Talking Climate with Conservatives

02/12/24 • 70 min

In this episode, Ralph and Luc chat with Michael Jefferies, Regional Conservative Outreach Coordinator for the Citizens' Climate Lobby. Together, we get out of our filter bubbles and find some common ground.

We discuss Michael's faith-based journey on climate issues, bipartisan proposals on issues ranging from a carbon tax ("Carbon Fees and Dividends") and import tariffs, along with strategies to communicate about the environment to conservatives.

We also listen to excerpts from former Senator Bob Inglis talking about his experience as a pro-climate Republican.

We hear a political advertisement recorded by Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi together on a couch back in 2008.

We read excerpts of:
• Dorothy Sayers' "Why Work?" speech from 1942 and
• Pope Francis' "Laudato si'" encyclical from 2015.

If you'd like to connect with the Citizens' Climate Lobby, you can find them at:
https://cclusa.org/join

Chapters:
0:00:00 Introducing our guest, Michael Jeffries, Citizen Climate Lobby's Regional Conservative Outreach Coordinator
0:02:00 What Michael heard about climate change growing up in a conservative household (Rush Limbaugh)
0:05:38 How Dorothy L. Sayers' "Why Work?" WW2 speech got Michael to consider prioritising nature over growth from a Christian lens
0:13:10 From Saint Francis of Assisi to Pope Francis' Laudato Si: We are Nature
0:17:41 Michael's climate journey: Campus activism
0:19:55 How Michael started working at Citizens' Climate Lobby on pro-climate legislation with Indiana's very conservative senator Mike Braun
0:26:04 Bipartisan Bills with major climate provisions that passed under the Biden administration: Infrastructure and Jobs Act, CHIPS and Science Act, the Growing Climate Solutions Act
0:29:31 The PROVE It Act: getting the DOE to measure emissions worldwide
0:33:42 Carbon Tax: the French example of "Gilets jaunes": what went wrong to cause the yellow vest protest against it?
0:36:02 Carbon pricing: Citizens' Climate Lobby's proposal for a carbon fee and dividend
0:44:04 Republicans are scared of getting primaried for introducing a carbon tax
0:46:59 Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi's couch commercial for climate action
0:48:02 How Republican Congressman Bob Ingliss lost his primary to Trew Gowdy after the Koch Brothers shifted their funding
0:52:41 The Bob Ingliss Mixtape: clips of former congressman talking about climate issues
0:59:12 How the climate discourse got polarised and stopped being a bipartisan issue
1:02:32 Michael's approach when talking to a conservative audience about climate
1:05:05 Wrap up: Michael Jeffries points out the contradiction of incremental fixes being insufficient to grapple with the issues of degrowth that moved him in the first place
1:08:11 Outro: Ralph and Luc briefly debrief the interview

We also listen to excerpts from former Senator Bob Inglis talking about his experience as a pro-climate Republican.

We hear a political advertisement recorded by Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi together on a couch back in 2008.

We read excerpts of:
• Dorothy Sayers' "Why Work?" speech from 1942 and
• Pope Francis' "Laudato si'" encyclical from 2015.

If you'd like to connect with the Citizens' Climate Lobby, you can find them at:
https://cclusa.org/join

Previous Episode

Gaslighting (Big Oil Knew)

In this episode, Ralph and Luc spotlight what the oil companies knew about CO2’s impact on the climate, and how they lied to you to sustain their fossilized business model – even if it risks drilling us into oblivion... This argument will soon be heard in court as part of a series of lawsuits against Big Oil.

We start by looking into the history of scholarship on this issue, dating back to the 19th Century.
We highlight the record of what the oil companies such as Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute were saying behind closed doors – and contrast this with their contemporaneous public statements.

We draw upon scholarship uncovered by Naomi Oreskes and the #ExxonKnew movement.

Sources:
• If you would like to read California's lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, BP and the American Petroleum Institute for deceiving the public for decades, you can access it here:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/FINAL-9-15-COMPLAINT.pdf

• We quote from the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt; How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway.

• We also sample a couple clips from the 2014 documentary derived from it, also titled Merchants Of Doubt, directed by Robert Kenner and co-written by Kim Roberts.

• We cite reporting from this 2017 article from the Center for Public Integrity: “The United States of Petroleum” by Jie Jenny Zou, accessible at

https://apps.publicintegrity.org/united-states-of-petroleum/

• You can read Edward Teller’s “Energy Patterns of the Future” 1959 Presentation at the Energy and Man conference organised by the American Petroleum Institute in full here:
https://www.planetaryhealthforbusypeople.com/whats-now-and-whats-new/edward-teller

• We sample a couple clips from the 1981 British TV documentary by Thames Television called “Warming Warning”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMjnvfkeJJ0&list=PL7WD0g9dS3jlkXemuiPdoj4RF416JTpn6&index=3

• We read from Exxon's 1982 internal primer on the CO2 "Greenhouse Effect", which was made accessible thanks to reporting by Inside Climate News in 2015, and is accessible here:
https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1982-Exxon-Primer-on-CO2-Greenhouse-Effect.pdf

• We also read from the oil companies' advertorials, as highlighted in a 2017 research article: "Assessing ExxonMoblil’s climate change communications (1977-2014)" by Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f

• We refer to elements from the 2021 book The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet by Michael E Mann.

• We also cite the 2023 Science article "Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections" by Geoffrey Supran, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063

• We excerpted a clip from Naomi Klein's June 2023 appearance on the podcast "The Audit", hosted by Dave Anthony and Josh Olson on David Sirota's Lever Network, which you can listen to in full here:

https://www.levernews.com/the-audit-the-climate-change-misinformation-machine

(This episode is also available as a video on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muNF_1mC3FI&list=PLwI-SH3khGtbDQ76_3VXTO3AaLkZ-sqnA&index=3 )

Chapters:
0:00:00 Introduction - Current lawsuits against Big Oil
0:07:16 History of science of C02 and climate change in the 1800s
0:12:10...

Next Episode

How Diplomacy Closed The Ozone Hole

In this episode, Ralph and Luc spotlight an environmental success story: the Montreal Protocol's role in healing the ozone layer. We draw comparisons to the pitfalls of the IPCC's COP process and try to derive a diplomatic blueprint for climate policy.

We look into the science of how ozone and chlorine works in the stratosphere, the history of the activist scientists (Sherwood Roland and Mario Molina) who first sounded the alarm about CFC's destruction of the ozone layer, and the work of technocrats in devising their replacement. We also examine the geopolitical dynamics that were foundational to this planetary victory.

You can also watch this episode on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qlz8O0_fkh4
Sources:
• We sample clips from the 2019 PBS documentary Ozone Hole: How We Saved the Planet, written and directed by Jamie Lochhead — notably interviews with Mario Molina, Joan Roland (widow of Sherwood), Lee Thomas (administrator at the EPA), Crispin Tickell (adviser to Margaret Thatcher) and Bob Watson (NASA).
https://www.pbs.org/show/ozone-hole-how-we-saved-planet/

• We also sample clips from this 2021 interview with Susan Solomon (the atmospheric chemist who demonstrated CFC’s impact on ozone) and Stephen Andersen (leader of the Montreal Protocol and co-chair of its Technology and Economic Assessment Panel), by the Future of Life Institute, in which they share their roles in the closing of zone hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hwh-uDo-6A

• We cite elements from the 1998 book Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet, by Richard Elliot Benedick.

• We cite the 2002 book Ozone Connections: Expert Networks in Global Environmental Governance, by Penelope Canan and Nancy Reichman.
• We cite the 2019 book The Ozone Layer: From Discovery to Recovery, by Guy P. Brasseur.

• We cite the 2021 Nature article The Montreal Protocol protects the terrestrial carbon sink, by Paul J. Young, Anna B. Harper, Chris Huntingford, Nigel D. Paul, Olaf Morgenstern, Paul A. Newman, Luke D. Oman, Sasha Madronich & Rolando R. Garcia.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03737-3

• We refer to insights from the 2021 book Cut Super Climate Pollutants Now!: The Ozone Treaty’s Urgent Lessons for Speeding Up Climate Action, by Alan Miller, Durwood Zaelke and Stephen Andersen.

• We also cite from the 2023 book 35th Anniversary of Protecting the Ozone Layer, by Marco Gonzalez and Stephen Andersen.
Read more at:
https://ozone.unep.org/ozone-timeline
and
https://csl.noaa.gov/assessments/ozone/2022/downloads/twentyquestions.pdf

Chapters:
0:00:00 Introduction: COP 28 Wrap-up
0:02:49 Science of the Ozone Layer
0:04:30 History of CFCs: Thomas Midgely’s invention and subsequent uses (1930s)
0:08:21 Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina’s Research shows CFCs' dangers for ozone (1970s)
0:17:42 Consumer Boycott of CFCs: All in The Family
0:24:05 Consumer Boycott of CFCs: children’s Entertainment led Mc Donald’s to change its packaging from foam to cardboard
0:29:51 Sherwood Rowland coins the term “ozone hole”
0:32:04 Ozone concentrations in the Antarctic were so low that the scientists thought it was a measurement error
0:33:53 Susan Solomon’s model explains how CFCs caused the ozone hole (1980s)
0:38:18 Scientists fly an airplane into the ozone hole
0:39:31 Global Diplomacy: First Framework, the Vi...