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New York Times Reporter David Gelles · Simmer Down

0:00
Kathleen Biggins: So someone else that we're grateful for is our featured speaker tonight, David Gallis.
0:05
Kathleen Biggins: David is a world-class reporter.
0:09
Kathleen Biggins: If you haven't been following him in the New York Times, do it immediately today.
0:13
Kathleen Biggins: He is a climate reporter at the New York Times and the lead for the Climate Ford newsletter at the New York Times.
0:21
Kathleen Biggins: Before that, for eight years, he was a business reporter for the New York Times.
0:25
Kathleen Biggins: And before that, he worked with the Financial Times, reporting both in New York and San Francisco.
0:30
Kathleen Biggins: We had the pleasure of meeting with David while we were over at COP28 in Dubai, which was such a joy.
0:36
Kathleen Biggins: And we have also had a chance to see him in action interviewing at the Climate Week.
0:41
Kathleen Biggins: And so when he agreed to step in to the Breach of the Les Minute, we thought we had just won the lottery.
0:47
Kathleen Biggins: So, David, thank you so much for being a good question.
0:57
David Gelles: Thank you so much for having me.
0:58
Kathleen Biggins: So, one of the things I want to talk about is that not only are you a journalist, an award-winning journalist, you are also a bestseller.
1:05
Kathleen Biggins: And you have are about to launch a book in September on a very interesting CEO, the CEO of Patagonia, who actually made a billion dollars and then in an incredible fashion gave it away.
1:19
Kathleen Biggins: So tell us a little bit about what his why his story resonated with you so much and why you wanted to bring it forward.
1:27
David Gelles: Yeah, well, thanks so much again for having me.
1:29
David Gelles: I can't wear it.
1:30
David Gelles: There's so much to talk about, and I'm honored that we get to talk about a little preview of this book that's coming out on September 9th.
1:36
David Gelles: It's called Dirtbag Billionaire, how Yvonne Channard built Patagonia, made a fortune, and gave it all away.
1:43
David Gelles: And sort of the whole narrative, the whole arc of the story is embedded in that subtitle.
1:47
David Gelles: Because Yvon Channard really started as well, a dirtbag climber.
1:51
David Gelles: He was first and foremost a rock climber who was just in love with the natural world.
1:56
David Gelles: And this was long before we were talking about climate change and the way you just spoke about it, or long before Yvonne and the rest of the Patagonia team were engaged in environmental activism.
2:07
David Gelles: At his core, he was just someone that loved the natural world.
2:11
David Gelles: And I related with that on a deep level because, like probably most people in this room, I also have a really deep connection with the natural world.
2:19
David Gelles: I try to spend time outside, I try to get deep into the backcountry, I go on backcountry trips and try to get sort of as far away, frankly, from New York City as I can.
2:28
David Gelles: And I think that innate connection with nature animates me, and we can talk about how it led me to my climate work, but it also animated Yvonne Shenarda.
2:37
David Gelles: When he built Patagonia then, he started making rock climbing equipment and then clothing equipment.
2:43
David Gelles: And there was this moment where someone came to him and said, Would you support this little environmental project I was doing?
2:50
David Gelles: And you know, in the same way you guys are on the ground doing grassroots conversations, this was a similar situation.
2:57
David Gelles: Back in 1975, someone came to him and they said, We're trying to just stop development on the Ventura River in the backyard from where Patagonia's offices were.
3:07
David Gelles: Will you help us?
3:08
David Gelles: And he cut them a check.
3:09
David Gelles: And that began this journey of environmental activism that then evolved in tandem with the business.
3:15
David Gelles: So as the business got bigger, his environmental activism got bigger.
3:19
David Gelles: And as he started learning more about what the supply chain was like and the environmental impacts of running an increasingly large company on a global marketplace, he started understanding that he had the opportunity to make an even bigger impact with environmental activism.
3:35
David Gelles: Fast forward to several years ago, I'm at the New York Times and I'm covering business, and I realized that there's one company more than almost any other that's really going against the grain in the business world.
3:47
David Gelles: And it's of course Patagonia.
3:48
David Gelles: And they're doing things like suing the president of the United States when President Trump moved to roll back protections for some national monuments during his first term.
3:58
David Gelles: Patagonia sued the president, right?
4:00
David Gelles: Other companies are nervous to like put out a tweet.
4:02
David Gelles: This guy's filing lawsuits against the Department of the Interior.
4:06
David Gelles: I looked a little deeper, and oh my gosh, they're mobilizing other Fortune 500s to get out the vote.
4:13
David Gelles: They're doing deep work to try to clean up not only their supply chain, but be really transparent when they find things like you know, child labor in their own supply chain, they publicize it.
4:23
David Gelles: And they say, this is unacceptable, but it's the status quo.
4:26
David Gelles: And so already I could see five, seven years ago, this is a really extraordinary company.
4:32
David Gelles: And then three years ago, something really remarkable happened.
4:34
David Gelles: I developed a relationship with Yvonne over the years.
4:37
David Gelles: I knew his team, and they came to me just under three years ago and they said, We've got a big news story coming out.
4:42
David Gelles: Would you be interested in telling it?
4:44
David Gelles: Well, when I figured out what the story was, the answer was absolutely yes.
4:47
David Gelles: Because what he has done now, Yvonne, as you said, was worth billions of dollars, not just one billion dollar.
4:54
David Gelles: You know, the company was valued at six billion dollars, and he and his family owned 100% of the equity.
5:00
David Gelles: So this company was sitting on six billion dollars in equity value on company uh uh uh uh themselves for the corporation, and they had offers on the table to sell it for six billion dollars.
5:11
David Gelles: And they said, we don't want the money.
5:14
David Gelles: They they l he didn't want the money, his wife didn't want the money, the money that they had been drawing as profits, distributions from the corporation all these years, they had been using to fund conservation efforts, to fund activism.
5:28
David Gelles: Their kids didn't want the money.
5:30
David Gelles: Two children with their own children.
5:33
David Gelles: They said, we don't want to inherit the company or the billions.
5:37
David Gelles: And so they went through this estate planning exercise and came up with a really innovative solution.
5:43
David Gelles: They created a new set of trusts and nonprofit entities, and they essentially gave the company away, locking up the equity, so no one will ever realize the equity value of the corporation.
5:54
David Gelles: It will never be sold.
5:55
David Gelles: And instead, what he said is we're gonna mandate that 100% of the profits from this corporation, which is roughly a hundred million dollars a year, all of that money is spent down on an immediate basis for environmental causes and conservation.
6:12
David Gelles: And at that point, I sort of had the full arc of a story.
6:16
David Gelles: And I wrote that story, it was it was quite literally the most read piece of journalism I've ever written in my life.
6:22
David Gelles: 13 million plus views.
6:23
David Gelles: I mean, the story truly went viral.
6:25
David Gelles: And after that story, I went back to Yvonne and I said, I gotta write a book about this.
6:29
David Gelles: And he's sort of a curmudgeon, and so he said, he told me not to at first.
6:33
David Gelles: But I said I was gonna do it anyway, and we wound up spending a lot of time together.
6:37
Kathleen Biggins: Wow, what an amazing man.
6:38
David Gelles: It's an amazing story.
6:39
David Gelles: Amazing family.
6:40
David Gelles: Amazing family, amazing story.
6:41
David Gelles: And it's been a real honor to be able to get close with them, get close with the company, spend time with them.
6:47
David Gelles: I traveled with him in South America.
6:49
David Gelles: We went on fishing trips, we went on road trips, I was at home with him cooking.
6:53
David Gelles: And just to understand someone with such pure intentions and such a consistency in vision and values, uh, I learned a lot myself from reporting this book, and I'm so excited to share it with the world.
7:06
Kathleen Biggins: Well, we'll be looking forward in September, and we actually have pre-orders of it.
7:09
Kathleen Biggins: If anyone wants to sign up for it at the end of this event, um we haven't.
7:14
Speaker 4: Yeah.
7:15
Kathleen Biggins: So obviously, he was kind of an out-of-the-box thinker.
7:19
Kathleen Biggins: Um I wanted to focus a little bit on the economics.
7:24
Kathleen Biggins: You were a financial writer, and to me, what I find resonates the most when we were on the on the road and surprises the most is how climate change will impact our economy and our financial stability going forward.
7:40
Kathleen Biggins: Um, I think it's kind of an undersung story, and yet it is potentially bigger than the crisis in 2008.
7:49
Kathleen Biggins: It can be in my opinion.
7:52
Kathleen Biggins: I want to hear your opinion.
7:53
Speaker 3: Yeah.
7:54
Kathleen Biggins: Why, okay, why isn't it at the forefront at this time?
7:58
Kathleen Biggins: And are the C-suites, all the other CEOs, aware of it and planning and thinking, or are they stymied because of the the current situation?
8:08
David Gelles: Yeah.
8:08
David Gelles: Well, let's take it one question at a time.
8:11
David Gelles: Sorry.
8:11
David Gelles: Um the the first thing I'd say is I I absolutely concur that when you look at the long-term forecast, even the medium-term forecast, for how climate change is going to affect the economy, right?
8:27
David Gelles: Let's set aside the natural systems in the natural world.
8:30
David Gelles: We should have that conversation.
8:31
David Gelles: But if we're just talking about the economy, I mean, I know there's people in this room who think about this deeply.
8:36
David Gelles: And it's it's indisputable that it's going to have massive effects on the global economy, on local economies, on GDP, and we're already starting to see some of the impacts.
8:50
David Gelles: And you referenced a few of the sort of the easiest to understand in your introductory remarks.
8:55
David Gelles: Things like the price of coffee, the price of olive oil, right?
8:58
David Gelles: When commodities are in shorter supply because of extreme weather, that scientists can now document with attribution studies is being made worse by climate change, and that sends prices up, well, there's a pretty causal relationship that we can understand.
9:12
David Gelles: But you zoom out a little further and you look at, say, the insurance market in California, and when large swaths of California or Southern Florida are becoming uninsurable because insurance companies, which let's be honest, are not are not ideological organizations.
9:31
David Gelles: These are pretty hard-nosed companies that are motivated by their bottom lines.
9:36
David Gelles: When they say it's not worth the risk to try to insure properties in large swaths of America because of the threat of rising sea levels, which we know are coming, because of the increase in wildfires, which is well documented now and which we know are gonna be more prevalent in the years ahead.
9:56
David Gelles: Well, there again, you see already, this is not something that's happening in the future.
10:00
David Gelles: This is something that's happening now.
10:02
David Gelles: There are real economic costs to climate change.
10:05
David Gelles: And that's just what's happening now.
10:07
David Gelles: When you look a bit further afield, when you start projecting what's gonna happen in five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five years, of course we can't know the details, but we do know that the scope and the magnitude is only going to get more intense.
10:22
David Gelles: And you can start to extrapolate some of these big round numbers, and they're not in the billions, you know, they're they're in the trillions, in the tens of trillions.
10:30
David Gelles: And economists are talking about, you know, major losses in global GDP.
10:36
David Gelles: And again, hard to measure these kinds of things.
10:39
David Gelles: So we need to be careful not to be too precise with some of these projections.
10:44
David Gelles: But the broad strokes are clear.
10:46
David Gelles: It's gonna cost a lot of money, and this is critical.
10:49
David Gelles: The longer we wait to act, the more expensive it gets.
10:53
David Gelles: We were just talking about numbers, but behind all the numbers are people.
10:57
David Gelles: And these are individual lives and stories and livelihoods and small businesses that are the ones that are gonna be actually feeling the effects of all this.
11:08
David Gelles: And I try to always keep that front of mind when I'm doing my reporting, right?
11:12
David Gelles: It's it's one thing to talk about the big numbers, but behind each one of those numbers is a story about someone just like us, someone just like someone in this room who's gonna have their life turned upside down by one of these events.
11:25
Kathleen Biggins: You know, it's interesting you said that because obviously a hot button around America right now is migration.
11:29
Kathleen Biggins: And one of the things that we talk about in our presentation is how migration from Central America and South America will be worse because their lands will be less habitable and will have that external pressure on.
11:41
Kathleen Biggins: But something that many people haven't internalized is it's also expected that people from our own southern states will be moving north to get to more um economically vital places where their economies aren't as hammered and just places that are cooler and not as exposed to some of these extreme storms.
12:00
Kathleen Biggins: Um and so those that are railing against migration today may become the migrants of tomorrow.
12:06
Kathleen Biggins: And it's gonna be within our country.
12:08
Kathleen Biggins: And that's something that I don't think people have really internalized as well.
12:12
Kathleen Biggins: But I think when you talk about individual lives, I don't want to say the frogs in the pot, because I recently learned that frogs jump out of the pot.
12:20
Kathleen Biggins: They do not say.
12:21
Kathleen Biggins: I was like, um but that people in some of these areas in the deep south and even in the Midwest are kind of the first to feel these incredible impacts and and are currently getting the most of FEMA dollars.
12:33
Kathleen Biggins: And so it's so frustrating that the people that I think are going to be harmed first and foremost are the people that aren't getting the message.
12:41
Kathleen Biggins: Yeah.
12:42
David Gelles: Yeah.
12:42
David Gelles: Well, and that's why the work you're all doing is is is so you know consequential.
12:47
David Gelles: Um I do think there is an awareness gap.
12:50
David Gelles: Uh, and we see that you know reflected in polling, we see that you know, coursing through sort of the partisan politics that animate a civil discourse today.
12:59
David Gelles: Uh, and and it's you know, it's deeply frustrating as a reporter to write stories where I every day in my inbox get people telling me, you know, like the science is wrong, when of when of course it's well established at this point.
13:13
David Gelles: Um as to the the issue of uh sort of the regional variance of both the impacts and the awareness, I I always try to recognize just how nuanced all of these things are.
13:28
David Gelles: So I I would note that there's plenty of people in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, pick your southern state, that are deeply keyed into this issue and are working on the ground and finding solutions.
13:40
David Gelles: Uh I also think it's, you know, I know that the broad strokes of migration, uh, what you just described make intuitive sense.
13:49
David Gelles: But of course, if you look at the fastest growing areas in the country right now, it's the south, it's the southwest, it's some of the hottest and, as you said, most vulnerable places.
13:59
David Gelles: So the some of the logical ways that we think things like migration might play out don't always necessarily comport with exactly how human nature and human behavior plays out at the end of the day, which again, like, you know, makes my job continually interesting.
14:15
David Gelles: Because when you have the most people in the country moving to the hottest city in the country, in Phoenix, uh, well, we got a good story there.
14:26
Kathleen Biggins: Yeah, but uh I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but there's a lot more to talk on on that.
14:31
Kathleen Biggins: Um, can we go back to the economics for a second?
14:34
Kathleen Biggins: And when we were talking about CEOs, and I I know I added that on to the last question, but I I would be intrigued to hear what your impression is of um what's being discussed in the C-suite, because four years ago there was a lot of common language about we need to move forward, this is critically important for people and the economy.
14:54
Kathleen Biggins: Yeah.
14:54
Kathleen Biggins: Um, and now there are headwinds.
14:57
Kathleen Biggins: And is it stopping action?
14:59
Kathleen Biggins: Is it a slowing action?
15:01
Kathleen Biggins: Or are they continuing to do it but not talk about it?
15:03
Kathleen Biggins: What what are you seeing at the top echelons of business?
15:07
David Gelles: Well, I you you you included an important distinction there, which is inside the C-suite.
15:11
David Gelles: And I think what's happening inside the C-suite is very different than what C-suite leaders sometimes say publicly.
15:18
David Gelles: And so uh there's no question that the public dialogue has changed markedly over certainly the last few months, but even the last couple years.
15:27
David Gelles: And there was this re effort, which I reported on extensively, by really state-level Republicans to push back on ESG from Wall Street, and that definitely changed the dialogue.
15:38
David Gelles: Uh, we were talking about green hushing earlier today.
15:42
David Gelles: And so, yes, you saw especially major financial institutions, some of the other major corporations, calibrate some of their public remarks to stop talking about it so overtly.
15:53
David Gelles: Um I don't think it's the case that if you get a CEO inside the C-suite talking with their directors, talking with their executives, they are just as aware as they were 18 months ago that climate change poses some of these real systemic threats to their supply chains, to some of their facilities, to things like demand.
16:16
David Gelles: So CEOs tend to be pretty grounded in the world of facts and figures.
16:24
David Gelles: And again, when the science is this clear, they're not going to turn their back on that.
16:28
David Gelles: What I would say is that if you think about sort of the years from the Paris Agreement, 10 years ago until call it eight years ago, we were in a pretty healthy economic environment.
16:42
David Gelles: And so what you saw was many of these companies made some of these aspirational climate commitments at a moment when both top line and bottom line were growing.
16:53
David Gelles: And it was sort of easier to make add-on commitments and say, yeah, you know, uh it's good time, so sure, we're also gonna help clean up the environment.
17:02
David Gelles: That's when you saw the business round table put out this new statement on the purpose of a corporation, which again sort of tried to turn the page on the Milton Friedman shareholder primacy vision of the world and say, no, we care about people and planet and communities too.
17:16
David Gelles: And what of course we've seen in the last several months is a much harder economic environment.
17:24
David Gelles: And in that harder economic environment, I think it's much more challenging for CEOs to maintain some of these commitments, which at least some investors, some hedge fund investors, for example, might think would come at a cost.
17:37
David Gelles: And I would also, just to pick on one industry in particular, note that many of the tech companies, which were leaders in this field, leaders in the effort to make really ambitious climate commitments, they all did that at a moment of essentially stable energy demand.
17:54
David Gelles: And what we've seen in the last 18 months with the rise of AI and the growing demand for data centers is that companies like Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon and Google, they're all seeing, after years of relatively stable energy demand, as a hockey stick going up for them.
18:13
David Gelles: And I'll tell you what, even the most ambitious climate tech companies are not going to put their data center plans, their AI plans on hold because they can't power a new data center with solar power.
18:28
David Gelles: If it means they're gonna use gas, they're gonna use gas.
18:31
David Gelles: If it means they might even use coal in the interim, they're gonna do it.
18:34
David Gelles: And that's where I think the sort of the temporal challenge of this whole conversation gets so real.
18:41
David Gelles: Because climate change is a big long-term problem.
18:45
David Gelles: And we live in a world consumed with short-term crises.
18:50
David Gelles: And that's so true for corporations, and I think that same tension uh explains a whole lot of the inaction that we see.
18:58
Kathleen Biggins: So let me probe that question about the data centers, because that's like on page three, so we just bring it forward.
19:04
David Gelles: Um how many pages do we have?
19:06
Kathleen Biggins: Oh, I have about six.
19:08
Kathleen Biggins: We're gonna be here about five hours, guys.
19:10
Kathleen Biggins: Um everyone's talking about this demand issue.
19:15
Kathleen Biggins: And the the question is, how do we meet it?
19:18
Kathleen Biggins: And there is perhaps the belief that the the numbers could be overinflated, but we have to go with what we think is coming at us and get prepared.
19:27
Kathleen Biggins: Um every new energy has problems, old energy have problems.
19:33
Kathleen Biggins: The mix of meeting this challenge given the time levels and supply change issues for natural gas and other things.
19:42
Kathleen Biggins: What do you see as the winning uh suite of technologies going forward and how much of it would be behind the meter as an on-site versus on the grid?
19:51
David Gelles: Yeah.
19:51
David Gelles: I think what you hear uh many people, including the Trump administration, talking about is is an everything approach, right?
20:00
David Gelles: Like we need we need literally all forms of energy in a moment of growing energy demand.
20:05
David Gelles: Now, in practice, what that means is, I mean, there are still coal being burned in this country.
20:12
David Gelles: I think, you know, from a climate perspective, it's in everyone's interest to transition that offline as quickly as possible.
20:19
David Gelles: We've made enormous strides reducing the amount of coal consumption in this country over the last 10 years.
20:24
David Gelles: I mean, the Bloomberg Philanthropy effort with the Sierra Club really made incredible headway shutting down coal plants.
20:31
David Gelles: Um, but you now see President Trump trying to revive the coal industry.
20:36
David Gelles: Uh, natural gas is, you know, a linchpin of the electrical system right now, not going anywhere anytime soon.
20:43
David Gelles: The United States is the nation, the world's largest exporter of natural gas, which a lot of people don't realize as well.
20:50
David Gelles: We're also the world's largest producer of oil.
20:52
David Gelles: We produce more crude than Saudi Arabia at this time.
20:55
David Gelles: So, you know, fossil fuels are the bedrock of the economy.
20:59
David Gelles: They're they're really the industry that make all other industries possible.
21:02
David Gelles: And so I I we can't be naive in thinking that this is gonna disappear overnight.
21:08
David Gelles: I think what the previous administration was trying to do is create a set of incentives that can that would be able to rapidly scale up alternatives.
21:20
David Gelles: Uh, and so with things like the bipartisan infrastructure law, the inflation reduction act, there were a set of federal incentives put in place that were designed to accelerate the manufacture, the production of things like solar panels and wind and batteries and electric vehicles.
21:37
David Gelles: And it wasn't just those acts, there were other new state level mandates that certain utilities needed to start bringing more renewables onto the grid.
21:46
David Gelles: And it's those kind of policy incentives that can start to bend that curve and sort of change the mix more or less rapidly.
21:54
David Gelles: What we're seeing right now, though, with this administration is a real sort of Return to the 20th century, if you will.
22:02
David Gelles: They are in the process of or attempting to take away a lot of those incentives for renewable energies.
22:09
David Gelles: And they are trying to make good on, you know, what President Trump said he would do on the campaign trail, which is drill baby drill.
22:16
David Gelles: And so they see the United States' dominance in fossil fuel, which is real, right, and is not going away anytime soon.
22:24
David Gelles: They see it as not only the past, but also the future of America's energy supply.
22:30
David Gelles: I think a lot of people would point out that this doesn't need to be an either-or conversation.
22:35
David Gelles: That there's an opportunity for the United States to continue having a really profitable oil and gas business for many decades ahead while also starting to build up its renewables business to compete with China, as you mentioned.
22:48
Kathleen Biggins: So let's delve into that because China has talked about having a different kind of future, a different energy future that they are perceiving that would be built more on these clean energy sources.
22:58
Kathleen Biggins: And admittedly, part of this is for their own energy security because they don't have the coal.
23:04
Kathleen Biggins: I mean, they have the coal, but they don't have the natural gas and the oil that we're can you talk about, I mean, one of the things that they have been dubbed recently is the first electrostate.
23:15
Kathleen Biggins: In other words, their geopolitical power coming from electricity and what they can create in their economy from these cleaner sources versus a petrostate, you guys can figure out.
23:25
Kathleen Biggins: So how do you see in many people's minds that there's two very different visions for the future?
23:33
Kathleen Biggins: As you said, the US going back to what the old game plan it appears that many in the world are trying to follow China, in part because they too want more energy security, not to be dependent on our fossil fuels, Russia's fossil fuels, or anybody's.
23:49
Kathleen Biggins: So as you see this game playing out, where do you see the rest of the world trying to get to?
23:57
Kathleen Biggins: Which vision do you see them following?
23:59
David Gelles: Yeah, I again I think it's so important to just be nuanced and sort of embrace the messiness here because it's not either or.
24:05
David Gelles: And you you look at the long-term projections, and the United States is still gonna be exporting a lot of natural gas in 10 or 20 years.
24:12
David Gelles: There's no reason to think that that's suddenly gonna shut off.
24:15
David Gelles: Renewables are not gonna scale fast enough to make that be uneconomical based on most current projections right now.
24:23
David Gelles: It's also true that, as you said, China is absolutely dominating, not only on solar panels.
24:29
David Gelles: They now are you know responsible for something like 95, 90, 95% of solar components and panels around the world.
24:37
David Gelles: They're dominating in electric vehicles as well, you know, producing more in a month basically than the United States produces in a year.
24:44
David Gelles: They're leapfrogging, as you said, uh earlier in most of the technologies in batteries.
24:51
David Gelles: They've made incredible strides recently.
24:53
David Gelles: And now they're even starting to take the lead in things like nuclear.
24:56
David Gelles: You know, there are 30 nuclear reactors under construction in China right now, which is more than in the rest of the world.
25:01
David Gelles: And this is again an industry that the United States had historically dominated.
25:06
David Gelles: And so you see China, A, doing much of this to meet its own internal energy demands, which is just tremendous and continues to grow at an astonishing rate.
25:17
David Gelles: But they are also using it as a new form of soft power.
25:20
David Gelles: So with things like the Belt and Road Initiative and their efforts to bring electricity to parts of sub-Saharan Africa, they've recognized that especially at a moment when the United States is retreating from some of its international engagements with the decimation of something like USAID, they have an opportunity to fill this vacuum.
25:39
David Gelles: And one of the ways that they can do it is with exporting not just their phones and uh clothes and products, but with whole energy infrastructure plans that help countries that aren't fully on the grid get there.
25:57
David Gelles: And a big way they're doing that is with renewables.
25:59
David Gelles: All that said, super important to note, China is still the world's largest emitter of uh planet warming gases and the largest consumer of coal.
26:08
David Gelles: They're still building record numbers of coal plants.
26:11
David Gelles: So, again, you can we could talk about China as an electrostate, and it's also in the same breath, have to acknowledge that they're also literally the world's biggest polluter right now.
26:21
unknown: Right.
26:22
Kathleen Biggins: So I heard that they were going to make an announcement coming up pre-COP, this next COP.
26:28
Kathleen Biggins: They were trying to come forward in a more leadership position.
26:31
Kathleen Biggins: Have you heard any scuttlebutt on that?
26:33
David Gelles: Yeah, there's yeah, so COP, which is the United Nations Climate Change Conference, this year it's coming up.
26:38
David Gelles: This always happens in uh November or so.
26:40
David Gelles: Uh this year it's going to be in Brazil.
26:43
David Gelles: This is a year when many companies are expected to put out, put forward ambitious new plans and targets for the timelines and how rapidly they're going to reduce their emissions.
26:55
David Gelles: Yes, there is grumblings that China is going to come out with an ambitious target.
27:00
David Gelles: Uh, of course, this will happen in a year when the United States may not even participate in the conference.
27:05
David Gelles: And yet, I mean, again, I don't mean to be waffly on too much of this stuff, but a target's a target.
27:11
David Gelles: And we've seen, you know, just as uh plans can change rapidly for a company like uh Microsoft, which put out an ambitious target and now is not adhering to it because stacks on the ground changed.
27:25
David Gelles: I think it's important to recognize that the same thing could be true with China.
27:28
David Gelles: I think what they're doing is taking, you know, capitalizing on the momentum they have in renewables and trying to set an ambitious target.
27:38
David Gelles: Um that's very different than meeting it.
27:40
Kathleen Biggins: But I will say one thing.
27:41
Kathleen Biggins: Um, because of their incredible growth of EVs, their oil usage has begun to plateau and may have peaked.
27:48
Kathleen Biggins: We just don't, and that kind of drives global um levels as well.
27:53
Kathleen Biggins: And so we are looking at potentially peak oil um in the next four or five years.
27:59
Kathleen Biggins: And that's something I think was unbelievable five years ago.
28:03
Kathleen Biggins: And that has been driven by China's um using the market really to push through EVs, they've taken a different approach.
28:11
David Gelles: And this is this is a moment where the oc uh the economics can be a source of some optimism because if we really, I mean, if peak oil happens, which is to say we sort of the humanity is burning the most oil it's ever gonna burn, and it's gonna be a slow decline after that, it's not going away.
28:28
David Gelles: That starts to change the economics of the oil business, starts to change the investment thesis for big oil companies, and it may lead to a situation where some oil is left in the ground.
28:41
David Gelles: Right?
28:42
David Gelles: And and that it's it's an abstract concept, but it's an important one because scientists have calculated that if we were to literally burn every drop of oil and and molecule of natural gas that's buried underground, well, the the United, you know, the whole world would basically be like a truly a greenhouse.
28:59
David Gelles: It would be hot and humid just about everywhere.
29:01
David Gelles: So we hope we don't get there.
29:04
David Gelles: Uh the way that ha we avoid that is by getting the economics of renewable energy to a place where it's simply not cost competitive to continue burning and drilling oil.
29:15
David Gelles: And we're we're maybe at some of those inflection points.
29:19
Kathleen Biggins: And and that is in many ways only because the true cost of carbon isn't captured in the price.
29:24
Speaker 3: Yeah.
29:24
Kathleen Biggins: I mean, I think that's something that many people just don't think about when they see their electric bill or their gas bill, that in fact, as taxpayers or as even consumers of food, they're paying for that out of another pocket.
29:35
Kathleen Biggins: And I think that's um it's a hard concept for people to grasp, but it's such a critically important one because it costs so much.
29:43
David Gelles: Yeah, yeah.
29:43
David Gelles: I don't want to get too wonky, but this concept of externalities uh is relevant to this kind of a conversation.
29:49
David Gelles: And of course, you know, uh so are federal subsidies.
29:52
David Gelles: I mean, the fossil fuel industry uh continues to be enormously subsidized by many governments around the globe, um, whereas renewables get a fraction of those subsidies.
30:02
David Gelles: So you imagine, well, what what what the government decides to support really matters, and that's why what's happening right now in this administration is so consequential.
30:11
Kathleen Biggins: So let's talk about that.
30:12
Kathleen Biggins: Is it indeed, I mean, so what exactly has the Trump um administration decided to do?
30:18
Kathleen Biggins: How much is rhetoric, how much is action, and what do you think that consequence is gonna be?
30:23
Kathleen Biggins: How significant for the long term?
30:25
David Gelles: Yeah.
30:25
David Gelles: Um, I mean, the list is long of actions they've taken in the first hundred days or so.
30:30
David Gelles: Uh exactly what is real and what is not is still being hashed out in the courts in some levels.
30:36
David Gelles: But I think what we can see broadly is that um, as mentioned, there is a serious effort to roll back or repeal key parts of the Bifartis Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
30:51
David Gelles: These laws that tried to provide support for the growth of the renewable industry in the United States.
30:59
David Gelles: And you can already see, even just with the uncertainty about the degree to which some of the things like these tax credits, again, sorry to get wonky, but right, this is this is what actually matters.
31:10
David Gelles: There were tax credits embedded in some of these laws that businesses were counting on.
31:15
David Gelles: The uncertainty around whether those tax credits are actually going to stick around has caused literally $12 billion worth of renewable energy projects to either be canceled or put on hold just in the last three months.
31:29
David Gelles: So you can already see that sort of grinding to a halt of this momentum that there was in the renewable industry.
31:36
David Gelles: We've also seen, um, just in to paint in pretty broad brushes, an effort to fast track approvals for new fossil fuel permits for things like pipelines and natural gas export terminals, and a simultaneous effort to slow or even pause indefinitely approvals for new renewable energy projects such as offshore wind.
32:02
David Gelles: And so these are you know big policy levers that the White House controls that, again, are just trying to sort of tamp the brakes, if you will, on the renewable business and pump the gas, if you will, on the fossil fuel business.
32:16
David Gelles: Uh that's that's the broad economic strokes.
32:19
David Gelles: Then there's the regulatory environment, and we've seen, you know, the Environmental Protection Agency, which uh was set up under President Nixon with the express mandate of sort of keeping uh Americans healthy and the nation's public spaces and air and water clean and free of pollutants.
32:37
David Gelles: Uh Lee Zeldon, former congressman from Long Island, has sort of unilaterally reframed the mission of the EPA to now be about promoting economic development in the United States, which is sort of a head spinning reinterpretation of the of the mandate of the Environmental Protection Agency.
32:54
David Gelles: But that's what we're seeing.
32:55
David Gelles: And that's gonna have cascading downstream effects as the EPA starts to uh re-evaluate or cancel tailpipe emissions regulations, smokestack emissions regulations.
33:07
David Gelles: All of this is either in the works or announced.
33:09
David Gelles: Uh, and so what we're gonna see, many analysts believe, is uh in the totality a really sharp increase in fossil fuel emissions compared to what we would have seen under the Biden administration.
33:24
David Gelles: Important to note, we may still see during this Trump administration an overall decline in emissions because some of this transition, some of this energy transition, does sort of have a momentum of its own.
33:37
David Gelles: And as we discuss, you know, as more EVs come on the road, uh emissions are gonna fall.
33:43
David Gelles: As more utilities get uh solar and wind on the grid, maybe that means less coal, less natural gas.
33:51
David Gelles: Efficiency is improving in a lot of ways.
33:53
David Gelles: That's gonna help.
33:54
David Gelles: So, broad trend line, emissions in the US are still falling.
33:58
David Gelles: But I think what's clear is they won't fall nearly as fast as they would have under a different administration.
34:05
Kathleen Biggins: Are you seeing pockets across the aisle and trying to maintain some of these things, especially tax credits that have brought so many jobs and economic development to Georgia and South Carolina?
34:16
Kathleen Biggins: 75%, I believe, of the benefit of some of these policies were in conservative voting areas.
34:23
David Gelles: That's right.
34:24
Kathleen Biggins: Are we seeing a pushback?
34:25
Kathleen Biggins: Or are we seeing it was these are jobs, these are these are jobs, these are big investments.
34:30
David Gelles: And the answer is absolutely yes, and and it's bipartisan.
34:32
David Gelles: Uh, I've I've written several articles just in the last couple months about a group of Republican uh representatives.
34:39
David Gelles: There's a uh a contingent in the Senate as well that is trying to lobby the White House economic team to preserve some of these tax credits.
34:47
David Gelles: Again, sorry to like you know put people to sleep about talking about tax credits, but but this these are the actual levers that determine how quickly or slowly the a country like the United States actually makes this energy transition.
34:59
David Gelles: And yeah, we see uh Republican congressman led uh in this case by uh Representative Andrew Garbarino, uh also out of Long Island, um, he's trying to say, like, this makes good economic sense.
35:11
David Gelles: We don't have to talk about it in terms of climate change, it's not the Green New Deal, but it is great manufacturing jobs, uh, and these are important tax credits that were benefiting the economy writ large, forget what the end goal was.
35:24
David Gelles: The truth is we don't know how the administration is responding yet.
35:28
David Gelles: We're we're moving toward reconciliation.
35:30
David Gelles: There will be probably a broader tax bill that comes out later uh this year, and we'll have to see you know to what extent some of these representatives are really willing to go to the mat um when it when it comes time to.
35:44
Kathleen Biggins: Well, one other thing I want to follow up about is we were talking about that increase in demand.
35:48
Kathleen Biggins: What I have um heard is that so many of the options are being slowed down by supply chain issues, especially natural gas.
35:57
Kathleen Biggins: So if we need this new demand tomorrow, what isn't it renewables that are most likely poised to be able to get online quickly enough to meet the demand?
36:10
David Gelles: Yeah, absolutely.
36:10
David Gelles: You can build a small solar plant faster than you can build a medium-sized natural gas plant.
36:17
David Gelles: But the truth is there's still reliability issues, uh, there's still uh uh land use issues, right?
36:25
David Gelles: It uh a big solar plant that's gonna compete with a major natural gas plant requires a huge amount of land, there's permitting issues.
36:32
David Gelles: And so um I think a lot of people wish it was as that simple, right?
36:36
David Gelles: That oh, you can just put wind and solar in place of uh a natural gas plant, but it's just not.
36:42
David Gelles: There is there are still intermittency issues, and you said it, right?
36:45
David Gelles: Texas hit that amazing milestone on an extremely windy day.
36:48
David Gelles: It's a windy day, yeah.
36:49
David Gelles: It's not always windy, and the sun's not always out.
36:51
David Gelles: And I don't say that as a uh to be an apologist for the fossil fuel industry, but the truth is right now the mix just isn't fully there to support.
37:00
David Gelles: I mean, look at the lights around us, look at the AV.
37:02
David Gelles: We use a lot of energy, and no one's quite willing to say uh we're willing to go back to the stone age and and live in a world where some of this electricity is not as uh readily accessible.
37:16
David Gelles: People are still expecting, you know, their full standard of living, and that, at least for now, has created a situation where grid operators believe that they need a whole bunch of natural gas.
37:31
Kathleen Biggins: Right.
37:31
Kathleen Biggins: No, and obviously natural gas isn't going anywhere.
37:33
Kathleen Biggins: If anything, it might even go higher.
37:35
Kathleen Biggins: But I guess the the thing that's surprising me a little bit is my my sense of it was that non-fossil fuels had been responsible for all of the electricity growth, all of the additional 96% last year.
37:47
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
37:48
Kathleen Biggins: And na uh internationally like 91%.
37:50
Kathleen Biggins: So they were picking up a lot of that load growth, but now all of a sudden we have that hockey stick and it's changing the equation.
37:56
David Gelles: That's right.
37:57
Kathleen Biggins: And we need to either keep coal online for a little bit longer or bring in natural gas.
38:01
Kathleen Biggins: Problem with natural gas is methane, and the fact that it is flaring that in throughout its system from production through transport.
38:10
Kathleen Biggins: Um, we have ways to ameliorate that, but the administration just kind of rolled back that as their number one first thing that they did.
38:19
Kathleen Biggins: But since we're talking in the abstract, let's let's let's um recognize another milestone.
38:25
Kathleen Biggins: We've talked a little about economic ones, and that is that this year or last year, we reached the 1.5 degree increase.
38:32
Kathleen Biggins: Now, that doesn't mean we cross the barrier because we have to hit it for quite a few years before we officially cross our stretch goal that was decided at Paris that was supposed to keep us at safe levels.
38:43
Kathleen Biggins: There's a lot of talk about once we hit 1.5, the reactions within the climate get much worse and we start feeling them at an accelerated rate.
38:52
Kathleen Biggins: We're kind of on a 3.1 C trajectory right now.
38:57
Kathleen Biggins: So as we talk about what's possible over here in the energy, let's talk about what's possible for our future as far as the livability of much of the planet.
39:06
Kathleen Biggins: What is a 3.1 degree sea world like?
39:09
Kathleen Biggins: Can you kind of help us visualize what that would be?
39:13
David Gelles: I try not to think about it too much.
39:16
David Gelles: I mean, it it it it's catastrophic, honestly.
39:20
David Gelles: I mean, many coastal cities are underwater without extensive seawalls.
39:25
David Gelles: Um average global temperatures are extremely higher.
39:32
David Gelles: That's gonna make places like India, which is you know, even right now in parts of the Middle East, experiencing unprecedented heat waves, um, you know, potentially unlivable.
39:43
David Gelles: You know, parts are just gonna be too hot too often to sustain comfortable human life outdoors.
39:49
David Gelles: Um we don't know, again, I try to be I try to be honest about what we don't know.
39:54
David Gelles: We we can anticipate there will be large-scale disruptions to agriculture, but we don't know exactly what they're gonna look like.
40:00
David Gelles: Um but what we even saw in uh uh two summers ago, which was an extremely hot one here in the United States, you know, a lot of a lot of air uh planes couldn't land because the runways were too soft.
40:14
David Gelles: And so you start to think about just a couple extra degrees on an ongoing basis, starts to quite literally like liquefy some of our infrastructure.
40:27
David Gelles: And again, to get back to that earlier conversation we were having about cost, right?
40:30
David Gelles: What's the cost of having to come up with a new pavement that can sustain uh 130 degree heats and then repaving every uh runway in the country?
40:39
David Gelles: Well, there's there, you know, there's a trillion dollar job right there.
40:42
David Gelles: Um so it's it's it it's treacherous.
40:46
David Gelles: Now, I I agree, right?
40:49
David Gelles: The models, uh, whether you look at uh the projections coming out of the IPCC or uh which is a UN body that you know looks closely at climate science, or even Morgan Stanley.
40:59
David Gelles: There was this report that sort of went viral a couple weeks ago on air conditioning, where they said very sort of off-handedly, well, we're planning for a three-degree world.
41:07
David Gelles: Um the consensus is that yes, we are headed there.
41:11
David Gelles: Uh I I try not to be polygannish, uh, and I'm not a techno-optimist, but I also don't underestimate humanity's ability to adapt.
41:22
David Gelles: And and that isn't to say that there isn't gonna be a tremendous amount of suffering, and that the suffering will be wildly unequally distributed.
41:30
David Gelles: And we're all you know very fortunate to live the lives we do, and I think we should all remember that every day.
41:36
David Gelles: For a Bangladeshi rice farmer or a Vietnamese fisherman, uh, the consequences are gonna be much more immediate and severe.
41:46
David Gelles: Uh, nevertheless, I really do believe that the amount of energy and innovation that's happening right now is going to change the conversation in some really fundamental ways that we can't currently predict.
42:01
David Gelles: And whether that's fusion or whether that's different types of carbon capture or geoengineering, we're in this sort of extraordinary moment where the scale of the problem has gotten so big and people are grasping the potential severity of it, and that's making people get that much more ambitious with their ideas of how we might respond.
42:27
David Gelles: So, again, I'm not Pollyannish.
42:30
David Gelles: I I'm not suggesting that we've got the solutions at hand that are gonna prevent us from getting to a three-degree world, or that the journey along the way isn't gonna be really, really rough for a whole lot of people and ecosystems.
42:41
David Gelles: But I also am not fatalistic.
42:45
Kathleen Biggins: Was that an optimist way of ending?
42:48
Kathleen Biggins: I'm not sure.
42:49
David Gelles: That's optimistic for a journalist.
42:53
Kathleen Biggins: Okay.
42:53
Kathleen Biggins: Um, if we're the audience to ask questions.
43:04
Kathleen Biggins: So we have a question in the back.
43:11
Speaker 7: You imagine carbon capture.
43:13
Speaker 7: Uh what I heard both of you say um before that was hydrocarbons are gonna be around for a long time.
43:22
Speaker 7: You know, we're gonna hopefully replace it replaceable energy, etc.
43:30
Speaker 7: But it would seem to me that carbon capture has got to be a major part of uh a future solution, particularly if you're gonna keep the temperature growth uh low enough to for us all humans to survive.
43:50
Speaker 7: And um I wonder if the two of you could give us a little bit of your thoughts about the current research that's going on in that area and where where.
43:59
Speaker 7: Things stand?
44:01
David Gelles: Yeah.
44:02
Speaker 7: That's you.
44:03
David Gelles: Uh that's me.
44:04
David Gelles: Okay.
44:05
David Gelles: Well, I'll take this one in part because I wrote a ton about it last year.
44:10
David Gelles: We did a big series called Buying Time, which looked at carbon capture solutions as well as other geoengineering technologies, uh, sort of precisely on this point of like how are we gonna address some of these massive challenges we've got?
44:24
David Gelles: Uh the answer is carbon capture works, um, but it's expensive and it works in incredibly small quantities right now relative to the amount of carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere.
44:37
David Gelles: And so what we're seeing right now is a big growth industry as many different companies find lots of different ways to sequester carbon dioxide in a durable way.
44:48
David Gelles: So some of that is things like direct air capture, where there's big fans blowing air over certain chemical solutions that grab the carbon dioxide, then turn it into a gas, and they can pump it underground.
45:00
David Gelles: That's one way to do it.
45:01
David Gelles: There are other processes that use more biological matter that can sort of again sequester carbon and they wrap up this very sort of carb, like you sort of put carbon dioxide in a sponge, wrap it up in foil, bury it in bricks.
45:17
David Gelles: And then there's things like point source capture, which is to say, at the very moment that you're burning uh natural gas or or or oil, you capture the carbon dioxide even before it goes into the atmosphere, you grab that, you put it underground.
45:30
David Gelles: All of those, again, they they work right now, but it's incredibly expensive, and relative to the amount of carbon dioxide we're burnt uh putting into the air, relative to the amount of emissions, it's just infinitesimal.
45:44
David Gelles: And so, yes, I think in the best case scenario, what a lot of people say is fast forward 50 years, maybe more like 70 or even 100 years, humanity, as far as we can tell, may still need to be burning certain fossil fuels for certain processes, things like long-duration shipping, things like uh long-haul air flights, right?
46:09
David Gelles: Big, complex industrial processes, the use of petrochemicals.
46:14
David Gelles: There are a lot of ways that right now we don't actually have an easy way to swap out the burning of fossil fuels.
46:21
David Gelles: And for those processes, the hope is maybe by that point carbon dioxide capture will have scaled well enough to capture most of that, so we can sort of achieve this net zero equilibrium.
46:34
David Gelles: But no one I've talked to has any illusions that given the current state of emissions, carbon capture can make a real dent in addressing what we're currently doing.
46:47
Kathleen Biggins: So isn't it true though that there's a lot of bleep?
46:49
Kathleen Biggins: I guess this is what you were saying, that we are going to need it so much in the second part of the century that the type of research and investment today is warranted.
46:58
David Gelles: Yeah.
46:58
Kathleen Biggins: Um, even though it might take money away from something else, but because it in the long term we really need it.
47:03
David Gelles: That's certainly the argument that a lot of people in that industry will make.
47:06
David Gelles: I, you know, it's not my job to say what's warranted or not, but but it is very clear that there's an investment thesis that is allowing many, you know, big corporates, big banks to get behind some of these technologies and invest in them with the belief that there is a big market in the future.
47:22
Kathleen Biggins: And oil and gas is also very interested in it, absolutely what you said.
47:26
David Gelles: Absolutely.
47:27
Kathleen Biggins: Which is intriguing to me because there are some of these newer technologies like the land-based ones that actually do quite well.
47:32
Kathleen Biggins: Yeah.
47:32
Kathleen Biggins: But they aren't getting the same kind of investment.
47:34
Speaker 6: Yeah.
47:37
Kathleen Biggins: Oh, sorry, back there.
47:40
Speaker 4: David, would you talk a little bit more in detail about carbon capture, about um using the ocean and um forests and uh how that would work and how effective that would be specifically?
47:58
David Gelles: Yeah, so it uh the that's uh sort of another bucket of uh carbon capture is using nature-based solutions, is broadly uh one one way to refer to them, which is say like planting trees, right?
48:11
David Gelles: You plant the right kind of trees in the right places, they can sequester a lot of carbon.
48:15
David Gelles: Sure, that will help, but but it's it's gonna be a similar answer, right?
48:18
David Gelles: At this moment, at this scale, um, or ocean iron fertilization you just referred to.
48:23
David Gelles: That's the technical term for sort of putting certain types of iron molecules into the ocean in the hopes that they actually uh create uh a reaction that draws more carbon into the ocean.
48:35
David Gelles: Um similar situation though.
48:38
David Gelles: It is so dwarfed by our current emissions that in the immediate it's not gonna have a meaningful effect at the scale that they're currently doing that work compared to the amount of emissions that are still going into the atmosphere.
48:56
Kathleen Biggins: Is there a question, Dallas?
48:57
Speaker 1: I think you said you were not a techno optimist.
48:59
Speaker 1: I think I said that.
49:00
Speaker 1: The spike I could change if some disaster happened.
49:05
Speaker 1: And we didn't talk about tipping points today, but there's been a lot written about the Atlantic current or the thawing of the Arctic, and there are a lot of others.
49:15
Speaker 1: There must be a sector or ten others that I wrote about.
49:18
Speaker 1: Do any of those enter into your thinking?
49:20
Speaker 1: And do you think that any of those could they actually begin to unfold in a two or three degree centigrade or hot, warmer world?
49:29
Speaker 1: If they unfolded, would they change things?
49:32
Speaker 1: Would they change the zeitgeist and change how we behave?
49:36
Speaker 1: How do you think about these?
49:37
David Gelles: Yeah, I mean, the tipping points that you're referring to are again these these sort of theoretical at this point uh thresholds within the natural world that uh once hit uh are basically irreversible.
49:54
David Gelles: And and just to put a little more meat on the bone here, you talked about sort of the Atlantic current.
49:59
David Gelles: So there is concern that as the uh Atlantic Ocean, the Northern Atlantic, gets warmer, it could disrupt this very powerful current that brings warm air and water up from the equatorial region toward northern Europe.
50:14
David Gelles: Right?
50:14
David Gelles: If you look at a map, London's pretty far up there, but it's it's it can be very pleasant because of that current.
50:20
David Gelles: You take away that current, and suddenly a lot of northern of Northern Europe, a lot of Europe, becomes a pretty incredibly cold place.
50:29
David Gelles: Uh another one you mentioned, some of the uh melting uh in the Arctic, same sort of thing, right?
50:35
David Gelles: If the melting, which has happened at a serious but relatively predictable rate, uh were to suddenly increase, sure, that could have radical effects on global sea levels in a matter not of decades or centuries, but of years.
50:54
David Gelles: These are enormous concerns, of course.
50:57
David Gelles: Uh I'm not one to predict exactly how you know the global economy or policy makers would respond in the event that we hit them.
51:04
David Gelles: But people are trying to figure this out.
51:06
David Gelles: Um, and you know, even within our own government, there's been extensive work by the Department of Defense, by the State Department, to start to game out some of these things under the previous administrations.
51:17
David Gelles: Um so that I think it shows that at the highest levels of power, many people are taking these issues seriously.
51:25
David Gelles: Uh, and I think we we should all hope for all of our sakes that we don't actually get there.
51:36
Speaker 3: So you mentioned about the data centers and the need for serious power, and my understanding is that the electric grid is not up to the requirements needed for these huge data centers.
51:52
Speaker 3: Can you talk a little bit about where that stands?
51:56
David Gelles: Yeah.
51:56
David Gelles: It's not just it's not just the data centers that the grid isn't up to the task for.
51:59
David Gelles: I mean, the whole our grid is just wildly antiquated and inefficient in this country.
52:05
David Gelles: Um the they, you know, many projections suggest that we need to build, I forget, it's like, you know, I'm just gonna blank on the number, but it's basically we need to build three times as many high transmission lines as we currently have to meet the new generation of electricity demand, especially in a world where we're employing more renewables, and we're just not even close.
52:28
David Gelles: And here, you know, we get into the conversation around permitting reform and NIMBYism and the fact that Americans really don't like it when things are being built in their backyards.
52:39
David Gelles: And that's true in nice neighborhoods like this, and it's true in rural areas where I've been out reporting on you know it these very projects, on uh water pipelines, on electric grids.
52:51
David Gelles: I've been to these communities where, you know, for us they seem like, oh, it's in a remote part of Maine or a uh a rural ranch or area of Colorado.
53:00
David Gelles: That's the perfect place to put a high speed transmission line.
53:04
David Gelles: But you tell that to the guy that's been there for 40 years, and it's the exact wrong place.
53:09
David Gelles: And um, that's a major roadblock.
53:12
David Gelles: And my colleague Ezra Klein and his colleague uh Derek Tompkins just put out this book, Abundance, a couple weeks ago.
53:19
David Gelles: And this is one of their central theses, which is that we can do a lot of the things that we're all saying are necessary to get to a more efficient, sustainable kind of economy.
53:31
David Gelles: But they're gonna require some trade-offs.
53:33
David Gelles: And this, what you just identified, you know, permanent reform, radical overhauls to the grid, that's a big part of it.
53:41
unknown: Yeah.
53:41
Kathleen Biggins: What did you want to talk a minute about reconductoring, though, and some of the things that they're talking about, the new technologies to provide more energy on the grid we have?
53:49
David Gelles: Yeah, I you know more about that than I do, Kathleen.
53:51
David Gelles: I don't know about reconductoring.
53:52
David Gelles: I'm not gonna call you and get sourced up for a story.
53:56
Kathleen Biggins: Um see me afterwards if anyone wants to talk about that.
54:00
Kathleen Biggins: Let's keep it the question.
54:02
Speaker 6: Kathleen.
54:03
Speaker 6: Here um going back to the chat you had earlier about the messaging, the conversation with the community, making them more aware of the issues.
54:16
Speaker 6: Um clearly in the last year's election cycle, the messaging didn't resonate while people were worrying about the prices of the price of eggs at the grocery store.
54:26
Speaker 6: So you know, many of your colleagues are writing now at the New York Times about what we need to do to create a more populist agenda, a civic uprising, as your colleague David Brooks just recently talked about.
54:40
Speaker 6: So my question for both of you is how do we make the conversation around climate change, around the environment, around sustainability, around energy transition more personal and more of a populist agenda?
54:58
David Gelles: You take that with Havily.
55:01
Kathleen Biggins: Okay.
55:01
Kathleen Biggins: Um well, I think that's exactly what we are trying to do, though maybe not the populist part, but making it more universal.
55:12
Kathleen Biggins: And I think the way you do it is by tying it, helping people understand what is happening, what the actual risk could be ahead, and what they could lose.
55:24
Kathleen Biggins: Because again, I don't think everyone kind of goes, oh, climate change is gonna get hotter, oh climate change that's bad, or it's not that good.
55:30
Kathleen Biggins: Very few people actually understand what it means and what it means for their insurance, what it means for their food, what does it mean for their ability to be outside and play a sport that they love during the summer?
55:41
Kathleen Biggins: They don't understand what they're being asked to give up.
55:44
Kathleen Biggins: And they, I mean, the Secretary of Energy point blank said that climate change is real, but it's just a trade-off we have to have, something that we just have to accept in order to have a modern world.
55:56
Kathleen Biggins: But he never delineates what that means for our pocketbooks, for our quality of life, or for our financial stability.
56:03
Kathleen Biggins: Um, so I think that's one of the things that we try to do so hard is to hit those universal things of importance to every American and make the line between the dots that climate change is going to hurt all of those things.
56:20
Kathleen Biggins: I I do think that the politicization of the issue has harmed us in ways that we would never have envisioned.
56:30
Kathleen Biggins: This became the number one thing that divided us more than abortion immigration.
56:35
Kathleen Biggins: For many years it was the number one, which is kind of crazy because it's a scientific issue that is measured of the gazoo.
56:42
Kathleen Biggins: Um, but it is literally a lightning rod of emotion.
56:46
Kathleen Biggins: And so talking about it instead of climate change head-on, but instead economic development or transitioning to a cleaner future environment, or you know, there's using some of those soft buzzwords can help because they're universal.
57:06
Kathleen Biggins: And um, I have to say, when I'm in the deep south and I'm in in South Carolina, they love their land, they want to keep it pure, they want to protect it, they want good jobs, but they don't want to destroy their children's lives in order to get it.
57:22
Kathleen Biggins: So if you lay it out in a way they can understand, they do come around.
57:25
Kathleen Biggins: But it's piece by piece, and I don't know how to do it in a big way.
57:30
Kathleen Biggins: What we need is a really good TV show that will rally the world in the future using art to help us get there.
57:37
Kathleen Biggins: Um, next, is there another question?
57:40
Speaker 4: One more question.
57:42
Kathleen Biggins: Okay.
57:46
Speaker: Just to come full circle.
57:48
Speaker: Schuinard and Patagonia 40 years ago was at the vanguard of uh recycling uh materials that you bought from them and so forth.
57:59
Speaker: And I'm wondering if you could uh talk a little bit about where their thinking is in terms of uh going forward and uh as it uh in regard to all these issues.
58:14
David Gelles: Yeah, that well thank you for for coming back to it.
58:17
David Gelles: And and I think it's a a great place to end in a way because uh, you know, Yvonne himself, and I spent a lot of time with him over the last couple of years, he's a real curmudgeon.
58:26
David Gelles: I mean, there's no doubt about it.
58:27
David Gelles: Uh, and it's not just his old age, his nature is he's sort of a pessimist.
58:31
David Gelles: Um, and he really he looks at the natural world, which as I said, he loves so much.
58:36
David Gelles: And he looks at what humanity's done to it, and he has this real sense of resentment.
58:40
David Gelles: And you could imagine that that kind of uh a posture would lead him to be a little disenchanted and disengaged, but it's the exact opposite.
58:50
David Gelles: He's more fired up than ever about trying to protect the natural world we have, about funding people on the front lines who are doing this kind of work, about you know, real environmental activism that is grounded not just in protest, but in policy and in policy advocacy and in legal action where necessary.
59:14
David Gelles: And so he's again not Pollyannish.
59:17
David Gelles: He doesn't believe that everything's gonna be okay magically, but he recognizes that he has the opportunity, he has the platform, he has the resources to try to move the needle on some of these issues, and he's he literally gave everything he had to try to do it.
59:34
David Gelles: And that's just I think a remarkable story that we can all learn from, even if we don't have our own six billion dollar company to give away.