Leah Stokes, A Matter of Degrees
Today's guest is Dr. Leah Stokes, a renowned climate and energy policy expert, strategist and researcher, helping leaders build clean energy practices into their long-term plans to secure our future.
But her resume doesn’t end there. Leah is an award-winning author of Short Circuiting Policy, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-host of a top climate podcast called A Matter of Degrees, where she and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson tell stories about the powerful forces behind climate change and the tools we have to fix it. Leah is also senior policy advisor at Rewiring America and Evergreen Action, plus she was named a Grist 50 Fixer in 2020. While she has a pretty impressive bio, Leah is also a unique combination of pragmatic, progressive, commercial-minded, activism-minded, academic-minded, and scientific-minded, all blended into one powerhouse of a woman.
In this episode, Jason and Leah have a great discussion about her journey, theory of change, and how it's evolved from when she first started doing this work to today. We also cover some of the barriers holding back the transition and the most impactful levers to facilitate it. Finally, we put controversial topics that people squabble over all the time, front and center, and talk through them pragmatically and respectfully with the nuance that they deserve. This is an insightful conversation you don’t want to miss.
*Leah will be participating in an MCJ Ask-Me-Anything event on Wednesday 11/02 in our Slack community. Get your burning climate questions ready. RSVP here.
Get connected:
Jason’s Twitter
Leah’s Website / Twitter
MCJ Podcast /Collective
*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded on September 22, 2022.
In this episode, we cover:
[3:12] An overview of Leah's work
[5:56] Her motivations and how she started working in climate
[9:40] How her theory of change has evolved
[11:27] Importance of structural change
[15:27] Tensions between conservation, decarbonization and environmental justice
[21:46] Leah's feelings toward fossil fuel company executives and the impacts of their denial campaign
[28:47] The role of fossil fuel companies moving forward in the clean energy transition
[32:31] The political polarization of climate change
[35:48] A future of abundance with clean energy
[38:23] Leah's views on the state of the climate emergency
[41:55] The role of the West vs. the rest of the world
[46:19] GDP growth and falling emissions
[49:46] Speed round including nuclear, offsets, carbon pricing, and more
Resources mentioned in this episode:
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit
Follow the Leader by Gabe Lenz
How Solar Energy Became Cheap: A Model for Low-Carbon Innovation by Greg Nemet
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Jason Jacobs (00:02):
Hello everyone, this is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms (00:04):
And I'm Cody Simms.
Jason Jacobs (00:06):
And welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:16):
In this podcast we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:27):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change. Today's guest is Leah Stokes. Leah is a renowned climate and energy policy expert, policy strategist and researcher, helping leaders build clean energy practices into their long-term plans to secure the future. She's an award-winning author of Short Circuiting Policy, co-host of a Top Climate podcast called A Matter of Degrees, and also an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Senior Policy Council, Rewiring America Senior Policy Advisor at Evergreen Action. And she was named a Grist 50 Fixer in 2020. Wow, what a bio. Now, I was super excited for this one because Leah is everywhere in climate. She's involved with some of my favorite organizations like Evergreen Action and Rewiring America, and she's also just kind of a weird combination of pragmatic, progressive, commercial minded, activism minded, academic minded, scientific minded, all kind of blended into one powerhouse of a woman.
(01:47):
At any rate, we have a great discussion in this episode about Leah's journey to doing the work that she's doing. We talk about her theory of change and how it's evolved from when she first started doing this work to today. We talk about some of the barriers holding back to transition, some of the most impactful levers to facilitate the transition. And then we have a really juicy discussion, pretty much putting controversial topics that people will squabble over all the time, front and center. And talking through them pragmatically and respectfully with the nuance that they deserve. I really enjoyed this one and I hope you do as well. Dr. Leah Stokes, welcome to the show.
Leah Stokes (02:29):
Oh, thank you so much for having me on.
Jason Jacobs (02:31):
Thanks for coming. I have to say, this is intimidating because as we were just talking about before we hit record, I was a fitness app entrepreneur a few years ago and now I'm talking to, from what I can tell, one of the most influential people in the climate space. So just thank you so much for your work and for making time to come on our little show.
Leah Stokes (02:48):
I don't know if the hype is merited, my friend, we'll see.
Jason Jacobs (02:53):
Also, as we were talking about before the show, in my research, it was hard to put you in a box. Are you a health person? Are you an environmental justice person? Are you a decarbonization person? Are you a policy person? Are you a politics person? Maybe just frame a little bit where you sit and how you spend your professional time?
Leah Stokes (03:12):
Well, it's a complex question because I wear a lot of hats. I've started saying I have three and a half jobs and somebody pointed out I sort of have four. So too many is the point. Obviously I'm a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, where I work on environmental politics. So, I'm a political scientist. I study things like Congress and who do they hear from, who do they not hear from and what do they think about climate change? I study energy policy, how do states make laws about renewables, things like that, public opinion. And I have graduate students who work on other amazing topics. We do research projects together. I teach, that's sort of the bread and butter being a professor. The second thing I do is I work for an organization called Rewiring America, which is awesome. They are trying to electrify-
Jason Jacobs (03:59):
Alex Laskey came on the show, by the way, and it's quick aside, but he and I went to summer camp together when we were little kids. But anyways, go on.
Leah Stokes (04:04):
Very cool. I'm also a summer camper and I know his kids now going to summer camp, so summer camp is cool. So yeah, with Alex Laskey and Ari Matusiak and Saul Griffith it's an amazing non-profit. We're trying to electrify a billion machines in America, so just slightly ambitious. It's really fun. We've made heat pumps cool. We helped get the president to invoke the Defense Production Act, and we got several amazing things into the Inflation Reduction Act to help everyday people electrify their homes, whether that's low and moderate income folks or wealthier folks through tax credits. So it's my second thing I do. The third thing is I work with Evergreen Action, which is the former Inslee campaign for president. It's an-
Jason Jacobs (04:45):
Maggie, came on the show.
Leah Stokes (04:46):
There you go.
Jason Jacobs (04:47):
Awesome. Yeah.
Leah Stokes (04:48):
All my friends. It's an amazing group of people who really kept climate front and center in the Democratic primary in the general election. In the first couple years of the Biden administration we worked on things like no climate, no deal. Basically saying failure was not an option. This is with Sam Ricketts, Lena Moffitt and Jamal Rod, fantastic people. It's been really, really high-impact work and super meaningful.
(05:11):
And then of course I run a podcast myself called A Matter of Degrees with Katherine Wilkinson. We tell really hopeful stories for the climate curious. We have a lot of women and people of color on our show, and it's a narrated show, so it's highly edited, really fun, folks really love it. So I would highly recommend people check out A Matter Of Degrees, the podcast, and then I go around talking to people like you, which is super fun too. So I do too many things, but it's all high impact and really fun. And the thing about activism is you make a lot of friends along the way, and that's probably some of the most fun parts of it, is getting to hang out with all these cool people who are just super amazing and so committed to making progress on climate.
Jason Jacobs (05:49):
What motivated you to do climate work in the first place? And even before that, what was your journey to care?
Leah Stokes (05:56):
Yeah, that's a great question and it's because I'm a researcher, it's the kind of thing we like to ask in a more systematic way. In general, why do people come to care about these issues? And there's different theories about that. I think direct experience in nature is one that comes out in the research. And you mentioned summer camp. I went to summer camp. People who spend a lot of time in nature, maybe that's a reason why we come to care. I'm from Canada. My dad grew up in this national park, basically it's called Algonquin Park. He grew up at a time when it was not commercial. He was not a wealthy person, and there were still indigenous people living in the community sort of hunting and fishing. It was a very different time. And when he had his kids, he also wanted us to go to this place.
(06:40):
And so we still go there every summer and we have a very, I would say, close connection with an ecosystem. And that really for me is a big part of the motivation for my work to protect people in places. So that's probably why I care on a macro sense. In terms of how I found my way to climate, I tell this story a lot. When I was a high school student I had the best teacher of geography and he introduced climate change in probably my grade 11 class, or maybe it was grade 10, and this was in the late '90s. And he introduced climate change as a debate. He said that, "We didn't really know if it was real, correlation is not causation. And how did we know that just because greenhouse gases were going up in the atmosphere that climate change was happening?"
(07:24):
So it's fascinating to me that that was the first time I heard about this. And I think for so many people they probably heard about it in a denial frame because keep in mind that the fossil fuel industry was extremely mobilized in the late 1990s, funding denial groups like the Global Climate Coalition and spreading this misinformation into schools. So it's funny that that's my first exposure to climate change. When I was an undergrad, I started an energy conservation campaign with my now husband a long time ago, like 20 years ago. And what we tried to do was get people to save energy, and it was a research study where we put these energy meters in buildings to understand how much energy they were saving. We surveyed people and people got super excited about turning off lights. Even there was these elevators that had lights in them, bizarrely, I don't know why. And they would turn off lights in the elevator in the bathroom when people were peeing, and it was really, they were excited.
(08:16):
So, that was really fun. We saved a lot of energy, like 12% of building use just from these behavior change things. But what I came to the end of it was thinking that it's great to ask individual people to make behavior changes. And I had been studying psychology at that time, so that was kind of the mode of thinking about-
Jason Jacobs (08:33):
Well, you really have done it all.
Leah Stokes (08:34):
Yeah, I've done a lot. And been all over the place. Maybe that's another way of saying it. I do little here, a little there. I just thought, "This is not a big enough lever. I can't just save 12% of energy and get some people to turn off the lights and think it's going to stop climate change." And think about that, that time there was this thing, I think it was called zero hour, forgive me if I'm wrong, but basically everybody would turn off the lights at the same time in the same year in the same place.
(09:01):
So the big tower in Toronto, the CN Tower would go dark and everybody would turn off their lights. And this is sort of when Al Gore was out there with an inconvenient truth and we were all changing our light bulbs and turning off the lights and we were all doing this. And at a certain point you have to stop and think, "Wait, is turning off my light for five minutes during a certain time going to save the planet and stop climate change?" No, probably not. And so that's really where I started working in politics and policy and feeling like that's the biggest lever out there. I got to put all my energy towards that.
Jason Jacobs (09:32):
Can you talk a little, and you just touched on it, but how your theory of change has evolved from when you first started doing this work to today?
Leah Stokes (09:40):
I think that individuals can do things. I'm an individual, I do things. But the narrative around individual behavior change, especially ones that are repeated like recycling, turning off the lights, composting, riding your bike, these are all super cool things and I think we should do them, and I do do them myself. But they're repeated. You got to do them again and again. They're not infrastructure changes is what I would say. And we actually have to make structural changes to society if we want to get rid of carbon pollution. Every one of us was born into a society that just belches out carbon pollution every minute that it operates. That's not our fault, it's not our decision, it's not our responsibility in some sense, but it is our responsibility to try to change the world, change the structure of society so that when we die, the next people who are born don't have to be born into that system too.
(10:31):
And if you just turn off the lights, think about it, is that going to change the system so that the next person born doesn't have to deal with carbon pollution? No. But what if you, for example, put an HVAC, you changed your HVAC, your heating and cooling system into a heat pump? Well, when you sell your house, the person who gets to move in with their baby, they get to move into a house that doesn't run on fossil gas for their heating and cooling. If you change your induction stove, that makes that change. And to some extent, if you get an E-bike or even just a normal bicycle, or a car, an electric vehicle, you can sell that car to somebody else. It operates for like 20 years. These are really structural changes. They're infrastructure changes that lock in carbon reductions. And so I think that there's things that we as individuals can do, but I really think we have to push towards structural change in our own daily lives. And then work together with others through organizations to create structural changes through politics and policy.
(11:27):
So the most impactful thing I've ever done is not composting, though I love composting or riding my bike, though I love riding my bike. The most impactful thing I've ever done is join with Evergreen action and Rewiring America to try to get massive billions of dollars through the federal government to help people get heat pumps in their homes, to help people get electric vehicles, to make electric utilities clean up the grid. Get us to 80% clean by 2030 and a 100% clean by 2035 through tax credits and other incentives. These structural changes, these policy changes are massive levers, and they're really hard ones to pull. Do not get me wrong, Lord knows, I thought we weren't going to manage to yank that lever down over the last couple years. But that persistence, working in concert with so many groups like the Sunrise movement, like the League of Conservation Voters, like the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, working with others in an organization, that's the way you can have the biggest bang for the buck.
(12:23):
So that's what I mean by structural change. It doesn't have to mean you can't do things as an individual, but it's trying to move people away from a sort of guilt behavior change repeated action. And I'll say one other thing, which is my theory of change, which is I am a "demand side person." What does this mean? First of all, I hate that term, we need to come up with a better one. But the idea is that I started to realize much like Rewiring America with Saul Griffith and Ari Matusiak and Alex Laskey realizing the same thing. That there are all these machines in society that eat carbon, they eat fossil fuels every day. They just take that stuff and turn it into invisible air and heat up the planet. And so it's hard to see that because they're stuck in our basements and they're in our driveways, but they're everywhere. In our garages with things like lawn mowers. In our backyards, barbecues. Think about all the fossil fuel machines. To say nothing of the power plants and the pipelines and all the other things that we sometimes don't think about or see.
(13:18):
We have got to turn all those machines into electric machines. Because once they run on electricity, we can use a 100% clean electricity through wind and solar, hydropower, even nuclear, to fuel those machines. And that way we have clean electricity and clean machines running what we would call electrification. And when we think about that pathway, what we can do is we can clean up three quarters of our carbon pollution. Why? Because a quarter of the carbon pollution comes from electricity. Another quarter comes from transportation, which we can fix with trains and E-bikes and electric vehicles and electric trucks. So we can clean up that one, a lot of it. And then we can do buildings with heat pumps and induction stoves and other heat pump, hot water heaters. And then we can even do about half of heavy industry through electrification. And that buildings and industry wedge, that's another quarter.
(14:09):
So that gets us three quarters of the climate solution. So I really started to think about let's crush demand for fossil fuels by getting electric machines in the world as fast as possible, and by pushing utilities to get clean electricity to run all those machines. So the pathway that I really think about for the lion's share of the change, not everything, there's still agriculture, there's still other things for people to work on, but three quarters of the solution can be made with clean electricity plus electrification.
Jason Jacobs (14:38):
Well that's very helpful. I want to come back to something that you said earlier about what drives you is protecting people and places. For me, when I think about protecting people and places, there's two different lenses. One is conservation, so biodiversity laws and protecting the natural environment. The other lens though is if you truly want to protect people and places we need to decarbonize and in order to decarbonize, we need to build stuff and in order to build stuff, are we digging up black and brown neighborhoods without their consent and is it causing environmental justice issues and is it polluting the local rivers and things like that? So is that tension between conservation and decarbonization real? And how do you think about it?
Leah Stokes (15:27):
I have a colleague at UC Santa Barbara named Eric Smith, lovely, lovely scholar. He is probably writing his next book on this subject. And since he has such a common name, he goes by Eric, R-A-N, that's his middle initials. I think that there are some tension points of course, but I would really point people to the work of Rebecca Solnit. And she wrote an amazing book called, The Faraway Nearby. I've read many of her books, but this one is probably my favorite. And she really talks about how activism and the work that we do is about trying to make things that are distant and hard to see, that are far away, feel more present and nearby and visible. And when we think about fossil fuel extraction and pollution, it is invisible. It's often distant, not always of course, but for many people it's not happening in their backyards.
(16:14):
And when we burn those fossil fuels in our car or our homes, it disappears into thin air. It's hard to see it. We know now with air pollution monitors, if we stick one in our kitchen, we can start to see that, "Oh my gosh, my gas stove is leaking even when it's turned off. It's putting out carcinogens like benzene and formaldehyde. And when I turn it on, when I use it's putting out such insane levels of air pollution that, believe it or not, it's going to violate EPA standards for a safe workplace." So people are really starting to see things that are invisible, which is dirty pollution in their own air, in their own kitchen, just by doing something so simple as cooking dinner. That little microcosm of pollution in our homes from cooking a meal on a gas stove, multiply that times a billion because that's happening all over the place.
(17:02):
And it's disproportionately happening in black communities and communities of color to black and brown bodies. So people like Rev Yearwood at the Hip Hop Caucus have done a lot of work to help people think about the ways that pollution is being put into literally black and brown people's bodies through higher rates of cancer, asthma, other diseases. Because people are living in extraction communities because that was forced upon them. And they are in highly polluting neighborhoods where, for example, trucks are running through on routes. This is why environmental justice work, people like Bob Bullard show us all the time that communities of color are on the front lines of pollution and it's really often against their will, that this was not a choice that was imposed on them.
(17:48):
So, that stuff can feel invisible to a lot of us. We don't see pollution, it disappears and it can feel distant. If we're not living in a coal mining community where people have black lung, how do we know that that's a big side effect from fossil fuel extraction? So we have to get really clear eye about the costs of the current system. And then I was just talking about the pollution and extraction and health costs in that statement. I didn't even start to talk about hurricanes and floods and drought and all the climate costs, which are also insane and also imposed disproportionately on communities of color in poor communities globally, and of course also in the United States. So the cost of the current system in terms of people and places in terms of health climate, and by the way, the economic costs of the fossil fuel system, We think about the volatility of people just trying to pay their gas bills so that they can drive to work.
(18:44):
Putin decides to invade a peaceful country like Ukraine, and boom, it's total chaos at the pump. And that hits so many people really hard in terms of their monthly budgets. That is really terrible. When you electrify your car, it costs about a dollar a gallon to operate. It's a very stable price. You start to save money from the very first month you drive that car off the lot according to energy innovation. When you get a heat pump, it's stable month to month and it saves you money. Rewiring America says, "That if people adopt all these clean electric technologies that the Inflation reduction Act are going to make more affordable, they can actually save $1,800 a year in terms of their operating costs, their energy costs, and they can do that every single year." So what we're trying to do is save people money, save their health, and make sure that we have a stable climate to function in.
(19:32):
So, that's what we're talking about with the current system. It's really bad. It can feel hidden and far away, but it's happening all the time. It's happening primarily to low income folks and communities of color who are on the frontline of pollution on the front lines of the climate crisis. We cannot accept this system. This system is expensive, it's dangerous, and it's dirty. So what we have to do is build the possible. And the Inflation Reduction Act, all the good parts of it, they are really pointing in that direction. They're saying, "Let's build this stuff in the United States. Let's do it with good paying jobs. Let's build heat pumps and electric vehicles and solar panels here. Let's install them at a rapid pace. Let's give people money to put them on their roofs, whether they're low income or wealthy folks, let's get them batteries and EVs."
(20:19):
This is going to be really transformative, not just helping people clean up their pollution in their own homes through electrification, but doing it at the society level. There will be moments where we're talking about a transmission line going through a community, going through a wilderness area that's going to be controversial. There's going to be moments where we're fighting over wind projects and solar projects in places that people really value and want to conserve. And we should think carefully about where we want to put these projects. But we should also think very carefully about the costs of delay. Delay imposes pollution on people, particularly black and brown people in this country.
(20:58):
And so when we oppose in a kind of what we would say, nimby, not in my backyard way clean energy projects, what we're actually doing is locking in the current polluting system for longer and making people sicker for longer and destabilizing the planet and making people have to pay more money for electricity for longer. So we got to be clear about the costs of delay and we really as a movement have to get really focused on moving clean energy infrastructure as fast as we possibly can.
Jason Jacobs (21:27):
This next one is a two-parter, and maybe it's kind of a weird one because it's not what is or facts or stats, it's about feelings. But how do you feel about the role of fossil fuels historically, and how do you feel about the role of fossil fuels looking forward? And then same question for the fossil fuel companies.
Leah Stokes (21:46):
Okay, well I'll start with the companies because that's easier. I'm angry. A small group of mostly white men, who are now old, maybe they weren't at the time, made a decision to lie about climate science, to attack climate scientists like James Hansen and Michael Mann, harass them really to make it so that when I first learned about climate change in high school, my brilliant teacher told me it probably wasn't real. I'm angry that that denial campaign, that systematic denial campaign from fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil, as Naomi Oreskes and Jeffrey Supran have documented from a lot of electric utilities as myself and one of my grad students, Emily Williams, as well as Sydney Bartone and Emma Swanson, former undergrads. We just published a paper which looked at what electric utilities knew about climate change and their role in climate denial, doubt, and delay.
(22:39):
This was a concerted campaign by a small group of people to hoodwink the world, hoodwink the American people. And the costs of this campaign are enormous. We can think about the tobacco campaign to say that cigarettes didn't cause cancer. It's a very similar playbook as Naomi Oreskes has shown in her book with Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt. What they said was that it wasn't real and people kept smoking cigarettes, they got cancer, they died. Multiply that times, I don't even know what, a million in terms of what the denial campaign on climate change has done to people. Think about what's happening in Pakistan right now where something like a third of the country is underwater. So many people have been displaced, lost their lives, their homes, lost their livelihoods. It's just terrible. And that's just one place and one moment of time.
(23:30):
The denial campaign was about a small group of people protecting profits for themselves, protecting their own, I don't know, jobs and money. And they did it at the expense of humankind really and all living beings on this planet. It is so immoral. It continues to this day. We had the head of the World Bank on a stage recently at Climate Week in New York saying to a New York Times reporter, David Gillis, that he didn't know if climate change was real, that he couldn't speak to it. He wasn't a scientist. That is insane that we have the head of the World Bank doing that in the year of our Lord 2022. So I'm very angry, I would say. And I think more people need to be angry. I think more people need to understand that when they're worried about their personal carbon footprint, that BP invented that concept of a carbon footprint and it kept us all distracted and divided and saying, "Oh, you can't be a climate activist. You should feel guilty."
(24:26):
Bill McKibben says that, "Hypocrisy is the price of entry to this movement." And I couldn't agree more. We're not asking for pure people. The climate movement should not be about that and it's never been about that. That has been a narrative pushed by the fossil fuel industry and electric utilities to keep us divided and focused on small potato stuff, rather than the structural changes in society, which is to stop fossil fuel companies from extracting, stop utilities from keeping open coal plants that poison us and destabilize the planet. And building, I mean, 220 proposed gas plants right now. That's what we're talking about. That's the stakes. So I'm very angry about those things, and that's the feeling that I have.
Jason Jacobs (25:06):
Looking backwards. What about looking forward for those fossil fuel companies before we get to the fossil fuels?
Leah Stokes (25:11):
I just want to point out that I said it was a small group of people who made those decisions. I'm talking about executives and leadership. I'm not talking about everyday workers. Everyday workers were trying to put food on the table for their families. They were trying to provide energy for their neighbors. People sacrificed their bodies, quite frankly, to the fossil fuel industry. We're talking about workers who have black lung disease, who got cancer. There's been really, really big costs for fossil fuel workers. And when these companies went bankrupt during the economic crisis of the Trump era, they actually laid off massive amounts of workers in the fossil fuel industry. There were companies that went bankrupt, they gave golden parachutes to their own executives and raided the pensions of workers.
(25:55):
Alexis Goldstein, who's now in the Biden administration, but was a reporter before that, did a lot of work on this. And the CARES Act for example, which was the bailout during the economic crisis, during the pandemic, that policy was so much more targeted towards lining the pockets of executives than it was about protecting fossil fuel workers and their pensions and their livelihoods.
(26:17):
So, I think what the Biden administration is doing right now where they're centering workers, they're thinking about, for example, program like 48C, which I know that sounds very boring, but basically it's a program to help bring manufacturing jobs to historically extractive communities, so places with coal mines for example. Making sure that those communities don't get hollowed out, that there are good paying jobs, there are healthier jobs to people, that there are jobs that could be unionized and good paying. That's what we need to do. This is not about leaving behind the workers, it's really about making sure that we can pass policy that protects workers. And I'll tell you, the executives of the fossil fuel industry, they don't want us to do that. They want us to do nothing, to just continue along and then let the industry collapse and put all that weight on the shoulders of workers. And that's wrong.
(27:05):
So, I'm so thrilled to see the IBW for example, be in such close partnership with the Biden administration. And I think that the Inflation Reduction Act is going to be totally transformative when it comes to American workers in this country creating good, paying, hopefully unionized jobs in the clean energy industries of the future. And that's what I'm hopeful for the industry. I really want there to be a transition that protects people.
Jason Jacobs (27:29):
We're going to take a short break so our partner Yin can talk about the MCJ membership option.
Yin Lu (27:35):
Hey folks, Yin here, our partner at MCJ Collective. Want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019, have since then grown to 2<000 members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and perspectives. And while those perspectives are different, what we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(28:04):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams I've met, nonprofits have been established, a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. So whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and then click on the members' tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Jason Jacobs (28:37):
Back to the show. And what do you see as the role of fossil fuels looking forward and what do you see as the role of fossil fuel companies in the clean energy transition?
Leah Stokes (28:47):
My view on fossil fuels is that we have to keep them in the ground, not because of some ideology or belief or whatever, because of science, what scientists tell us. There's been papers dating back several years now. Basically the title is, Committed Emissions from Existing Infrastructure Jeopardizes 1.5 Degrees Target. Okay, what does this mean? Why did I basically memorize the title of a boring academic paper? It basically says we cannot build any new fossil fuel infrastructure and limit warming to 1.5 degrees. The fossil fuel infrastructure we already have, pipelines and power plants, and oil wells, fracking operations, even things like our furnace in our basement, our car in our driveway. All of that infrastructure, if it keeps going along for its useful life until it's fully depreciated and broken, it will belch out too much carbon to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.
(29:43):
So if we build a new fossil fuel machine, like a new gas-powered car or a new gas-powered plant, either that plant has to stop operating, or that car needs to be retired before it dies, which is a waste of all those resources and money, quite frankly, because it won't be fully depreciated. Or it's going to keep belching out carbon pollution past the time that it's safe and we will blow past our carbon pollution reduction targets and destabilize the planet even more with really deadly consequences.
(30:15):
So, think about it, we're in the year 2022 and we've got 220 about proposed gas plants for the electricity system in this country right now, companies like the Tennessee Valley Authority, Duke Energy, all these companies are saying, "We want to build massive amounts of new gas." Okay, well, how long does a power plant operate? Generally 40, 50 years. Some coal plants operated for 75 years, just to be clear. So these things can last a long time. How many years are there? These are some simple math questions between now, 2022 and 2050 when we're supposed to put out no more carbon pollution? Well, less than 28 years. That is not a lot of time for a power plant to operate.
(31:02):
And so either these companies would be neglecting the climate targets when they say, "Oh, we're going to be net zero." All these utilities say, "We're going to be net zero by 2050." Or they're going to make terrible financial decisions and stick rate payers who can't leave and buy electricity from some other company with the bill. And with Sierra Club I've recently wrote this report and we're writing a new version of it, which is going to be out maybe when this podcast's out. It's called The Dirty Truth about Electric Utilities and it's about their plans. And what we show is that, yeah, they make these sort of greenwashing plans that they're going to be carbon neutral by 2050 and their investments are not in line with that at all.
(31:42):
So that's what I think about fossil fuels. We got to stop doing this. I think what the UN Secretary General said recently, which is that, "New fossil fuel projects are moral and economic madness. It makes no sense to keep investing in a technology that isn't going to be around for the operating lifetime of the project. That's really just wasting money. It's burning it, not just burning the planet, but burning the cash too,"
Jason Jacobs (32:03):
In order to transition, on the one hand, as you said, it can be a head fake to talk about personal responsibility. And so I'm just curious if you really want to bring about the systems and infrastructure change, is it more about winning hearts and minds of the populous or is it about changing the system in visibly under the hood so that the populous just goes about their daily lives as they have been, but the system belches less carbon and other greenhouse gases?
Leah Stokes (32:31):
Well, you've asked a very big political science question that probably wasn't intentional on your part, but this is the question as old as time and the discipline of political science. Is it public opinion and what people think that shifts policy, or does policy shift and then that changes public opinion? There's a book called Follow the Leader by Gabe Lenz, the UC Berkeley professor, which basically argues that people tend to follow the leaders. So if you've got Trump out there being really racist, that's going to make his base more racist. You have to remember that these politicians have massive megaphones and they tend to influence what their co-partisans think. So if Democrats start saying, "Climate change is terrible, we need to do something about, it's this big deal," we should expect that every day Democrats start to worry about that more, start to think about that more, et cetera.
(33:15):
So when we ask the question of why did climate change get polarized, both in the public opinion area and the elite area, what I think and what my colleague Matto Mildenberger says as well in his research is that first fossil fuel companies, especially around Citizens United, but even before that started to put massive amounts of money into the political system. This is what Senator White House also thinks. They basically bought and paid for the Republican party at the elite level. So we're talking about congressional representatives, senators, et cetera. This is why we basically can't get these people to vote for any climate legislation.
(33:49):
Then these folks start saying a lot of climate denial. There's amazing work by Justin Farrell where he takes basically denial documents from the industry, the fossil fuel industry, exact words, and then he analyzes speeches on the floor of Congress, the president's speeches and the media. What he finds is that these denial documents, climate denial documents from the industry, exact language, like verbatim, we're talking plagiarism here, ends up in the speeches of the president, in the news media, in speeches on the floor of the Congress.
(34:22):
And so, what we're seeing is that the industry is creating a denial campaign. They're creating content, they're putting money into the kinds of politicians they want to see elected. They're playing in primaries as well to select what kind of Republican gets elected. This is something I write about in my book, Short Circuiting Policy. And then they're getting those people to parrot their lies. When they start parroting those lies. When people start watching television like Fox News and they start hearing about climate denial, that changes what everyday people think as well. There's amazing research by some political scientists, David Broockman and Josh Kalla, where they paid people to stop watching Fox News and start watching another channel.
(34:59):
They find massive changes in people's attitudes and beliefs. We should not underestimate how radicalizing these cable news channels can be. And on climate change, they're like a megaphone for denial. I'm sure people listening have family members that they've lost to Fox News, and that's like not their imagination. And we've lost some people into climate denial because of these megaphones of these politicians and media platforms. So, that's what's happening.
(35:26):
Now, in terms of when we get the Inflation Reduction Act into the world in implementation, what's going to change? Well, the interesting thing is, the fossil fuel industry wants to tell us a story that this is all about sacrifice and it'll be so expensive and we won't be able to eat hamburgers or drive to work. It'll be like we'll just sit in our basement cold, and I don't know what, stare at the wall. That's what dealing with climate change is.
(35:48):
Well, that's bullshit, as we might say, because think about what I'm talking about. I'm talking about abundance. I'm saying, "You want a car? You can have a car. In fact, you want a truck, F-150, that's like the best selling car or truck in this country. You can have one that's electric. And not only is it as cool as the old one, it's cooler because it's cheaper to operate and it has more torque and drive." And I don't care about cars, but people who care about cars would know it's like a fancier, cooler car for car people. So hey, this is actually about abundance. I have an electric vehicle. It is way cooler and cheaper to operate than my old car. And I've camped in it, I can sleep in it. I can charge my phone in it without using really expensive gasoline to charge it, but has basically a computer in it. It's a really cool car. And I don't even like cars.
(36:37):
I have an E-bike. I love my E-bike. It's cooler than a normal bikes, sorry normal bikes, but I can go up hills, I can bike around, I can have fun. If you have a heat pump, it can cool your home and heat your home at the same time. It takes no energy to do that. It's really cheap to operate. It's like a magical machine that stops putting dirty pollution in your home just by heating it. The things we're talking about are not about sacrifice, they're actually about abundance. They're about creating a cooler, more exciting and better future.
(37:07):
So, what I think is that when people start to get these rebates and these tax credits that they can put solar in their roof and a battery in their garage and then the lights go out and boom, they still have electricity. They have a EV in their driveway, and once we get vehicle to grid going, they can literally back up their own house if there are blackouts. That's something people are going to like more. The electric future, the clean electricity future is cleaner air in our homes, in our communities. It's less expensive energy bills, it's better jobs here in the United States and cleaner industries. This is a really amazing future that we're going towards. We are not asking people to sacrifice.
(37:47):
And when it comes to the hamburgers and things like that, probably people can still eat some burgers. I'm not saying you can never eat a burger. And then we've got really cool innovation in sort of this alternatives to meats as well. Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat. There's going to be really interesting things that are going to happen where we're going to figure out ways to maintain the same life that we have today in a lot of ways, but without causing as much harm to people, to animals, to the planet. This is really what we're talking about. So, that tends to be the way that I think about it.
Jason Jacobs (38:22):
Are we in an emergency?
Leah Stokes (38:23):
Yes, I think it's an emergency. I woke up this morning and my husband said, "There's going to be the hurricane that just devastated Puerto Rico, Hurricane Fiona that knocked the same island that is part of the United States completely out of power. Killed I'm sure many people. He's going to continue to kill people because not having electricity is a life or death situation." This is what happened to Puerto Rico with Hurricane Maria just a few years ago, and it's going to keep happening. That hurricane is about to hit Eastern Canada where my husband is from. It's probably going to be the worst hurricane in Canadian history. That's just today.
(38:56):
Every single day people are facing emergencies. The people in Pakistan who have lost their homes, their communities, their family members to these devastating floods. The people in Europe who are facing rivers that now no longer have any water in them where they're finding artifacts in the bottom of the river because the river doesn't exist anymore. Think about the heat waves that baked Europe this summer. Think about the deadly fires that hit the Western United States, or the drought that more than 60 million Americans are under. It's the worst drought in a millennium, in a 1,000 years. It's a mega drought. That's so devastating. And since I live in Southern California where this drought is happening, I see its impacts in my garden. I see its impacts on wildlife. Just talking to a graduate student yesterday, she told me that all of her tomatoes have been eaten by the squirrels. And I said, "Well, they probably need the water." Normally they don't eat all their tomatoes, but this year they did.
(39:50):
We start to see these little signs that wildlife is stressed, that people and communities are stressed. It's just going to get worse and worse. And so this is only what 1.2 degrees of warming looks like. We're almost about 1.2 degrees centigrade of warming. What does 1.3, or 1.4, or 1.5, or two degrees look like? And the carbon-based energy system that we've been talking about, this infrastructure that we're talking about needing to change, it's a slow moving system. It's like a giant ship. You can't turn it around overnight. You got to plan. If I want to be in a different location a week from now, I got to start to turn the ship. I got to start to reorient it because it's going to take a long time to get that ship turned around and headed in a new direction.
(40:33):
The infrastructure's very sticky. We sometimes call that carbon lock in. So we have to be making decisions every day in our personal lives, politically, the utilities to be making better decisions every day. Fossil fuel companies, ideally to someday make a better decision, everybody needs to start moving this ship in a better direction. Because every time a new fossil fuel machine is installed, I like to say a fairy dies. If you put a new gas stove in your house, there's a dead fairy. And Katherine says that if you turn the stove, Katharine Wilkinson, my co-host on A Matter of Degrees. "If you turn the stove on, it goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. That's the sound of a dead fairy." So every single time we do that, we are locking in carbon pollution.
(41:15):
So we got to stop making those decisions. We got to get on a different path and it has to start today, it has to continue tomorrow. And there's not a lot of time left between now and 2030 to change these decisions. So yes, it is an emergency. There's no time left to waste. Every decision that people make, whether it's buying a car, getting a stove, who they vote for in an election, if they get involved in door knocking or not, if they give money or not to help get a climate champion elected, rather than a climate denier. All this stuff really, really matters.
Jason Jacobs (41:46):
I feel like a lot of this discussion has centered around the United States. How do you think about the role of the U.S. and the role of the West in general versus the rest of the world?
Leah Stokes (41:55):
In political science I'm called an Americanist, which is hilarious, because I'm actually Canadian by birth, and I do a lot of research on other countries too. But I'm in American politics. And of course, I've spent the last year working on the Inflation Reduction Act, or the last several years. And it wasn't called that until the last minute. So I spent a lot of time working on to build back better work. And I wrote a book about state electricity laws, so that's why I'm focused on the United States. I spent a lot of my research working on this stuff. But climate change is a global problem. It's affecting people over the planet. I was talking to Bill McKibben when the Inflation Reduction Act was poised to pass the Senate, and folks were upset because Manchin stuck some garbage stuff in there at the last minute, which was terrible, not good.
(42:38):
And there was a lot of opinions in the movement about, was it good enough? Were we sacrificing people? People were upset, understandably. And I was talking to Bill about this and he said, "When I'm in moments like this, I often think about how what we do in the United States is not only going to affect the United States, it's also going to affect the whole world." And there's a lot of poor people, communities of color all around the world who are counting on us to make sure that we act on climate. And I think that's very true. And not only does it matter in terms of like, "Okay, the United States does a bunch of stuff and we cut our carbon pollution, we meet our goal of cutting carbon pollution in half by 2030." Yeah, it's a global problem, there's carbon pollution everywhere.
(43:17):
Well guess what? Technology spills across borders. If we make solar panels cheaper, or we innovate them, or we make heat pumps cheaper, or we make an F-150 or whatever car in the United States that's electric, that doesn't just stay in America, it goes across borders. Greg Nemet wrote this book and it's about, how did solar get cheap? And he writes about how first it started in the United States, we innovated this new technology. It then went to Germany. Germany passed this law feed-in tariffs, where they in the 1990s and 2000s massively deployed quite expensive solar. Brought down the costs for the whole planet through innovation. Then China got into the game and started figuring out how to manufacture it in insane scale, brought down the costs even more. That didn't just stay in the United States, or Germany, or China. It went all the way around the world and all these countries acting has made solar cheaper for people in the United States to install and hopefully cheaper for people in South Africa to install too.
(44:18):
So, that is the vision here. What we do in the next few years, because the Inflation Reduction Act is going to change technology innovation. And that is going to not just do great things for the United States, it's going to do great things for the whole world by making clean energy even cheaper than it already is. And I just looked up this statistic from Greg Nemet's work. In the 1950s, if you wanted to run your house on solar for a month, okay, it would cost about $300,000 to do it. That'd be a fairly expensive electricity bill over the month. Today, if you want to run your house on electricity, guess how much it costs? I want you to guess, Jason.
Jason Jacobs (44:57):
Well, how big a house?
Leah Stokes (44:58):
The average house, we're talking about the average American household,
Jason Jacobs (44:59):
A $100.
Leah Stokes (45:02):
Only $30. Think about that. That's an order of magnitude of four that we've reduced it. I think so.
Jason Jacobs (45:08):
Keep in mind, I also live in Boston, so we have the New England winters that I was factoring in.
Leah Stokes (45:12):
That's funny. That's exactly. Actually it might be an order, yeah, it's four. That's just so crazy that we have managed to reduce the cost so dramatically and now it's quite affordable for people to run their home on solar. That's going to make it affordable for people all around the world. So, that's the transformative promise of what we're doing here in the United States. It's not just about cleaning up air pollution, stabilizing the planet, making good paying jobs. It's also about creating innovation that's going to help countries all around the world get on the same pathway as us. And that is the real ticket. That's the real secret to getting global greenhouse gas concentrations to finally start to fall.
Jason Jacobs (45:48):
Well, I know we're running out of time here. If it's okay, I have one final question and then just a quick speed round where you can do just one or two sentences each about things that we didn't cover that [inaudible 00:45:56]-
Leah Stokes (45:55):
I'm so good at speed round. You can just see from my very long seven minute answers. I'm just amazing at it.
Jason Jacobs (46:00):
No, it's just cause I know people are going to say, "Why didn't you ask her about?" So I just jot it down. It's like, "Well, what haven't we covered yet that we have to?" But the last question is just around GDP. So as you start to see in the U.S. the decoupling of continued GDP growth from a fall in emissions, what conclusions do you draw from that, if any?
Leah Stokes (46:19):
That's the whole game, my friend, decoupling. Yes, I love it. The problem has been that GDP and carbon pollution have marched in lockstep for like, I don't know, 150 years probably at this point, a long time. We made a lot of money. We figured out how to build our societies by digging up old dead plants from underground and burning them. And that was creating energy that wasn't as reliant on human beings. We didn't have to use people's physical labor as much. We could use energy stored underground. But it's interesting, because even in the early 1900s, Thomas Edison, really important person in electricity history, he actually started to say, "Well, what about wind and solar? Why are we using this old dead stuff? Like we're burning up our front fence in order to keep our home warm. That's dumb. We should start thinking about using natural forces like wind and solar."
(47:11):
These ideas are really very old, and that is where we need to go. We have to keep in some ways, in my view, maintaining standards of living, bringing people in poverty. There are so many people in poverty still on this planet. I think it might be two billion people. That might be the right number right now. A lot of people live in poverty, like living on a dollar or less a day. And we have to lift those people out of poverty. We have to give them more resources and we have to do it in a way that doesn't continue to rely on dirty fossil fuels that are expensive, that destabilize the planet and that poison people. So, that's really the ticket.
(47:46):
I do feel that in our own lives in the United States and in other developed countries, we have too much, to be honest. And I don't think we have too much in some kind of moralistic sense. I think that the amount that we have actually overwhelms us. That we spend a lot of time having to find our things, and manage our things, and deal with our things. It doesn't bring us joy. It leaves us feeling empty. People talk about this in terms of fast fashion, having less and building our society around meaning and purpose more than material things might actually be really good for us as people.
(48:21):
Because in my own life, being so involved in activism and doing all these jobs and running the podcast A Matter of Degrees, that's the most meaningful work that I do. It's not about buying things. It doesn't take a lot of energy to do this stuff. It doesn't have a big carbon footprint to run our podcast. And it has a huge impact and it's really meaningful and it connects people. And I think as religion has fallen aside for many people, not everybody, but for many people in our society, people don't have the same meaning and purpose. And sometimes they turn towards stuff for doing it.
(48:52):
And so I personally think that we want to keep. Having a thriving society we want people to have meaning and purpose, and that's really what GDP should be about. That people have health, that they have meaning and purpose, that they can live good meaningful lives with good paying jobs. That's what it's really about. Well, yeah, they should have a car if they need a car to get around and people should have the things that they need. But do we need as much as we currently need? Do we need growth to continue on this endless trajectory? Is GDP as a metric really the right one? I think people who ask those questions are onto something, and I'm sure many people in their daily lives can say this as well. That being said, we got to get people to a basic level first before we can have these airy fairy conversations. We got to get them up the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs before we can say these things.
Jason Jacobs (49:36):
Well, I know in the speed round we could do a whole episode on any one of these topics, but just quick pit the answers and then we'll let you go.
Leah Stokes (49:42):
All right.
Jason Jacobs (49:42):
I know given that portfolio of stuff, you have things to do.
Leah Stokes (49:45):
I do, yes.
Jason Jacobs (49:46):
But nuclear?
Leah Stokes (49:48):
I believe we should keep safe, existing nuclear plants open as long as possible. They provide carbon-free electricity, and without it's a lot harder to meet our carbon goals.
Jason Jacobs (49:57):
Advanced nuclear?
Leah Stokes (49:58):
It's interesting and promising. I don't know if it'll turn out or not. To be determined. There's a cool nonprofit called Good Energy that I encourage people to check out. Jessica Lovering works there.
Jason Jacobs (50:08):
She's been on the show.
Leah Stokes (50:08):
Oh, she works with me. We write papers together. She's sort of affiliated with my research lab. She's great, so check her out.
Jason Jacobs (50:13):
Offsets in carbon markets?
Leah Stokes (50:15):
Oh, great one. I think current offsets are BS. I think we have to develop new offsets that are meaningful. Rewiring America is talking about developing offsets that rather than buying a tree that doesn't stay in the forest and burns down and is terrible, why not help buy a piece of a heat pump for a low-income family in Boston that really offsets carbon pollution? That's exciting. I think negative carbon removal and the work that companies like Stripe are doing is really exciting too. But scaling that will be hard. So we need real offsets, not fake ones.
Jason Jacobs (50:45):
You stole my next one, which is going to be carbon removal. So I'll skip that one and jump to price on carbon?
Leah Stokes (50:51):
I don't think that that is the ticket. I think it'll piss a lot of people off and it won't bring down carbon pollution because demand for fossil fuels is inelastic, meaning it's really, really hard to move. So I think that that's something we do later on after we've decoupled carbon from everything we do in society so that the little last pieces easier to get.
Jason Jacobs (51:10):
Natural gas, bridge or core staple of clean energy future?
Leah Stokes (51:15):
Neither. Natural gas is not, first of all-
Jason Jacobs (51:18):
You shouldn't just say natural gas and then not led the witness.
Leah Stokes (51:21):
You should have said fossil gas to start. I mean, I'm going to criticize that whole question. Fossil gas is dangerous, is a bridge to nowhere, we got to stop that stuff as soon as possible. Get yourself an induction stove. Your lungs and your children's lungs will thank you.
Jason Jacobs (51:34):
This is not part of the speed round. Speed round is over. Last question. Are you an optimist?
Leah Stokes (51:38):
I think I am. I think I'm a very optimist. People tell us that our podcast, A Matter of Degrees is very optimistic. It makes them feel hopeful.
Jason Jacobs (51:44):
But are you an optimist about this?
Leah Stokes (51:45):
Yeah, I am. I think my activism makes me an optimist. And I'd say to anybody, and I know your listeners are so engaged, love that about folks, get involved. It'll make you feel better. That's something that Kathryn Hayo says too, "If you doom scroll, you will feel doom. If you act, you will feel hopeful."
Jason Jacobs (52:01):
Last question is just, speak to listeners for a moment. What parting words you want them to hear?
Leah Stokes (52:05):
I would say everybody can get involved. So, we just launched season three of our podcast, A Matter of Degrees, and we are doing a mini-series and it's about, what can I do? I know those are things that people on your listenership really care about. Doing one on the personal, the professional, and the political. And I would just say I would encourage people to tune into that and think about how in their daily lives they can get involved. "Because we need a billion climate activists," somebody has said. And we need everybody involved. We need people to make this their career. And we need fossil view workers and we need tech people and we need stay-at-home moms and we need young kids and we need everybody.
(52:42):
So, I just really think people should try to figure out their own role, which they're obviously doing because they're on the climate journey with you. And join an organization and get involved because your work really does matter. And even if you don't see the impact, that doesn't mean it's not having an impact. Social change can be really circuitous, it can come in indirect ways. So don't feel like just because you didn't see X cause Y, it doesn't matter. Your work does matter, and stay in the fight.
Jason Jacobs (53:09):
Okay, Leah, well you do such important work that we've kept you from it enough. So, go get back to work and thanks for everything you do and for coming on on the show.
Leah Stokes (53:17):
Thanks so much for having me on.
Jason Jacobs (53:20):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (53:23):
At MCJ Collective we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity. To do this we focus on three main pillars, content like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change, and our member community to bring people together as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (53:45):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at dub dub dub.mcjcollective.com. And if you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter, @mcjpod.
Cody Simms (54:00):
Thanks, and see you next episode.
