyone who has not read 1984 should now get that book and read it because it’s. Actually shocking how much, so much of this really reflects and in, uh, instant the kinds of things that Orwell warned about decades ago, you know, almost, I don’t know, almost getting close to almost a century ago, uh, things that he thought would happen in the Soviet Union, right?

I mean, he, he’s writing from the position of criticizing Soviet dictatorship and yet we now in the United States, you know. Which we, we boast about being a democracy, and yet many of the things that are happening here are the very things that Orwell warned against would happen in a Soviets style dictatorship.

Uh, it’s great having great having you on the prep. Yeah. Well, it’s, uh, been great having you on the program n Naomi and, uh, everybody should check out the work that you’re doing, buy a copy of, uh, your most recent books, A Big Myth and Merchants of Doubt, and, uh, follow you online ’cause you’re doing outstanding work. That’s, uh, very, very important. So, uh, pleasure to have you on the program.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show.