A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

Miami is toast. It’s going to go underwater. It’s built on porous rock. It’s going to flood from below. We have what George Lakoff, the linguist, calls the Enlightenment fallacies-the idea that a great policy or scientific idea will magically sell itself because it’s so smart. Language matters. The notion that logic and facts alone are going to convince people is false. The fossil fuel industry is up at Congress asking for immunity because they know that when a jury sees the documents where their scientists told them they were going to destroy planet Earth and they decided to lie about it, they’re going to have to pay. So their solution to that is to get immunized, like the gun industry did.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got David Fenton on the show today. David, we’ve had on the show back 100 plus episodes ago. Now we’re up to 250. He was graced us with his presence back at 113, I think. So David’s got an incredibly long resume. Currently, he’s doing the hosting the Fenn Forecast podcast, among other things. So, without further ado, David, welcome to the show again.

Glad to be back.

Well, David, tell us a little bit about your Fenton Fordcast podcast, just to get started.

Sure. Well, it’s about our choice of futures in climate and AI safety and income inequality, health, and what kind of future do we want? And the role that activism and mass movements play in determining the future.

Well, that’s a that’s a lot of ground to cover. Tell us a little bit about maybe some of your guests recently and some of the exciting things that have been covered on on your show.

Sure, I had Billie Eilish’s mother on, Maggie Baird, who’s a big climate activist, and homeschooled Billy and her brother Phineas. Governor Jane Inslee of Washington, former Governor Inslee, was a guest last week. Next week, I’m interviewing a woman who’s suing the big tech companies for their AI assisting kids committing suicide, and I’ve had Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Catherine Hayo on, who I’m sure you know.

Yes, I had the good fortune of interviewing both of them. So yeah, they’re they’re great climate activists, and well, of course, Governor Inslee did a lot of great work as a governor up in Washington, and and he ran for president back, I think, in 2020. So he’s he was a bright light, is a bright light in the environmental movement. What what’s what say he now? What what’s his direction going to be going forward?

Well, you know he’s preaching the opposite of so-called climate hushing, and you know what climate hushing is. It’s you know as bad as climate denial. It’s kind of the new climate denial. Don’t talk about it. Voters aren’t interested in it. It’s a great way to try to solve it, right? So he does acknowledge that how we talk about it in the current high-cost inflationary environment is important, and he wants to start with cost. That Trump is raising everybody’s energy prices by killing clean energy, which is cheaper, and this is the result of corruption, Trump being corrupted by the fossil fuel industry with money, and climate denial that we can’t afford to have in these heat waves and storms. So he’s talking about the 4c’s: cost, chaos, corruption, and climate denial, which I think is is very alliterative, don’t you?

Yeah, I like it. You’re a messaging person. I guess that’s one of the things maybe we should talk about is is your your background in in public relations and communication and and how maybe the climate activists are maybe getting it wrong in terms of our communication that we’re not making the best case for what we’re trying to do.

Yeah, well, that’s what Inslee was talking about. You know, our language is kind of that of a subgroup. We don’t use language that most people readily and instantly understand, and we have to to communicate this issue to people. So, you know, when we talk about carbon, most people don’t know what that is. When we talk about net zero, nobody knows what that is. I barely know what that. Is and we don’t talk in simple metaphors, simple imagery.

You know, the best way to talk about climate change is to explain it to people, and this is proven over and over again, is that we’ve put a blanket of pollution around the Earth that is trapping heat, and that all that trapped heat energy that used to go back out to space has to go somewhere, so of course it makes things hotter and it makes the storm stronger. And when you do that, people go, “Oh, pollution! I know what that is. I don’t like it. Nobody likes pollution. When you say blanket, everybody knows what that does. Most people in this country, if you ask them what causes climate change, they can’t tell you. You know, 40% of the country says it’s caused by the ozone hole, which it isn’t.

Right.

And when you ask them how to solve it, the number one answer you’ll get is reduce, reuse, and recycle, which also will not solve it. So we have really failed largely to communicate this in clear and simple ways, and it shows this is why the polling. While it shows most people are concerned about climate change, they’re not very concerned. Most people don’t think it will affect them in their lifetime, even while the storms and heat waves and wildfires are happening now. It’s a low saliency issue, which means it’s not that important to most people. When Yale does their surveys of likely voters, climate ranks 19th of 27 issues. Now, this is not good, and we must change this. We need to make it a very high priority voting issue, and the data shows that we can, of course, but we’re not doing it the right way.

Well, I certainly could see it, say, in the presidential debates in you know the last cycle in 2024. Essentially, Kamala Harris engaged in climate hushing. She on the debate on the debate stage. She did not bring it up, and she kind of sashayed around it without making the strong case for you know climate effects and and the corruption of Trump and the denial of Trump and the you know the costs of clean energy being less than than fossil fuels, she didn’t make that case.

That’s right.

She didn’t make the simple case, which is that our usage of energy has gone down in the United States recently in the last decade or so, and our productivity, our GMP, has gone up. So you can have this occur? Trump kind of continues the mantra of we need more energy and to blow you know to increase our GNP, and that’s not that’s not accurate.

That’s been true largely until very recently because now these data centers for AI, as you know, are sucking up enormous amounts of power, so this is changing the equation some, and that’s why we have to insist these data centers must be powered by clean energy and by renewable energy. We cannot allow them to start up all these gas turbines and restart coal plants. We can talk about the nuclear issue if you like, but yes, Kamala didn’t talk about climate at all. Biden never gave a prime time speech about it. He didn’t do any public education about it. You know, people barely knew that he passed the most ambitious climate bill in history and the Inflation Reduction Act, because he didn’t talk about it. When the few times he mentioned climate change, he would call it an existential threat. Another term most Americans do not know.

You know, some people in a cafe in Paris know about that. So, so we’ve. And by the way, Obama never educated the public about it either. I know scientists who were in the Obama and Biden White Houses who urged the administration to conduct a major public education campaign on this, the most threatening and important issue facing humanity, and they wouldn’t do it because they thought it was a political loser. So they’re ensuring it stays that way by not talking about it. So, you know, it it really is so upsetting to me. You know, I’m I’m generally a fan of the New York Times. It’s very flawed, but it is our greatest newspaper, and yet in its opinion section, have you noticed they’re urging climate hushing? They’re actually in both editorials and columns advising Democrats to be moderate and support more fossil fuel drilling.

Now, I’d like to know what’s moderate about increasing the Earth’s temperature and causing. More destruction and collapsing insurance markets and flooding people’s homes. This is not moderate, and it’s also, I think, very elitist to say that we can’t explain to the public what the threat is. Of course, we can. So I think the New York Times is doing climate hushing too, and it’s very sad. Not in the news section, that’s often good. But the opinion section has kind of become like an ostrich in the sand section on this issue.

Yeah, well, I I find the patronizing tone of some of the kind of elitists, and this is kind of how Trump got into power, is because I think Middle America senses that elitism and and kind of and the fact that they’re being talked down to, and you’re not trusting them to be smart enough to understand this, and so of course it plays right into the hands of of Trump and people. Yes,

I think a lot of the language of the left and progressives have played into the hands of Trump and made people think that we don’t care about them. We care about you know the birds and the trees, and we’ve also fallen into a trap of making climate action sound like it requires vast amounts of sacrifice, and you know sacrifice does not sell. And if we repower our lives with clean energy and transportation, it’s actually the opposite of a sacrifice.

It’s better for our health. It’s better for our wallets. The electric cars don’t require hardly any maintenance. They’re much less costly to operate. You can fuel them with electrons that cost far less. You can even fuel them with solar panels on your roof if you have them at no cost. You know, I like to say the sun has a great advantage and the wind. It can never go up in price. It doesn’t go through the Straits of Hormuz, so we can explain this to people, but hushing up about it is a disastrous idea.

So yeah, I think that one big issue that I think can be pounded a lot more than it currently is is the insurance rates going through the roof because of wildfires and hurricanes and the like, and and this is clearly caused by what’s happening with the climate. But I’m not hearing in my mind enough about this because that is hitting Americans in their pocketbook, and to me, that may be the best angle to get people’s attention.

It’s a very good angle, and you know who’s been very articulate about it is Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Have you seen his talks about this?

I have not.

He’s fantastic, and he’s worth following online. Senator Whitehouse from Rhode Island, and you know he says, “Look, this is an insurance crisis. It’s caused by the burning of fossil fuels, making the weather extreme. That this killing of clean energy is basically transferring your money to Trump’s dirty fossil fuel donors-it’s a huge ripoff. Inslee calls it the mugging at Mar-a-Lago, which I think is really great. And of course, as White House points out, an insurance crisis leads to a mortgage crisis because if you can’t insure your house, you can’t get a mortgage for it. So you know this is going to make the 2008 housing crisis look like small potatoes when it hits.

I mean, already I’m seeing reports that housing prices in Florida are dropping, and this is clearly related to the inability to get insurance in Florida. And you know, as you probably know, but most people don’t. Miami is toast. It’s going to go underwater. It cannot be saved. It’s built on porous rock. It’s going to flood from below. No seawall can save Miami. But you could barely find very many people in Miami that know this as they keep investing in more and more condos. So yeah, this is the emergency that people don’t talk about. It’s kind of crazy.

Yeah, it it is totally crazy, and I I recall us talking about the blanket of pollution and the way to communicate that back a couple years ago in 2023, and unfortunately, I did not hear much of it in the 2024 cycle, which would have been, you know, did you did you send a memo to the Harris campaign saying, “Hey, this might actually communicate. Could you please wait?

They didn’t want to talk about it. Their pollsters kept telling the the Harris. Campaign not to talk about it, and it’s just like the New York Times and mainstream Democrats and this columnist Matt Eglesias telling everybody don’t talk about it, and even some progressives are saying don’t talk about it. The important thing is to win the working class. Okay, so here’s the problem. Let’s say the next president really sincerely wants to do something about the climate. If we haven’t talked about it and giving them a mandate to do something about it, it won’t happen at the scale we need.

It’s not like this can just be done to the American people from a back room without their support. This requires a major revamping of the entire economy and the entire infrastructure of the country and the world. So you cannot do that without public understanding and support. They will oppose you. Look at the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act. It was a great piece of legislation in many ways. It was full of compromises with Joe Manchin, but it was great in many ways.

So we only won it by one vote in the Senate, and when you win by one vote, you don’t-you haven’t won anything permanent, and that’s why Trump was able to repeal it by one vote. So this is evidence that we have not done our job to get public support for the transition that we need that will benefit them. So yes, I know that Gavin Newsom understands this. He understands the language issue. Let’s see what he does because he’s clearly running for president.

I haven’t heard him use the term “blanket of pollution. You know, have have you talked to his advisors about kind of revamping their language?

Well, I can’t talk about my conversations, but I can tell you that he does talk about how oil, coal, and gas is causing pollution and heating the planet, and you know he names them. Of course, California is suing them, the oil companies, for causing damage and lying to the public about it. He’s been very involved in that, so you know we’ll see. But I think that it’s really up to us. It’s up to the climate movement and the scientists and the NGOs to pressure the politicians.

You know, you know the famous story. After he was first elected, Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with a bunch of progressives and labor leaders, and they laid out for him what they wanted him to do. And Roosevelt said, “I agree with you on everything. Now go out and make me do it. That’s a true story. So it’s up to us. And you know, one of the big problems we have is that the climate NGOs, by and large, many of whom have very large budgets, invest almost none of it in public knowledge and understanding. Most of their public communication is fundraising, and this is a giant mistake because the fossil fuel industry is investing in propaganda and influencers, and we largely are not. Online, there’s an influencer from the fossil fuel industry.

I believe her name is Lucy Biggers, and Lucy claims to have worked at I think 350 and to have been a climate activist who has now seen the light that fossil fuels are great for us and bring us prosperity and there’s nothing wrong with them and it’s all climate alarmism, and she doesn’t believe any of that stuff anymore, and she’s really good. She’s very appealing. She has quite a lot of viewers and rising. And are we investing in our influencers? We’re in the influencer attention economy now. Are we investing in them? No, you know, like take Catherine Heyhoe. She’s such a great communicator, right?

Right.

She has no team helping her with social media or video or strategy or anything. No help. Does it all by herself. If she had help, Michael Mann had a team. If these people had, or take Bernadette Woods Placky, the great weathercaster. If they had a team behind them, they’d have 10s of millions of followers and have much more impact on the dialog. But our side tends not to value that kind of work. You know, I think we may have talked about this a bit last time, but briefly.

So we have what George Lakoff, the linguist, calls the Enlightenment fallacy. That is the idea that a great policy or scientific idea will magically sell itself because it’s so smart. Now it’s a fallacy. Now the business school guys at the fossil fuel industry. They study cognitive and marketing science, and they have to sell to advance their careers. And so, going to public opinion and selling, often in their case, false and phony ideas, is in their DNA. It’s natural to them. We don’t do it, and it’s not because we don’t have money. We have billions of dollars a year in our NGOs, so this is a priority problem that I hope we’re going to overcome if we want to survive.

Yeah, it certainly is, and you know, you make a very compelling case for why we need public education on these issues and and why we’re kind of falling down on it because people aren’t understanding why it’s so important, and and for some reason back 60 years ago in 1970, 98% of all the senators, or maybe even 100% voted for clean air and clean water, and and we enacted the EPA, and the country was behind it. So it isn’t that long ago that that it was a bipartisan issue, and everybody was on board with clean air, clean water. What what do you think could get us back on that track. How how how much how much work do we?

Well, back then, the environmental movement was a grassroots movement. It was real people organizing, and so it had a real effect on our politics. So now, this isn’t the only reason. We mostly have a kind of professional NGO community that does a lot of policy and legal work, but it doesn’t do organizing. And so, this is a giant vacuum. This is one of the big reasons. Another big reason is that we only had three television networks back then, and pretty much everybody watched them. So if a river started burning, everybody saw it and knew about it and said, “Jesus, we better do something about this.

And we did not have this massive wave of intentional falsehood and disinformation on social media because we didn’t have social media. We were not tribalizing people and creating filter bubbles around them. We didn’t have Fox disgusting, lying so-called news, purposely misleading people as their business model, that is Rupert’s business model, spreading lies and confusion. So that all contributes, but all that to me argues for more communications and more organizing. That’s how you solve it.

So, any particular advice that you can give to the listeners to kind of engage on this front and move the needle.

Well, as Dr. Catherine Hale likes to say, the the first climate solution is to talk about it. You know, people don’t hear about it much. The Yale surveys show that only 12% of Americans see or hear anything about climate change on social media, 12% They’ve documented that the major media barely ever links burning oil, coal, and gas to extreme weather and higher temperatures. That hardly ever happens. The TV networks never do it, and the TV networks are not gone, you know. They’re still very big on TikTok. They have big influence still. So talking about it is actually important. Talking to your friends and neighbors about it, posting about it.

This is a very important step that we are not doing. Pressuring your politicians to talk about it, insisting that they do. Yeah, this I would say is is number one. Now, you know, I’m quite sure that eventually an NGO is going to wise up and start doing mass communications again properly and organizing. So let’s make sure that happens because ultimately, you know, in my opinion, only a mass movement can overcome the corruption of our politics by the oil, coal, and gas industry. Only a mass movement, and I’ve seen mass movements form in my 55 years of working on them and with them, and I’ve seen them succeed often. So it can be done. I’m sure it will happen. I just hope it happens in time because you know we’re up against the clock.

Right. It’s certainly it’s it’s getting worse. The continuum is shifting further and further towards a more dangerous scenario. The the. More, we are pumping out more carbon, more methane, more nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. It just gets more and more dangerous. Any particular thoughts you have? You know, you authored a book, The Activist Media Handbook: Lessons from 50 Years as a progressive agitator, what what do you think are the top lessons coming out of of your book?

Language matters. Pay attention to it. Use language and imagery that touches the heart. People are emotional creatures. We all are. The notion that logic and facts alone are going to convince people is false. It doesn’t work that way. You know, it’s kind of like the Democrats are talking about affordability, right? Okay, so that’s an important thing to talk about. But it is simply false that people only vote about their economic self-interest. I mean, look at all these Republicans who keep voting against their economic self-interest because they’re voting their identity and their moral values. So we need to appeal to those.

You know, the way I would talk about this issue is as the great moral struggle of our time. So when you talk this way, you could initially be dismissed as some crazy radical, which of course I am. But here is the facts: there is a small group of mostly men at the oil, coal, and gas companies who are determined to make every last dollar, or if every last drop of oil, coal, and gas on Earth, while knowing they have known for 50 years that doing that will render the planet uninhabitable for civilization, they know they’ve known for decades. Their scientists told them we have the proof from the lawsuits. We have the minutes of their meetings, where they were told, and they decided to lie about it, cover it up, and confuse people. So these are, in a sense, the greatest criminals who’ve ever lived in terms of the impact that they’re having on the planet and future generations.

So that’s how we should talk about it. They’re also massive rip-offs. They’re overcharging you. Trump’s war is enriching them. His he’s paying people to not build wind farms, which are cheaper energy, so he can help his corrupt donors maintain their profit levels. These are facts, but they are a moral story. And when social movements win, is when they tell moral stories and they hold and win the moral high ground.

Well, I an amen to that. Now we just need to get out the get the message out, and I I’d love to have more people talking about it. I guess we’re doing it today and and spreading it around. Tell us about the work that you’re doing to to get others to spread the word and to tell this story.

Well, I’m afraid I haven’t been very successful at that. You know, I’ve been urging people. A group of us put a plan together to create a nonprofit communications operation to do public education on climate science and clean energy solutions, and we had a stellar, very great team ready to go, and we were not able to raise the philanthropic money because, again, with some exceptions, this is not valued. The philanthropies so far prefer to support policy and law and science and some kinds of grassroots work, But there’s very little going to public education and mass communications, whereas from the bad guys there’s a torrent. So I’m afraid I don’t have report success to report in this realm, but I have not given up, nor should anybody.

Well, I appreciate you not giving up. How much money do you need to raise?

Well, you know, to do this right would be several million dollars a year. It’s not really that much money compared to the budgets of these groups. You know, you and I know environmental NGOs, for example, that have budgets in the 400 $500 million a year range employ many hundreds of people, but as I said, they spend less than 1% of their budget on public knowledge and communication, and most of that is for fundraising. So we have a priority problem. These people are very well. Attention! They’re wonderful people, but they’re kind of living in a the past. We’re in we’re in an attention information war economy, and they are not playing. They’re not on the battlefield.

We need to change that, David.

Well, I’m trying. Let’s do it together.

Yeah, let’s do it together. You know, I’m I’m down for it. I will use both of our networks to kind of move this ball forward. You

should have the heads of some of these orgs on and say what what what what are you doing?

Amen to that. And again, they’re all great people. They’re caring. They you know their their intentions are fantastic. They’re talented, but you know, along with this Enlightenment fallacy that facts alone are going to succeed, there’s a there’s another attitude that tends to go with it, which is that selling ideas is viewed as dirty and manipulative and beneath us. We don’t do that, and so that’s the self-fulfilling prophecy.

And by the way, we can sell and we must sell ideas accurately and truthfully. I would never urge anybody to falsify or mislead ever, and I’ve never done it. But to not communicate at all, I call it unilateral information war disarmament, and it won’t last. You know, eventually people are going to wake up, but if we want the next president to act on climate, we need to get to work and show the candidates that this is what the public cares about it right now. You can’t demonstrate that, not sufficiently.

Yeah, as you were talking, David, I was thinking about my skill set, which is I’m a trial attorney and been a trial attorney, and and essentially what you’re saying essentially is what trial attorneys do in trial is is you’re you’re persuading people who don’t know anything about your case about the value of of the facts of your case and and and of course when you’re doing this facts alone are not going to sell it like you have to have an emotional connection.

That’s right. You have to tell a story.

You have to tell a story that that is going to engage the listener as to why it’s beneficial for this jury to award your client damages, and in some respects, it’s beneficial to the jury. There’s there’s a whole you know school of thought about they call it the reptilian brain. So the reptile strategy, telling the story of why it is in the interest of the community to say punish this person that has harmed the community, and and there’s been a lot of large verdicts in recent years, and because trial lawyers have been effective at telling the story, but it’s interesting that this same network of people that you know most trial attorneys are left of center are not kind of giving the the same you know storytelling ability to the the people who are progressive.

Well, some are. You know, are you familiar with the Center for Climate Integrity?

You know, I’ve heard the name, but I’m not. I can’t say I’m.

Yeah, I’d recommend you have Richard Wiles on at the head of it as a guest, he’s helping to coordinate many of the lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry that have been brought by states and local governments, and he’s terrific. And there are lawyers going after these people. And by the way, this is why the fossil fuel industry is up at Congress asking for immunity, they’re asking the courts and the Congress for fucking immunity, and that’s because they know that when a jury sees the documents that I was talking about, there are meetings where their scientists told them they were going to destroy planet Earth, and they decided to lie about it and confuse everybody and cause all this damage knowingly that the jury’s not going to like it, and they’re going to have to pay. So their solution to that is to get immunized, like the gun industry did, and we must not let that happen.

What is the status? Are there any bills in Congress currently that are legislating or proposing to legislate immunity for the oil companies?

Yes.

Wow.

And Jay Hensley has been lobbying against it. You know, no one should be above the law. He talked about it very eloquently. He was on my Chanton Forecast podcast. Yes, this must be stopped.

You know, it’s interesting. I tend to think that I’m somebody who’s fairly well informed on these issues. I read the news voraciously. Some might say addictively, and you know, I’m not seeing that on the on my feed, so I guess they’re putting putting it under the radar because they don’t particularly want anybody to hear this because I think an average person would say that seems wrong.

Well, again, there’s not much about climate from our side on social media, period. And when there is, it’s without the resources to boost it to enough of an audience, so you can follow the Center for Climate Integrity on Instagram and the other platforms, and you can follow Governor Inslee, who’s posting about this. But yeah, we the the you know in the future the media of our era is going to be judged very harshly for not alerting people to this problem and this emergency.

I mean, back to the New York Times, not one editorial has been run talking about what Trump is doing to our ability to have a livable Earth. Not one. They’ve run editorials about his attacks on clean energy, and they even start with, “Well, even if you don’t care about climate change, you should care about clean energy. So there you have the New York Times editorial board legitimizing not caring about climate change. They have not. I mean, Trump’s going to put New York underwater. Trump’s longest-lasting legacy for sure is going to be hotter temperatures on Earth, because he’s putting more.

He wants more carbon in the air, and he’s getting his way. No one ever points this out. So you have a giant media failure, and when you couple that with the deficiencies in the NGOs that we talked about in terms of communications, it’s a double disaster. It’s fixable. We could even pressure the media to change. You know, the right has pressured the media a lot, as you’ve probably noticed. We don’t even do that. We certainly could.

Well, when we talk about this immunity, this is like an enormous story. This is a, you know, probably I was going to say multi-trillion, but it’s more like 100 trillion or hundreds of trillions of dollars in liability that the oil companies have created. I mean, you destroy the environment and the the cost is off the charts. It’s more money than ever has been made in the history of humanity. Is the is the bill for what they’ve done?

So to give…

And they’re the richest, most profitable industry on earth.

Right? So to get to let them get off with some kind of immunity is is extraordinarily intolerable.

So, well, you see why they want it because they know they’re guilty.

Right? And I’ve had people on the show before. I have had Melissa Sims who’s suing the all the oil companies for Hurricane Maria down in Puerto Rico, which was exacerbated by the you know the oil companies and their emissions of fossil fuel, which you know caused a more severe hurricane than would have occurred but for their of course action and these attribution scientists that are that have kind of connected the dots to show that the oil company’s actions actually caused this, which is now you know the the final piece in in proving liability. the The oil companies see that, and they must see they’re they’re in deep trouble when this gets in front of a jury.

Yeah, they know that’s why they’re going for immunity. We must not let it happen. So call your congressperson. No immunity for criminals.

Right? No one’s above the law. I like that one.

Yeah, except maybe Trump.

Well, eventually, even Mr. Trump may have to answer to the law.

Hopefully.

You know. But so you were talking about trusted messengers, friends, family, podcasters, influencers, people who move institutions. What what are your thoughts on on on that ecosphere and and what can be done to improve it for people who care about the climate?

Well, everybody should be posting about this. Excuse me. Everybody should be talking about it. We should be helping the effective spokespeople like Catherine Ajo and Dr. Michael Mann and others have more of a platform. So you know that’s the solution. Talk about it. You know, climate communications, as Catherine Hale likes to say, is a climate solution. Because if we don’t have an informed citizenry, they’re not going to want to act. So this is the number one thing that is needed.

I would also say pressuring the media is very important. You know, it’s not that hard to tweet, or or what do you call it now? X. You know, hey, at NY Time opinion, NYT opinion. Why are you climate hushing? Yeah, you know these people are sensitive. You can write letters to the editor, 100 words. Letters at nytimes.com. Why aren’t you telling people this is an emergency? Why are you trying to hush it up? Yeah, like they need to hear from people. They hear from the right. Now, if you’re only being attacked from one side. Which side do you pay attention to?

Yeah, I see it on on my feed, and I I saw it when I ran my campaign for the presidency. You know, the far right was attacking with you know vim and vigor the entire time.

And by the way, right now I don’t know if you’ve noticed on Elon Musk’s horrible platform with the European heat wave, the bots are out. The climate disinformation is dominant. It’s disgusting, confusion, falsehood. It’s a torrent, and he should be ashamed of himself because he knows better. He started Tesla because he knew we needed to electrify transportation to survive. You know, I mean, if his racism wasn’t bad enough, becoming the number one source of climate denial-it’s just unforgivable. I’m I’m astonished, really.

Yeah, he is, you know, something else. And you know, my mom said, “If you can’t say anything good about somebody, don’t say anything at all. For Musk, that I’d have to close my mouth.

You know.

Yeah.

You know, it’s it’s shocking, and it really is. And and I had somebody on the program. He was saying that essentially the AI world is being run by people who are hoarders, wealth hoarders, and so they’re they’re not taking any of that money to help you know society. Like Musk is a prime example. He’s now worth a trillion dollars. Where is his philanthropy? Where where’s the money going to anybody to help the world that obviously funded his fortune? But he acts as if nobody had anything to do with it but him.

Yeah. Did you see? He’s getting into this fight with the New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, because Christophe has been saying accurately that when Musk killed USAID, it killed people abroad, and Musk is in a tizzy. That’s a lie, blah blah blah. Kristoff has offered to take Musk to Africa to meet the families where people are dying because of what he did, including this Ebola outbreak, where USAID would normally have been there stopping it, you know, a friend of mine is coming out with a book on these wackos.

It’s called The Nerd Reich. I believe the subtitle is Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, and it’s coming out in August, and people should look for it because you’ll be amazed that these people really think they should run the world and that they’re better than all of us.

It’s like Peter Thiel, who’s you know certainly an extremist. You know he wanted a libertarian essentially, where he believed in you know, kind of destroying democracy and just having like this authoritarian leader. That was his. That’s his view of the world.

Peter Thiel has famously said he’s come to the conclusion that freedom and democracy are incompatible. He means his freedom to plunder. Yeah, it’s no joke.

Everybody was great having David on the program. Really loved the conversation, and I think everybody should check out his podcast, which is the Fenton Forecast Podcast, and and. Check out a lot of the things that he talked about during the show. But David, just to wrap it up, any particular thoughts that you have to give give the audience of things that they can do going forward?

Talk about it. Climate communications is a climate solution. Tell everybody you know that we’ve put a blanket of pollution around the Earth that’s making it hotter. It’s what blankets do, and we know how to solve this transition away from pollution. The blanket will thin, so that’s what I recommend most of all. Talk about it.

Thank you so much, David. Loved having you on the show, and look forward to following you as we go forward.

Okay, thank you. Nice to be back.

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