A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

It’s terrifying, but it seems totally possible that by sometime next decade, toward the end of next decade, in the summer, the North Pole might be open ocean with no ice. If you tell people that the cost of failure is World destruction, and then fail, then they are left with either the psychologically insupportable prospect of constant dread or the impression that you were exaggerating the stakes, neither response inspires action.

Mr. Gates was pretty pro environment, but he seems to be backing off. And is that kind of symptom of the Trumpian era, or is that him getting older and wiser? I You’re listening to a climate change I’m Matt Matern, your host, and I’ve got a great guest on the program, Steven Lezak. Steven’s got an incredible background, PhD from Cambridge in polar studies, and an expert reviewer and the cop, I guess it was the IPCC sixth assessment. He’s also a research fellow at UC Berkeley, the Goldman School of Public Policy.

Steven’s work focuses on environmental justice, indigenous people, on indigenous indigenous climate adaptation and high integrity Carbon Finance. He also worked as a research manager at the Smith School of enterprise and the environment at the University of Oxford. Heard of it, small school over there in England, currently working on a book about climate justice in the Arctic, expected to come out in 2026 with Simon and Schuster. Welcome to the program. Stephen, Thanks, Matt. It’s nice to be here. Well, tell us a little bit about your background and what what brought you into the climate space in the beginning?

Yeah, I took a sort of winding path to the climate world, and it began really with an interest in, really in social justice and and I was, the truth of it is, I was in college, and I was looking for an easy class to round out a difficult semester. And and a friend suggested geology 120 which was affectionately called rocks for jocks. That the joke being that if you were on the football team and you needed a science credit, you could take geology 120 and not have to worry too much. And and this class really got me thinking.

And it really, it was actually a couple lectures that that my professor gave on deep time, and I started asking myself. I said, Well, what does social justice look like if you’re not thinking in terms of election cycles, but But thinking in terms of centuries, or even millennia and and that really set me on a on a much larger path of trying to think about finding some middle ground, some meeting point, between a lot of the issues around human flourishing that I think about, but but also trying to tie that into a question of, what does it mean to be responsible stewards of a of a planet that’s changing pretty quickly.

That’s pretty fascinating. Where, where did you go to school for your undergrad to take geology 120 I’m sure there’s plenty of listeners out there want to know where they can get this easy credit. Yeah.

Well, this, this was about the most geologically boring place you could go. This was Oberlin College, just outside Cleveland, Ohio, and so, you know, we were kind of surrounded by by fields of corn and soybeans, but, but we had a really great geology department.

Well, I understand it’s quite a good school and kind of an interesting place. I know some people went there. So shout out to the all the Oberlin folks out there, that’s right. So then from there, where did you were the next steps, where

I was a ski bum after that, frankly, and I taught, I taught skiing outside, like Tahoe, and it was, you know, really kind of trying to figure out what was, what was next for me, and and I ended up in a in a fit of frustration of applying to grad school and and really didn’t think that much about it, but it was sort of to take my mind off of the numbing feeling of applying to all of these jobs and getting rejected from them. And lo and behold, I got into Oxford, and I thought, I don’t know if I really want to go to grad school right now. I’m only 22 years old at the time, but I didn’t feel as though I was going to be able to replicate my luck. And so, you know, with the admission offer in hand, I ended up packing a bag and going to England. And.

And that then, you know, kind of, as things happen in life, took me on a path where I got very interested in in understanding, particularly how indigenous communities work around environmental policy. And I suspect we’ll get into it a little bit today, because, because it’s, it’s very kind of alive in the discourse right now. But when we’re talking about how to secure a safe environmental future, who are we trying to secure that future for? And there’s a whole spectrum. And on one end of the spectrum you have folks who say, Well, you know, it’s really about making sure that humans are doing okay, and sometimes the environment can get in the way of human flourishing, and so.

So there’s this one attitude where you see the environment as an obstacle or a resource, but But it’s all in service of human flourishing. And then on the far other side of the spectrum, you have communities and entire countries even that are really interested in in a kind of coexistence between humans, and for lack of a better term, what we’d call non human nature. And I got really fired up about like, well, what does it look like to create laws and to have a, you know, political processes that are based around the idea that, you know, a glacier has a right to exist, not just because it gives water to farmers, but because it because it’s there, because it was there before us. And that that took me to Mongolia, where I did my first kind of, you know, serious research project, and and one thing led to another, and I started to, I felt a little sucked into the Central Asian Research silo, and I decided I wanted to work someplace a little closer to home.

And so starting about six years ago, my work pivoted, and I’ve been doing work in Alaska since then. It’s where I did my PhD work, it’s where a lot of my writing focuses on now and spending time, particularly with Inupiaq and Yupik communities and indigenous partners there who are really mentoring me and understanding what environmental governance can look like and what it means to talk about the Future and increasingly, something I’m I’m focused on quite a bit, and this comes through in in the zeitgeist today is when you’re spending time with groups of people, like many Alaska Native communities who lost so much in the 19th and 20th centuries, getting to see climate change through their eyes, through a community that that’s really suffered a great deal of hardship in recent generations. It’s such a valuable perspective I find for thinking about the present in the future.

Well, that’s a lot to unpack, a lot of very interesting stuff. One thing that came to mind as you were talking is the cop 30 conference that’s going on in Brazil in kind of an indigenous area, or certainly areas that are surrounded by indigenous tribes, and certainly they’ve had a bit of a different take on on cooperating, cooperating with their indigenous, you know, communities, I would say, in Brazil than probably in the US, maybe not perfectly, certainly not perfectly. But tell us what you think is maybe going to happen out of cop 30. You know, with that in mind, whether we’re heading in the direction of listening to indigenous communities more across the political spectrum or not, and realize there’s pretty varied amount of territory to cover in that so, you know, please feel free to kind of ad lib as as necessary.

No, it’s a great question and and the and the answer kind of depends on whether you want to take a rosier view of things or maybe a more pessimistic one. Suffice to say that when the UN first really kicked off its process around climate change in the 1990s people were not thinking and talking that much about getting indigenous voices to the table. And in the time since then, what we’ve seen that’s been really, in some ways, encouraging, is that there’s now a lot of what we might call representation of indigenous voices in these international fora. So obviously I’m not at COP this year.

I was there last year, and you have a lot of amazing indigenous leaders coming from around the world to make their case and share their stories. But there’s the part of cop that looks like a conference with a bunch of people wandering around and giving presentations. And then there’s the part of COP where you have decision makers huddling together and arguing about text that will become united nations policy. And when push comes to shove a lot of these indigenous leaders are excluded from the decision making process, and so they’ve got this kind of halfway participation situation going on now where they’re at the venue, they’re making their case. There’s a lot of certainly, lip service being given to the importance of protecting indigenous people, but they remain quite disenfranchised politically, right?

So you know, there’s a lot to be said about that, and of course, going back to your comments about deep time and centuries and millennium, certainly the way that indigenous communities have thought about the environment are are ways in which we actually preserve our environment in in a way that you know, hopefully will help humanity flourish. And unfortunately, those ways have not been really followed. You know, post industrial revolution, there has been a complete disconnect and kind of a sense that we that our resources are unlimited and we can pollute almost an unlimited amount. Up until in recent history, that’s kind of been shown to be false, but that’s kind of the way we’ve acted for the most part in Western society.

Yeah, and I would add to that, you know, and I won’t speak for the indigenous perspective about, you know, there’s so many amazing indigenous authors out there that that people could turn to, or podcasts, you name it. Robin wall kimmerer’s work on this is a great entry point for a lot of folks. Her book braiding sweetgrass, I think is for a lot of people, they’re kind of on ramp into this way of thinking. But, but what we do have, I’m, I’m of European descent, and you know that the tradition in the European world, it’s like the Garden of Eden. You have God creating this garden, and then creating Adam and Eve and saying, Hey guys, I made this for you and and it’s this idea that, Oh, well, you know, this land kind of belongs to us, the humans, and it’s our job to not ruin it, but there’s still this idea of we sort of own it, and and a lot of other communities around the world, non western communities, think very differently about that, and and feel much more of a sense of kinship with the rest of the world, rather than a sense of ownership and domination, and you get really different ideas, beliefs about how the world should work, if, if you go in that direction.

So, you know, for example, you know, right, right before cop Bill Gates published this memo talking about, oh, let’s rethink the climate change conversation. And he put himself in a camp that we see a lot of these days, which is, well, you know, climate change is a problem, and we can do X, Y and Z to produce the problem. But at no point in any of his writing Did he mention a sense of responsibility to say, the world’s coral reefs, which are on track to be basically obliterated by the end of this century. And so that’s a question I’m not I’m not out to say, like you know, that that one of these viewpoints is strictly speaking wrong, but definitely when you step outside of the Western mentality and the Western assumptions about, well, what is nature for? And who is it for?

If you start to get into a more reciprocal frame of mind where you say, Okay, well, yeah, we have some obligations to the rest of the world. It’s not just for us to use as we see fit. I think it gets you, frankly, into into a politics, into a mindset, into a space of belonging that, for me, feels much better than than thinking that, you know, the planet is just some garden for me and other humans to eat from.

Well, I I agree with you, and I guess there are a lot of different threads to follow up on there, one of which you’ve already touched upon, which were the rights of nature, and whether or not we’ll see that rolling out more in the US, and whether or not there have been any movements in any of the states to kind. Claim that, and for anybody who’s not really familiar with that, certainly people have rights, and now in the United States, corporations have rights as if they were people, and even ships have rights. So why not rivers have rights, or mountains have rights in that, if we can create a legal construct that a ship has a rights of a person, why not a mountain or a river totally and, and, and the thing that I think is so interesting and important about those conversations, I mean, it’s that thing, Matt, right, where, like, you know, laws are not just downstream of culture. So culture creates laws, and then laws also create culture.

And the example I always like to think about is, you know, in the United States, the drinking each year is 21 and it was 18 in what was it the 70s or 80s was when it shifted? And, and there are a lot of people who really relate to that drinking age to say, Oh, if you know, if a 20 year old having a beer is is not just legally wrong, it’s ethically bad. And, and that was a shift that happened because Congress passed a law 40 years ago, and the passage of that law changed the way that people thought about this, about about an act, not just on a bureaucratic level, but on an ethical one. And similarly, I think we have that a little bit when we when we talk about endangered species. So, you know, making the hunting of whales illegal in most cases, really helped change the way that people thought ethically about about hunting whales. And I’m partial to the idea that if we gave mountains some set of legal rights, people would think differently about mountaintop removal coal mining, for example. Right?

So do you, as part of your work, is that something that you’re engaged in studying or following at all, in terms of, I understand, in Latin America, there have been communities countries that have given rights of nature to various entities in nature. How is that kind of worked? And is that likely to kind of jump to the US or other Western countries?

Yeah, it’s such a great question. And this is, this is one of the most interesting and kind of embryonic worlds of environmental policy. So Latin America, like you mentioned, a couple countries have given rights to nature. New Zealand has given legal personhood to a river and to a national park. I believe you know. I’m not, I’m not even going to hazard a guess, but there’s a tribe in the Upper Midwest that has given legal rights to their wild rice, which is a super important traditional food for them. And because these systems are all pretty new, I think it remains to be seen how they’re going to hold up when push comes to shove. And you know when an issue ends up in front of the courts and a judge has to decide whether these rights of nature are being violated, and if so, what the proper remedy will be.

So that is something that hopefully we’ll get to see in the next five or 10 years, but I think it’s a really exciting an exciting time, and is exactly the sort of politics that I think of as really radical. We hear people in the US and in Europe complain a lot that the left is not really that different from the right. The Democrats and the Republicans. Maybe they agree, actually, on quite a lot of things, even though they fight viciously over the details.

I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I do, then look at political proposals to give rights to nature, and I say, Okay, well, now we’re really getting creative, and now we’re really pushing the boundaries and and I mean this in a in a serious way, but kind of having fun, you know, like thinking about government and policy as a tool, not just to kind of keep everything under control, but actually to really shake things up in a way that that can motivate people to think differently and act differently and hopefully have much better lives.

Well, I do think that it’s, as you said, a cultural shift, and that’s something that we really need is in terms of the way we view the world has been destructive to the environment and and so like a game changer, to bring back in concepts. These are not necessarily foreign concepts. Stewardship of the land is. A concept that’s been around, you know, arguably, since the Bible or before. So it’s not, it’s not a new thing.

It’s just that modern capitalism has not really baked that into the cake of of what we’re looking at. Kind of going back to gates for a second, and I bought his book back, 2021 how to avoid a climate disaster. And Mr. Gates was pretty pro environment in that. And he’s, you know, he’s invested in tons of companies with his breakthrough. What is it breakthrough ventures? Or whatever it is, but he seems to be backing off. And is that kind of, you know, a symptom of the Trumpian era, or is that him, you know, getting older and wiser?

Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. And, and, you know, for for any listeners who aren’t super who have better ways to spend their time, Gates published this memo a couple weeks ago in which he basically said, Well, climate change isn’t a big threat to humanity, or it’s not the biggest threat to humanity, and he suggested that that money that’s being spent on climate is maybe not being spent So wisely, and that people are not paying enough attention to other forms of human suffering, like poverty and disease.

I did hear a critique from folks saying, oh, Gates is is kneeling to kiss the ring of Trump in this case that you know, he doesn’t want to run afoul of of the folks in Washington DC who think that climate change is a hoax or whatever. I don’t know that. I strictly buy that. And maybe this is naive of me, but you know, Gates does not have a lot of skin in the game here, right? Like he’s one of the world’s richest men. He’s promised to give away the vast majority of his money. He’s not, as far as I know, he’s not, you know, any more invested in, you know, AI or technology than than anyone else at this point. And he’s certainly not trying to do the Jeff Bezos thing or the Elon Musk thing, and just, you know, continue to accumulate gobs and gobs of money.

And in fact, few months ago, earlier this year, he pledged that he was going to accelerate the drawdown of money in the in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to, I think he’s going to try to spend almost all of it in the next two decades. So I just don’t quite see the motive for gates trying to get on the good side of Trump. I do think that the sense I get is he likes to be an iconoclast and, you know, he likes to kind of throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. And if I had to guess what I thought was really going on, is, I think he is probably responding to a very vocal subset of the environmental movement which has asked us to take climate change, and to place it at the hierarchy, at the top of a hierarchy of problems facing humanity today, and to say, well, yes, all of these other things are problems, but climate change is the biggest.

Climate change is, you know, you hear language like it’s the existential threat, the challenge of our time language that is very persuasive and very poetic. But for Gates, who spends a lot of time thinking about how many people die every year of malaria and HIV and tuberculosis, I think he understandably feels a little frustrated by some of this hierarchical language. And so what I think his publication was, was a poorly aimed rebuttal to some of that.

So where do you kind of land on that? If you do land anywhere in terms of existential threat, the highest and most important problem face, facing the world, or somewhere in between.

Yeah, it’s tough, right? And there’s the challenge is. The challenge is, how do you how do you hold on to the severity and the urgency of the issue without inflating the stakes, so that one, you become the boy who cried wolf, or two, you suck the oxygen out of the room and draw attention away from things that are really important. So I hope you don’t mind. I brought a quote from an author named Dorian Linsky, who published a book earlier this year. And he wrote, quote, if you tell people that the cost of failure is world is World destruction, and then fail, then they are left with either the psychologically insupportable prospect of constant dread or the impression that you are exaggerating the stakes, neither response inspires action.

Dorian Linsky talking about how if you’re talking about world destruction, people are either left with paralysis, or they’re going to think you’re exaggerating. He’s not writing about climate change. He’s writing about nuclear war, way back in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, when there was a very similar problem, facing the West and trying to communicate about something that was a huge danger, but doing it in a way that didn’t turn people off, didn’t shut them down, and didn’t seem so patently hysterical. Where I come down on the climate issue in particular, I reluctantly admit that I don’t think that climate change is going to cause the extinction of humanity, and it’s really difficult for me to imagine what you would print on the hypothetical death certificate of the last human who died because of climate change.

You know, the world is not going to get so hot that every part of it is going to be unlivable. The world is the oceans are not going to rise so high that there’s not going to be dry land when we talk about climate change causing conflict, it’s really easy to say, Oh, well, that’s climate change. But you know, we have to be able to allow that these things are really complicated. So you know, what could cause the extinction of humanity right now with some probability, nuclear war could do it. A disease could do it, some unthought of biological weapon could do it. And we might want to locate climate change somewhere within Oh, well, the war wouldn’t have happened if there wasn’t climate change. But to say that climate change alone is going to cause the extinction of humanity, I think is pretty unlikely at this point. Now, climate change can and probably will cause an insane amount of suffering for hundreds of millions of people, possibly billions of people, in this century.

And I’d like to think that it’s enough to communicate that to say, hey, no, this isn’t the end of the world, not in the sense of we all living, we all live on one planet, but for some people and some nations, even this will be the end of their world in ways that are unimaginable to us. And my hope is that the right kind of climate politics comes out of saying, Oh, we’re responsible for, you know, we here in California or the West are responsible for causing vast destruction in places like Pakistan or Bangladesh or western Alaska, where I do a lot of work, and it would be the height of your responsibility to just kind of abandon people to face really insurmountable problems that we have caused them.

The last thing I’ll add to that is that when you go to some of these frontline climate communities, a lot of people, it turns out, are not actually talking about climate change, per se, and and the communities that are most affected by climate change, it’s no coincidence that they tend to be the poorest communities around the world, where people can’t necessarily just pick up and relocate to high ground, or where they don’t have the ability to build a house in the first place that could withstand a hurricane. You know, you have Florida on the one hand, which gets hammered by hurricanes every couple years, and people’s houses, generally speaking, don’t fall down. You know, there might be some flooding. It might be really bad, but in a few years time, most people have kind of got back on track.

You compare that to Haiti, which I believe is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and people in Haiti, when a hurricane comes, it’ll level entire neighborhoods, because people aren’t don’t have the resources to build really strong homes that can withstand a major hurricane. And so you know this cycle of of damage, of disaster, displacement, you name it, the that the predicting, the determining factor here, in so many cases, is who’s got resources, who’s got political stability, who’s got a safety net, and who doesn’t?

Well, again, lots of issues raised there. One that jumps to mind is. Say, in Alaska and and the Arctic, which is your area of specialty, climate change is happening faster there than any other part of the planet. And say for the polar ice cap up in in the North Pole, some predictions have that it’s likely to melt. What do you see happening in that area, and what are the consequences of that occurring?

Well, so let’s quick primer for your for your listeners, the North Pole is ocean covered by sea ice. The South pole has a giant continent on Antarctica, which is covered by a huge amount of glacial ice, sometimes a mile thick. It seems totally possible, and it’s terrifying, but it seems totally possible that by sometime next decade, toward the end of next decade, you know, the late 2030s in the summer, in the height of summer, the North Pole might be open ocean with no ice. That’s That’s how quickly the Arctic is warming and and that would have huge consequences ecologically.

You know, there are animals like walrus and polar bears that depend on sea ice, you know, it’s, it’s literally where they live. They live more on ice than on land. And, and it would be catastrophic for them. There are indigenous communities that depend on the ice for hunting, so the human consequences would be huge. And, you know, to say nothing of just the kind of cascade of ecological changes that would happen from a much warmer Arctic so that that’s like a really scary thing on a lot of different levels. It what we’re not really talking about with the North Pole, we’re not necessarily talking about a huge increase in sea level rise. Greenland stores a lot of ice, and as Greenland starts to melt, that could cause a really significant rise in sea level, possibly much scarier in terms of sea level is what’s happening in Antarctica, where there are these massive ice caps that are really thick, flowing off of glaciers on land and onto the sea.

And those there’s a potential that they could fracture and that you would get enormous volumes of ice leaving Antarctica and melting very quickly, and that that would cause sea level to rise, you know, a lot, a lot, not hundreds of feet, but, but a lot, but that those are events that we’re that we’re talking about not happening next year or even the year After, but, but happening in 100 years, or 500 years, and so it’s very difficult, because there’s so much uncertainty. It’s very difficult.

You’re saying like the North Pole melting in the next couple of decades, that has a cascading effect that we don’t we don’t really know. We have models out there, but say that ice has the albedo of shooting off light back into the atmosphere, and when that ice is not there, then that heat is going to come and hit the ocean, and the ocean will get warmer, and all kinds of things that we kind of think we know will happen. But do we really, I mean, the shit is going to hit the fan, and it could be really bad.

It could be really bad we and we call this polar amplification, which is the Arctic, when it gets warm, it gets warm faster than the rest of the planet, and a lot of it is what you just described, that you have a region that’s very snowy, and when you melt that snow, it reflects less sunlight. The ground absorbs more light. Things heat up really fast, and there are huge, huge uncertainty here and and when we talk about, when we talk about the future of climate change, we have a bunch of the world’s smartest scientists who are hanging out and trying to model this stuff on computers, but at the end of the day, there’s no experiment that someone can run to say, Okay, we’re going to increase CO two to 500 parts per million in the atmosphere.

Let’s see what happens. All of these simulations are basically happening on machines, and there’s huge error bars. So you know, the past gives us something of a record in terms of saying, Well, what’s happened when CO two has gone up a million years ago, 10 million years ago, but never in the earth’s history has CO two been increased so quickly in such. Short period of time, and so we’re really in uncharted waters here.

Yeah, we’re playing with fire, and we’re playing with fire in a big way. That’s what’s the scariest thing is that, you know, humans just have this pathology to kind of be myopic and not look at what’s going to happen in the future, and the current administration is the king of myopic views.

And we live in a world which does not reward long term thinking. You know, if, if you’re an executive at Exxon Mobil or even at JP Morgan, Chase, you know, no one’s handing you a bonus based on what’s happening in 30 or 40 or 50 years. People are thinking in terms of quarters years, maybe a couple years, if they’re really lucky. And so, you know, it’s, it’s exactly this, like we have a whole society that’s built on thinking about what’s coming down the pike right away.

So let’s see pivoting a little bit to your work in California on the cap and trade system. You are authored an article that millions are being wasted, and you had a fix for this. So tell us about the fix.

And we had a fix for it, but the legislature did not strictly take our advice, which is okay. So this, this gets to the the thorny issue of carbon offsets, which you’re I’m sure your listeners are familiar with, but you know, the idea behind a carbon credit is that you pay someone to not emit somewhere, and in exchange, you get to admit and you feel you feel fine about it. So, oh, I put a ton of CO two into the atmosphere, but this guy over here, he was going to cut down a forest, and he didn’t cut down that forest, so we’re even.

And I think most people, they hear that and they think intuitively, like that sounds like a bad system. And as it turns out, when California’s cap and trade program was created, and and it should be clear, this is probably the best, the best climate state level climate policy in the country, in many ways, it’s a very good program. There was a carve out that said that if you are a big business and you have to comply with the cap and trade program, you can purchase carbon credits to meet some of your obligations. It’s a small share, a few percent of your obligations under the bill.

And then the California State government ran and created a set of rules, and they said, Okay, well, we’re going to make this a really tightly regulated market and make sure that we only get the best carbon credits and and they made this market for carbon credits, for kind of official government approved carbon credits, and the best research out there suggests that probably three in four of them are just garbage, and one in four is okay. And it’s a little more nuanced than that. You know, it’s not, it’s not that one in four are perfect and three and four have no impact at all.

But if you were to average it out, you have a program that probably overstates the climate impact by about 400% and and it’s disastrous. You’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars going to, you know, kind of bogus forest projects in places like Arkansas. No offense to Arkansas, but you know, it’s, it is money that could otherwise be spent in the state doing really important environmental work, and it just kind of gets funneled out into this really remarkably grifty industry that has been around now for, you know, going on 30 years. And the reason you might ask, like, why did the why on earth would the state ever allow such a crazy program to take place? A big part of it is that the fossil fuel industry, they look at carbon credits and they say, Ah, this is our future.

Because if you don’t have carbon credits and you just say, Well, look, we have to emit less carbon dioxide, then the only reasonable kind of conclusion is, what, we have to extract less oil, gas and coal. That’s pretty straightforward. As soon as you have carbon credits into the mix, the fossil fuel companies can say, no, no, it’s okay. We’re going to keep extracting It’ll be all right. We’re just going to offset, offset, offset. And so you have a bunch of lobbyists, a bunch of well funded folks, and even some environmental groups, by the way, and some very well intentioned environmental groups who are drinking the Kool Aid and thinking these offsets, they can work. Uh, I work with a group of people at Berkeley and other folks all around the country and the world, frankly, who are kind of more on the science side.

And we just realize that people have tried for so long to make these things work, and sometimes they do, and the vast majority of the time they don’t. And because climate change is a crisis, we can’t keep hanging out trying to figure out how we’re going to get carbon credits to work, because, as you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. And so what we had suggested, and we shopped this around with lawmakers, and many were very supportive, we’d said, look, take the same money that’s being spent on carbon credits and give companies the credits, but don’t let them go into this grifty supply chain with a bunch of consultants and brokers who are paying landowners and timber companies to not do things that they weren’t going to do in the first place. Instead, take that money and let the really smart people at the state decide how to spend it on good conservation projects, on good climate projects. Is it going to be perfect? No. Is it going to be better than the status quo? Absolutely.

And people were interested in our idea. But, you know, there is a whole political machine that we had to fight against, and a couple writers and academics at Berkeley are are no match for, you know, the fossil fuel industry, and they’re very well funded lobbyists.

Well, that’s not your no match, but it may take a year or two to get it through. I’ve, I’ve had some experience and trying to push some bills through the legislature, and it’s, it is a challenging process.

I think, I think that’s exactly right. And one of the things that we were really pleased with is, is we just got to sort of float the idea that, hey, the system could be better. And what did happen? And you know, sort of hats off to some really smart people in Sacramento, is they did make a couple great changes to the offset law. The biggest one being, and this is getting really wonky here, but previously offsets in California, they’ve been what we call above the cap, which says that, you know, companies can buy offsets to meet their obligation. And so it’s this kind of swapping out.

What was done instead is offsets were brought below the cap, which is to say that for every offset that is used, an allowance gets taken out of the pool, and so the net impact of having a bunch of junky offsets on the market became much less negative from a climate perspective. So there might still be a bunch of bad offsets, but at least they’re not functionally expanding the amount of pollution that takes place in California.

Give us an example of how that works in the real world.

Yeah, so the way that the cap and trade program works is the state sets a cap for all of the total emissions that are going to come from a few 100 covered entities. These are public utilities. These are energy companies. These are the few 100 institutions that that purchase and emit the most oil and gas of of anywhere in the state. So it doesn’t affect you, it doesn’t affect me, it doesn’t affect the coffee shop down the street, but these are really large organizations. So the state says we’re going to have this is the cap for this year.

It’s going to be X million of allowances in each allowance, as you emit one ton of CO two. And then every year we’re going to ratchet down the cap a little bit. Now those allowances, a lot of them, are given out for free at the beginning of each year. Some are not given out for free, but every entity ends up with their allowances, and they can then the it’s called cap and trade, because they can then buy and sell those allowances. So maybe you really want to emit more so, and I’ve been really energy efficient, so I can sell some of my allowances.

You can buy them. The whole idea here is that the market will decide where the cheapest emission savings are. It’s not, it’s not, in principle, a bad idea with the offsets, what had ended up happening, we were recently, I believe, at 6% so an entity could meet 6% of their obligation through purchasing offsets. So if, if the cap was set at, you know, just for conversation sake, if the cap was set at 100 million tons, that 6% had made it so that the cap was functionally not actually 100 million tons, but 106 million. In tons, because I could go and I could buy offsets, right?

And I could say, hey, hey, I’m adding to my allowance pool with these offsets that I got from Arkansas. Now, the way that the law has just been changed is that, and it’s not effective currently, but it will be soon, is that if I go and I buy six offsets to meet my obligation. Then the then carb, the California Air Resources Board, which which oversees the program, they’re going to remove six offsets from the pool. So it’s a one in, one out situation. And so that means that even if I buy really junky offsets, I still haven’t expanded the cap. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I get it, yeah. So that that’s good. So progress.

We take our wins in in 2025 and climate policy, we take our wins.

Yeah, that’s a win. It’s progress. So that’s, that’s what we got to be focused on. I want to switch gears a bit and talk about China versus the US. And it seems as though China is dominating in clean energy technology and solar and wind and and then the US is putting way more money into AI versus China. We’re out spending them. I think 10 to one, or maybe even more, is the AI battle more important than than the Sustainable Energy battle and that, hey, maybe we let them kind of make all the wind turbines and solar panels for the world. And that’s kind of low tech comparatively to AI and, and this AI kind of make us stronger in the long run.

Yeah, you know, it’s a great question. And, and what comes to mind is, like, we have to walk and chew gum at the same time, right? You know, we as as the American economy, with three, 30 million people, we can’t just sort of give up one battle, because the new shiny thing just rolled out and, you know, say, oh, you know, forget this clean energy business. We’re just going to go all in on AI. What, the, what, what the Chinese have done is very clever, is they have cornered the market on this, on the supply of critical minerals. And by the way, you know, people talk about these critical minerals coming from China. China is not mining these critical minerals.

What they’re doing is they are setting up mines all over the world, and often these mines are have huge human rights issues. These are not nice places to work, for the most part, and they are sort of cartel style, locking down the supply chain for these minerals, which all make it to China to then get processed or refined or even just assembled into, you know, you name it. It could be a wind turbine, a solar panel. It could be an EV battery. So those are the benign things. But then there’s also all of these rare earth elements that get used. A lot of them for aerospace and defense. And suddenly this happened. A few years ago, people in the US were like, Whoa, hold on, if they turned off the spigot, if they put on these export controls, we would not be able to build a lot of the things that we think of as really essential and and China has been kind of rattling the saber. They have been playing around with these export controls.

I think the way to understand it, this is how I understand it. Anyways. You know, there’s, there’s not a lot love lost between me and the Chinese government, but I have to hand it to them in some ways. They’re not dogmatic, right? Like you look at the Trump administration and you have all of these cronies coming from the fossil fuel industry and from the chemicals industry and you name it, and they’ve all been installed, many of them, in very senior leadership roles in places like the EPA and the Department of Interior. And these are folks who have, don’t forget Department of Energy. Don’t forget the Department of Energy. And these are folks who don’t just have a political agenda, but they they are ideologues. You know, they believe in some deep, almost spiritual way about the superiority of petrochemicals and fossil fuels. You know, for them, even if you could generate cheaper energy from a wind turbine, they’d rather see it pulled out of the ground, because they have some kind of vision that that’s what makes America, America and and China doesn’t suffer from those sorts of delusions.

You know, they’re they’re able to just, it’s this incredibly technocratic, authoritarian government. They’re going to do what’s cheap, they’re going to do what’s secure. It’s not going to be Democrat. Dramatic, but it’s also not going to be necessarily that dogmatic. And so in this funny way, what China shows us is this, like, highly rationalist energy policy. And so yeah, I think the stat is that last year, China installed more renewable energy capacity, maybe than the rest of the world combined. I think that, yeah, I think that saw that saw that in the New York Times. And that’s not because there’s a bunch of, you know, environmental activists in China beating down the doors.

They don’t have tree huggers there that are no there.

There might be tree huggers there, but they’re keeping quiet about it, that that’s because this stuff is cheaper and cleaner.

Well, isn’t that? Isn’t that going to win the end of the day is that Trump and his ideologues may create fortress USA, but the rest of the world is going to adopt cleaner energy because it’s cheaper, and so it just the day is going to come. And what I read the other day was that the markets in the US, for those companies that are in clean energy have been going up faster than the the overall market. So the market is saying, you know, Trump whatever you want, great. But the reality is, these companies are good companies, and they are the future.

It’s, it’s a yes and, and, and. And the reason why there’s a little bit of a caveat there is that Petro states, like the United States, like Saudi Arabia, we put a thumb on the scale, and we subsidize this stuff. We make it difficult to build renewable energy. We make it really easy to extract oil, gas and coal. And so a lot of this stuff, when it gets to market, it’s artificially cheap. That is the the petroleum products, the oil and gas, is artificially cheap. The other thing that we do is we don’t price in the cost to human health.

So the benefits of renewable energy are not just in terms of the cost of the electrons, but in terms of reduced childhood asthma, reduced premature deaths, you name it, but we’re not pricing that in when we pay our utility bills at the end of each month. And so there are some market dynamics that are continuing to favor oil, gas and coal. And there was a really sobering report that came out last year the International Energy Agency, which is a widely respected un group. They published their annual World Energy Outlook, where they sort of model, among other things, when is demand for oil and gas going to peak and then decline? And they were looking at peak oil and peak gas, maybe not happening.

I think peak gas, not until the 2050s and that that really shows this, by the way, was a much less rosy outlook than they had in previous years, because the political headwinds for renewables have grown so much in the last year, kind of in the wake of Trump’s election, and then, you know, other movements around the world, like we can’t rest on our laurels. So the the renewable energy transition is inevitable, but it might be way too slow.

Yeah, I you know, there’s obviously mixed signals. You can find some good ones and some not so good ones. The good ones that I like are certain company countries are banning the internal combustion engine and saying, Hey, we’re just going to go with electric vehicles going forward, because it just screws our balance of trade to buy all this oil when we could get free sunshine and and we don’t need to do it anymore, and so that, I think, is going to create a revolution, that other countries are going to do the same thing that don’t have oil. They’re they’re going to say, this makes more sense to to go, go with solar and wind.

I think it’s absolutely true that that that mean, what, what you get at there, Matt, that’s so important is a lot of it’s cultural and and, you know, a lot of it, like the cultural changes are sticky, and they take time and then, and then, when they do happen, you know, think about the fight for marriage equality In the United States. You know it was like, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, and then the dam broke. And you know now we take marriage equality for granted, almost certainly in California, where you and I are, and 20 years ago, that was not the case.

And my hope is that when you see, when you see other countries that say, Hey, we don’t need the internal combustion engine, which, you know, back 10 years ago, that was an impossibility to say that, because there weren’t enough vehicles manufactured that technology, you couldn’t do that. And today, third world country like Ethiopia can say we’re not importing any internal. Combustion engines, and they say, Holy shit. You know, this is mind blowing.

Well, in Norway, I love to bring up Norway, which is a Petro state. You know, their wealth comes from a bunch of fossil fuel extraction in the North Sea. EVS now have 90% market share among new vehicles purchased in Norway, nine out of 10 new vehicles purchased in Norway does not take any gas or diesel for that matter. And by the way, this is a cold country people, you know, people complain to me. They say, Oh, I can’t buy an EV, it gets too cold. And I see it doesn’t get colder here than in Norway, and and so, yeah, it, it can be done. And I and I think that’s, that’s where the stickiness is. And right now, EV market share, by the way, in the US to compare, is one in 10. So Norway’s got the Flipped proportion that we have. And there are other factors, but, but I think, I think you’re right. I think, like, you know, you move away from this cultural fascination with drilling for oil and gas, and hopefully that really accelerates things as much as the cost issues do.

Well, certainly a fascinating conversation. Stephen, great to have you on the show, and look forward to collaborating with you and talking with you in years to come, it sounds like you’re doing great work, and it’ll be fun to create a rights of nature legislation here in California to kind of bring people some something to be energized about, something to be excited about, and something that we could do to lead the world as California has led in many things, particularly in the environmental sphere, for for the last 5075, years.

Absolutely, yeah, no, we have to make environmentalism exciting again and and we’ll get there. Okay.

Well, thank you and everybody. You can follow Stephen on social media where? Tell us where, where they can link up to here the you…

Actually you can’t follow me on social media, but you can get on my website and definitely find me on LinkedIn, or send me an email if you want to chat. I’m the only man in the world who’s not on social media.

Well, good for you. Good for you. Yeah, thank you. And we’ll be looking forward to seeing your book come out. Do you have a title for the book?

The working title, it’s liable to change, is The Longest Night Coming Home in the Age of Apocalypse.

Okay, well, looking forward to reading. It sounds like a great book, and you’re doing great work out there, so keep it up.

Thanks, Matt. It’s been a pleasure.

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