Investigative Journalism and the New Climate Creator Movement

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May 29

Michael Thomas is making a name for himself in independent investigative climate journalism. One of his earliest pieces saw him immerse himself in dozens of Facebook groups, organized around opposing local clean energy legislation. He used that exploration to pen a series on climate misinformation, which can be found on his newsletter at distilled.earth, and has recently started creating content on YouTube. He also created Carbon Switch, a Wirecutter-like guide to help people navigate home electrification, which he donated to Rewiring America.

Michael is also a co-founder of Campfire Labs, a tech-focused content marketing agency that donates 50% of its profits to climate action. This has included a significant contribution to Climate Changemakers, a climate action platform co-founded by Cody in 2020.

We started by discussing Michael's motivations for starting his investigative journalism efforts and his climate journey. We then delved into the stories he's written and the investigations he's done. Michael also shared his advice for anyone feeling the itch to get started with something that they might not have prior experience in. Spoiler alert: involves a strong willingness to embrace and learn from failure.

At MCJ, none of us had prior climate experience, but we believe that as long as you're willing to dive in and do the work, there's so much impactful progress to be made in the climate space. We're seeing more and more people like Michael being called into action every day.

Get connected:
Michael Thomas Twitter
Cody Simms
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 April 26, 2023.

In this episode, we cover:

[03:24]: Michael's background and early journalism career
[06:16]: Moments that catalyzed his climate journey
[10:02]: His interest in home electrification and founding of Carbon Switch
[14:14]: Investigating the alarming health impacts of gas stoves
[17:35]: The origins of Campfire Labs and marketing climate tech companies
[20:49]: Rewiring America's acquisition of Carbon Switch
[25:09]: Takeaways from his immersion in clean energy opposition Facebook groups
[32:05]: Influencers in the clean energy opposition space and their misinformation playbooks
[37:52]: Clean energy misinformation in right wing cable news and links to big oil
[45:19]: How anxiety about mining is weaponized against clean energy
[49:11]: How collective action transformed Amsterdam into a bike-based beacon of hope
[54:24]: Michael's process for finding topics and publishing his writing
[57:10]: Potential legal ramifications and dealing with online harassment
[58:51]: How Michael funds his work, the generosity within the climate creator space, and advice for anyone wanting to jump in
[01:05:20]: The essential role of popular movements in shaping climate policy

Cody Simms (00:00:00):
Today's guest on the My Climate Journey Podcast is Michael Thomas, whom you may know from Twitter as @curious_founder. Recently, over the last nine months or so, Michael's emerged with a unique voice and style in independent investigative climate journalism. One of his earliest pieces saw him immerse himself in dozens of Facebook groups, organized around opposing local clean energy legislation. He used that exploration to pen a series of articles around climate misinformation, how it's organized, how these groups are funded, how they operate, and more, all of which can be found via his newsletter at distilled.earth. He's recently started exploring topics in video format as well via the YouTube channel at distilled-earth, which I highly recommend you check out. In addition to these recent pieces, Michael started a wire cutter like guide to help people navigate home electrification called Carbon Switch, which he recently donated to Rewiring America.
(00:01:00):
He's the co-founder of a tech-focused content marketing agency called Campfire Labs, which gives 50% of its annual profits to climate action, including a sizable gift in the past to Climate Changemakers, a climate action platform that I co-founded in 2020 together with a number of other MCJers. I'm, of course, very grateful to Michael for that.
(00:01:23):
To start us off, I wanted to get to know Michael better. I was interested to learn what motivated him to start his investigative journalism efforts in the first place and what kickstarted his own climate journey. We chat a bit about that and then dive into some of the specifics of the stories he's written and the investigations he's done. Then we chat some about what it's like to be an outsider, an independent content creator. Lastly, he shares his advice for anyone listening who's feeling a similar itch to get started with something that they might not have prior experience in. Spoiler alert, it involves a strong willingness to embrace and learn from failure.
(00:02:02):
I consider MCJ an outsider climate initiative, to some extent. None of us at MCJ had any prior climate experience before jumping in head first. Yet, what's exciting about this moment in time is seeing more and more and more people like Michael being called into action. As long as you're willing to dive in and do the work, there's so much impactful work to be done in the climate space. Every day there are more and more and more of us. With that, let's get going. But before we dive in ... I'm Cody Simms.
Yin Lu (00:02:37):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (00:02:39):
I'm Jason Jacobs. Welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (00:02:45):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:02:50):
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.
(00:03:03):
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Thomas (00:03:05):
Hey, Cody. Thanks for having me.
Cody Simms (00:03:07):
Most people, I think at this point, probably know you online, as you know @CuriousFounder on Twitter with an underscore in there, I think. A guy who posts these really provocative tweet threads about all sorts of different topics. You now run your own newsletter. You now have your own YouTube channel. The first question I have for you is how did this come about? Did you set out to be a journalist? Has that kind of been your MO in life, or is this a new thing for you?
Michael Thomas (00:03:35):
Some parts of it are new and other parts have honestly been something that I've been interested in all my life. Growing up as a kid, my heroes were all sports broadcasters and sports journalists. I grew up reading The Denver Post sports section every morning and watching Sports Center every night and wanted to be a sports broadcaster when I was older.
Cody Simms (00:04:03):
Who were the specific idols for you?
Michael Thomas (00:04:06):
Stuart Scott was one of my heroes for sure.
Cody Simms (00:04:09):
Rest in peace.
Michael Thomas (00:04:10):
Yeah. RIP. Then I joined the school newspaper. I've been interested in this stuff from a really early age, but then became less interested in sports as I got older and have really shifted to being interested in all kinds of things. I think that, for me, the core thing that's always been true in my career is that I just kind of follow my curiosity, hence the Twitter handle, I guess. I've just kind of followed my nose, try to learn as much as I can, and then I really enjoy sharing what I learn with people. That's evolved over the years in terms of formats. I started out just blogging back in 2015 and then wrote for some magazines like The Atlantic and Fast Company, and then started to dabble in video and YouTube. It's kind of evolved over the years.
Cody Simms (00:05:08):
It's hard to become just casually writing for the Atlantic and Fast Company, Michael. I think you were selling yourself a little short there. You earned your stripes there obviously, because you do good work.
Michael Thomas (00:05:18):
Well, I appreciate that. Yeah. Especially when I was just getting started, it was a lot of work to just learn the style. I didn't go to journalism school, dropped out of college after my first year. A lot of it is just kind of self-taught and learning on the internet and on YouTube. With regard to writing for publications, I just learned the format and learned what a successful article looks like and try to repeat that and write every day and just put in the hours to grow.
Cody Simms (00:05:53):
Then at some point, you obviously have married that with an interest or a curiosity, I guess, maybe toward climate change, toward how the world is dealing with climate change, how the world is in some cases fighting efforts to deal with climate change. Where did that part of your interest set come from?
Michael Thomas (00:06:15):
Initially, I became interested in climate as a real problem actually in a sort of strange experience. I was volunteering at a refugee camp for about three months in the summer of 2017. I was talking to an NGO worker at, I think, Red Cross. They were telling me how the refugee crisis is going to get much worse over time because of climate change. I just never really thought of that. They described all of these places where climate change will really force people out of their homes, they tend to be the most marginalized communities in the world. That's already causing a lot of migration and will cause even more. I really started to look at it from the perspective of refugees and all of the challenges that would come as we go into the next few decades as the world warms up.
(00:07:19):
Then in 2018, I think a lot of people that felt like this year where it was hard to look at anything but climate change. There was of course the major 1.5 C report from the IPCCC. There was all of the activism all around the world, young people like Greta protesting. I just started to read more about it. I read I think David Robert's summary of the IPCCC report in Vox. I read a lot of other analysis and just started to learn more and realized that this was really going to be the problem of our time and that I might have some way to contribute and could hopefully educate people on what I was learning.
Cody Simms (00:08:05):
Two big takeaways from me there, one is I continue to hold the opinion that it's these flashpoint moments that encourage people to jump into caring about climate change. You are one of many people who cite the 2017 IPCCC report. My partner, Jason, the creator of my Climate Journey podcast, that also was his flashpoint moment. There's quite a few other people who've come on the pod and mentioned Orange Day in San Francisco, that day in the fall of 2020 when the sky turned orange. That was another big flashpoint moment. It's interesting to kind of look at these catalyzing moments as points of inspiration.
(00:08:43):
Then the second observation I have is I think you're one of the best investigative reporters out there with respect to climate, because you dive into topics that people just are turning a blind eye toward, frankly. One of the other people I hold as one of the best investigative reporters in climate is Abrahm Lustgarten from ProPublica, who I first discovered in a piece he wrote for New York Times magazine about climate migration. Kind of a full loop there for you, from an interest perspective, which is also interesting to see that be a topic that pulled you into the movement in the first place.
Michael Thomas (00:09:20):
Yeah. Absolutely. I think those flashpoints are so important. I think my experience, in talking to friends and also interviewing people, is that they are often like a personal experience. Orange Day that you mentioned in SF, that's a really personal experience to see that the world is changing. It can be scary. I had my own kind of surge in interest or motivation in 2020 when there were all the wildfires in Colorado where I live. I think that it makes sense, people start to experience the impacts of climate change and are motivated to do something.
Cody Simms (00:10:02):
When you and I first met you were going down the deep end on home electrification. In fact, I think we first met, because I was exploring a retrofit of my home with a heat pump and everything ... A project I did end up doing, and frankly I'm still paying for today. I think I had found a website ... I know your partner and so I can't remember if she introduced us or if I literally found your website online and submitted something. Then I think we connected the dots thereafter. Either that or you replied to me on Twitter, I don't remember, but it felt serendipitous and random. That was your area of expertise at the time was home electrification, heat pumps. You were trying to compare data of different projects. How did that area become a focus for you?
Michael Thomas (00:10:52):
Yeah. That year that I described in 2020 when there was all these wildfires in Colorado and then we're at really the peak of the pandemic and stuck inside, I was just spending a lot of time online on my computer at home. I think I stumbled across, maybe it was Our World In Data page on the largest sources of emissions in the world and in the United States, and was shocked to learn that about 20% of emissions in the US come from our homes, if you take all the fossil fuels that we burn directly and then also indirectly in terms of the electricity that we use. The more that I learned about the causes of emissions and energy use within our homes and then also the potential solutions like heat pumps, I realized that it just seemed like a opportunity where educating people, raising awareness and making the process of decarbonizing a home would be impactful.
(00:12:00):
I started to Google things like heat pumps and furnaces and all of these things that I think someone would Google in their buyer's journey in getting a new furnace or a new water heater and realized that there was so much misleading or just outright false information out. There was plumbers or contractors or gas companies saying a natural gas furnace is the most environmentally friendly thing that you can do, not a heat pump. Then I also learned from just looking at some Google search data that there was millions of people searching for this stuff every year.
(00:12:38):
I came up with the idea of building something like a wire cutter for climate, specifically focused on electrification. The idea being that all these people are searching for best air conditioner and they might not know that they're about to replace a really inefficient air conditioner and have an opportunity to replace it with a heat pump that could also heat their home and hopefully save them a lot of energy and maybe money over the next 10 or 15 years. Kind of set out to build that in 2020 and worked on that through last summer.
Cody Simms (00:13:13):
That is what evolved eventually into Carbon Switch. Is that correct?
Michael Thomas (00:13:16):
Yeah. That's correct.
Cody Simms (00:13:18):
Started as an idea of we can actually help guide you through an installation sort of plan, but then it sounds like it kind of quickly evolved into more of an editorial product around just writing reviews and helping people make choices on their own. Is that accurate?
Michael Thomas (00:13:33):
Yeah, exactly. Basically, guides to heat pumps, heat pump hot water heaters, LED lights, insulation, all of these things where there's really big opportunities to save energy and replace a dirty fossil fuel appliance with a clean, electric alternative. Wrote both reviews of specific models, because that's often a challenge when people are searching for this stuff, trying to figure out what's the best cold climate heat pump, for example. Then also guides trying to figure out what questions you should be asking, how you should think about the trade-off of higher upfront costs versus better energy efficiency.
Cody Simms (00:14:14):
Then the work you did there, if I connect the dots correctly, sort of then led you into obviously looking at induction stoves and comparing those to gas stoves and then pulled you into the whole culture war that took off in that area a few months ago, as well. Anything that you kind of took away from that experience or that you want to share?
Michael Thomas (00:14:37):
Sure. While I was working on some of these guides, I started to look at induction and gas stoves. I'd heard from a lot of people that gas stoves don't really use that much energy. If you look at it compared to the rest of the energy use in a home, it's a small fraction. They're responsible, very, very small amount of emissions in total. If you look at the public health risks and just the higher rates of respiratory illness, there's really reason to think that we shouldn't be having gas stoves in our kitchens. I was a little bit skeptical of this when I read it. I just wasn't sure how big of the risk it'd be. Again, approached it from the perspective of a climate hawk looking at just emissions.
(00:15:29):
I bought a bunch of air quality monitors and put them all throughout our home, and then we used our gas stove for a month or two, and I just measured the nitrogen dioxide levels, which is really the pollutant that causes respiratory illness. Then I went and took that to an environmental epidemiologist, Josiah Coupler, who crunches these numbers for a living and much smarter on the topic than me and asked him to take a look. He told me that they were five times higher than the WHO guidelines of what's safe. He helped point me towards different studies and academic research.
(00:16:11):
I went very deep down the rabbit hole, I think read 30 studies on the health impacts of gas stoves. There was often studies that cited other studies. I had had to just go really deep. Came away with it just believing something very different than I did at the beginning. I went in skeptical and came out thinking these are like cigarettes. They are in our homes, the companies that sell them and the gas companies that sell the fuel know and have known since the seventies or eighties, if you look at public documents, that these things really harm our health and are causing a huge number of asthma cases. I think the latest data is something like 12% of childhood asthma in this country. Hundreds of thousands of children that are getting sick, because we have gas stoves that companies know are harmful and are actively lobbying to make sure that policymakers can't actually ban them or at least create incentives for better alternatives like an induction stove or electric stove.
Cody Simms (00:17:17):
We're going to get into some of the reporting you've done in more depth. Obviously, you just touched on one of the pieces that you did, but it feels like this common theme of your reporting is how it ties to local policy action. I want to spend a bunch of time on that. Before I do, I want to hit one more topic, which I'm trying to, I think, upfront established what I see as your bona fides as a climate renaissance man to some extent, Michael. The other area that you've dived deep on, I think over the last five or six years is you run a content marketing agency called Campfire Labs. As far as I understand, historically, that didn't have anything to do with climate that was you paying the bills. I think over the last year or so you've done some customer discovery work with climate tech companies on what they might need help from, from a content marketing perspective. I'm curious what you learned, what you heard.
Michael Thomas (00:18:17):
Yeah. We have just begun this ... This is a company that I started back in 2018. We started out just doing content marketing for tech companies like Stripe and Dropbox and Notion and really no climate angle at all. One of the things I did when I set up the company is pledge 50% of the profits to climate action and nonprofit advocacy groups. That was kind of part of how I started to get into climate and we've been able to give, I think latest number's, some mid hundreds of thousands of dollars to climate nonprofits including Climate Change Makers, which I know you helped start.
Cody Simms (00:19:05):
Super grateful for your contribution there, obviously.
Michael Thomas (00:19:08):
Yeah. Then more recently we realized that we should be working with some of these growing climate tech companies. In 2018, there wasn't really as big of a market and it didn't seem like it made as much sense, but as you know, the market has completely changed, it's grown like crazy. We're just beginning to have some of those customer discovery conversations. I think we've had a dozen so far. I'm operationally not very involved in the business day to day. Our general manager, Hal, has been having some of those conversations.
(00:19:40):
I think the thing that he said that stood out to me is that everyone just agrees that telling the story is so important that they often have a technology that solves a very specific problem and it's hard to raise awareness for it or get people to understand why it's so important. You think about something like a heat pump, if you tell someone I'm working on a heat pump technology, they kind of look at you with glazed eyes, it's a bit boring. We're talking about HVAC and plumbing and stuff that's in people's boiler room. They don't think about it that much, but a lot of people say that the most impactful thing they can do on the marketing side is to try to just tell that story and put it in a larger context. We're hoping to be able to do that with some companies and excited to learn what kind of problems they have and where we can plug in.
Cody Simms (00:20:33):
Last question for you and then we'll dive into some of the explorations you've done on the investigative journalism side is Carbon Switch, again, the publication you started to help people make smart, climate-friendly choices in their home around home electrification and whatnot. You announced, I think at the end of last year, that you were acquired by Rewiring America. What has that been like?
Michael Thomas (00:20:55):
Yeah. Last fall I started to have some conversations with Rewiring America and realized there was a great opportunity to partner. Just kind of some context, I started in 2020 and wasn't really sure at the beginning whether I wanted it to be a for-profit or a nonprofit. I knew going in that the media landscape is pretty terrible, the business models in media are really bad, but I was already giving a lot to nonprofits and saw how scarce those dollars are and how hard it is to raise money as a nonprofit. I didn't really want to take up more resources in the ecosystem. Started it hoping to create a for-profit that could kind of fund itself, produce research and quickly learned that the business model of a site like Carbon Switch is incredibly challenging.
(00:21:50):
It's difficult for a number of reasons. One of them is that if you look at a typical site like a wire cutter or this kind of affiliate model, it relies on the Amazon ecosystem or e-commerce people don't order a heat pump online and get it shipped to their door and it's done. They have to work with a contractor and installer. It's a pretty complicated process. Then the second challenge is that there's a real supply shortage of contractors and plumbers and installers and electricians. They're not out there spending money on marketing trying to drum up demand, they're just trying to keep up with all the projects that they're coming their way. There's not really a customer in terms of someone who will pay for sending someone to a heat pump installer.
(00:22:43):
Yeah. I kind of tried a lot of different things on the business model side and then by last summer realized that it wasn't really going to make sense for it to be a standalone entity. I had met the folks at Rewiring America about two years before, when they were just starting Rewiring and really liked the team, really liked the vision and really respected what they had done to raise awareness for the Electrify Everything movement.
(00:23:09):
I emailed Ari, the executive director one morning, said, "Hey, I'm thinking about either selling Carbon Switch or potentially shutting it down. Wanted to see if there's some opportunity to partner with you all. I'd be interested in donating everything and then helping you all incorporate that into all the work that you're doing." I got an email back I think five minutes later. He said, "Absolutely. We'd love to talk." We were on the phone I think 30 minutes later and it's been a good partnership. I'm excited to see what they do with kind of expanding it.
Cody Simms (00:23:45):
Chock full of different initiatives that you've been working on. If I understand it then the specific evergreen content around home electrification will continue to live on at Carbon Switch. I don't know if you're still contributing pieces to that going forward. Then now you're primarily focused on ... I mean you've got Campfire Labs that's kind of off and running. It sounds like you're not necessarily day to day. It seems like going forward your primary focus is around your new newsletter Distilled.earth, and obviously now starting to build out some video content around that too. Would you call that 90% of your time at the moment?
Michael Thomas (00:24:23):
Yeah, absolutely. That's where my main focus has been for the last six months or so.
Cody Simms (00:24:28):
What gave you the confidence to say, "All right, I'm going to go all in. I've figured out I can be a credible journalist covering climate topics?"
Michael Thomas (00:24:38):
Well, I think like so many things in my career, there wasn't a big master plan or a big vision per se. I just kind of followed my curiosity and started to write stuff and published stuff. Last fall, I had taken a few months off after donating Carbon Switch to Rewiring America and thought I was going to take a couple of weeks off. It ended up extending. I just couldn't really figure out what I was going to work on next. I was reading and learning a lot about specifically opposition to clean energy. At one point, I was just kind of frustrated that I hadn't figured out what I was going to work on and was feeling kind of stuck and decided to just set a challenge of writing one thing on Twitter about what I was learning about every week and see where that led.
(00:25:36):
I started that in October. I think maybe my second or third thread that I wrote was one of these viral threads on some of the Facebook groups and NIMBY groups that are opposing clean energy projects. For that project I'd heard that there were a lot of people opposing solar projects and wind projects across the country. Wasn't really sure how big of an issue it was, but I read in a lot of articles that they would organize on Facebook. I went on to Facebook, started to join some of these groups, learned that there was a lot of them. Joined, I think, 40 in the end.
Cody Simms (00:26:18):
I was going to say, you mentioned this like, oh, I just casually wrote a Twitter thread on this, but no, you immersed yourself in understanding the point of view of the people who are really leading these opposition movements. It's an immersion that is much more than maybe the casual person might do if they were curious. I'm just going to go out and say you maybe jumped two levels deeper into the morass, which is amazing. It's all right there. It's kind of so obvious, and yet you had the foresight to jump in and go learn about it, and obviously people were interested to hear what you learned.
Michael Thomas (00:26:56):
Yeah, totally. That's, I think, a theme with a lot of my work is that I have a hard time not going really deep down the rabbit hole and do have to at times pull myself out when I'm a month deep on a topic that I've maybe spent too much time on. Yeah. I started to join these groups and just saw some of the craziest...
Cody Simms (00:27:22):
I have to ask, no one lets you play fantasy baseball, right? Because it just seems like that would be not good for you.
Michael Thomas (00:27:28):
Yeah. Honestly, when I was younger, I was as obsessive about some of the stuff with sports, and fortunately I don't watch sports anymore and put some of that energy in ways that maybe make some money instead of watching sports all day, which I probably would do.
Cody Simms (00:27:48):
So then what did you learn?
Michael Thomas (00:27:50):
I think the main thing that I learned is that there's a lot of misinformation that's spreading about clean energy in these groups. I, in my story, describe what I call the wind turbine on fire post. I think I saw dozens of pictures or videos of wind turbines that were on fire, spinning, putting off a lot of smoke and sparks. I looked it up and was like, how common is this? It turns out they're recycling a lot of very rare incidents and posting them as if they were happening every day and very common. But in fact, out of something like 40,000 wind turbines, according to the most recent research, only 40 of them have ever had some kind of maintenance failure like that.
Cody Simms (00:28:39):
It makes sense as something for someone to think they should be afraid of because we hear about EV batteries blowing up and we hear about cell phone batteries blowing up. It's like, oh, this is another big, electric thing that actually is really dangerous that no one's talking about.
Michael Thomas (00:28:53):
Totally. It's really effective in terms of what is sort of a propaganda by some of the groups that I can get into that are funding some of this misinformation, because it's really emotional, it's really scary. If you did believe that wind turbines were just catching fire every day, you wouldn't want one going up in your community. You'd fight for it, because you want to protect your family and your community and your kids. I think that can be really effective.
(00:29:23):
Then another kind of a common theme was the negative health impacts of wind turbines. There's a kind of now infamous study on wind turbine syndrome that says that wind turbines will give you cancer and they'll make you nauseous and they'll give you headaches. It was put out in, I think 2006, I don't believe it was peer reviewed, and it's been debunked in 20 papers since then. It's just so abundantly clear from the data that wind turbines do not make you sick, except for one scenario, which is I think tragic, which is if you believe in wind turbine syndrome, if you've read a lot of this stuff, so let's say you're in one of these Facebook groups, then it will actually cause some of those negative health effects. There's kind of like a placebo effect. You will get headaches and you will maybe feel nauseous. This misinformation is actually creating a lot of harm and negative health impacts, which when I read that, it was just mind-blowing that that can happen.
Cody Simms (00:30:30):
It's a self-induced anxiety that creates an actual physical reaction.
Michael Thomas (00:30:36):
Totally.
Cody Simms (00:30:36):
Yeah. Oh my goodness.
Michael Thomas (00:30:37):
Yeah. I learned that there are all these groubigps, there are more of them every year. What starts as just some Facebook posts and just a Facebook group can lead to incredibly angry town hall meetings and county meetings and people flood from these Facebook groups into some of these county meetings where they're trying to approve a project. In some subsequent reporting, I interviewed county commissioners, or I interviewed people who were in these communities and they say before wind projects or solar projects, it was like there'd be 10 people at a meeting. It was talking about sewage or talking about the water in the town. They had to figure out some technical thing. Everyone got along really well. They had some disagreements, but they always made up.
(00:31:28):
Since there's been some of this misinformation, there are just these really intense town meetings and county meetings and people are yelling at each other and screaming and putting out threats on county commissioners. It creates an atmosphere that divides communities. Then it also has led to hundreds of communities just outright banning wind and solar projects in the entire county, so just blocking off that area for any clean energy development, at a time when we have limited transmission and only so many places that we can build this stuff.
Cody Simms (00:32:05):
Then you did a separate piece on sort of someone who, to some extent, has been championing the strategies that these local groups use, A guy named John Draws, as I understood from your piece. One of the big takeaways I had from reading that was ... Please elaborate on it and explain kind of what you learned there. There's a really good book on negotiation by a former hostage negotiator called Never Split the Difference. In that book, one of the tactics that this person recommends is that you always should anchor extremely. Meaning, if you are required for whatever reason, to throw out a first number or to reply to a counter offer, don't split the difference. Don't just kind of give a meek, "Oh. Let's go a little bit below or above the number you gave me." You go extreme. It gives the other party a lot of room to kind of navigate. That's what I was hearing in the strategies that you found these local groups were doing, which is they basically are taking a complete noncompromised position. Explain a little bit about what you've learned here about this guy, John Draws.
Michael Thomas (00:33:24):
Yeah. I hadn't read that book, but that's fascinating, because that's the exact strategy that these groups use. After I joined all these Facebook groups, I thought about how I kept seeing this one person's name mentioned a lot, this guy John Draws. People kind of talked about him as if he's like the Yoda of clean energy opposition or something. I started to look into him. I started to interview some people in the clean energy world and they'd say, "Have you looked into John Draws?" He has this big name in the world of clean energy development and opposition. Looked into his story and started to just kind of understand some of the tactics that he's had over the last 10 years.
(00:34:11):
I learned that in 2011 or 12, I've forgotten the exact year, he was a real estate developer investor in Carolinas. He decided to produce this 110 page PowerPoint presentation on sea level rise, because at the time, the legislature where he lived was debating a law that was going to act on sea level rise and invest some money in adapting to it. He created this presentation and presented himself as a physicist and climate expert and started to set up these meetings with legislators, and was so effective at kind presenting himself as an expert that the Washington Post cited him as a local physicist in this article about sea level rise and this bill that was being debated. He got an ear with a lot of Republican legislators and convinced them of a lot of either misleading data or outright false things that sea level wasn't going to rise, that climate change wasn't happening.
(00:35:18):
I think, in a subsequent presentation, he started to turn his attention towards wind energy and described wind energy as this scam and something that's so expensive and is bad for people's health and all of these reasons why we shouldn't be building wind. Then started to ally with a lot of groups across the country. What started as just one individual who put together some of his own research and presented it quickly became a playbook. He started to teach what are sometimes referred to as wind warriors all across the country, clean energy opposition activists to oppose projects, and really developed a playbook on his site that is in a lot of PDFs. Again, kind of went down rabbit hole, read through all of his PDFs and read through everything that he'd published.
Yin Lu (00:36:18):
Hey, everyone. I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective, here 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.
(00:36:30):
We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community, A number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established, and 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. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important.
(00:37:11):
If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks. Enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (00:37:19):
Did you glean any motivation from this of why he cares so much?
Michael Thomas (00:37:25):
No, not really. Every time he's been interviewed, he says, "This story isn't about me." He doesn't want to talk to journalists or when he does, he doesn't tell their story. I felt like I couldn't really get that from him.
Cody Simms (00:37:45):
Okay.
Michael Thomas (00:37:46):
Yeah. I think he's been incredibly effective.
Cody Simms (00:37:52):
We're on the heels of a big revelation in the sort of conservative right wing news media this week with Tucker Carlson being let go from Fox News. I'm curious, I haven't seen a lot of reporting on how climate is talked about in cable news. I'm interested if you've done much work ... I don't know that you've written a bunch on this yourself, but I'm curious if you've kind of dived in yet on the intersections of these sort of Facebook groups and how cable news either inspires them and, or serves as amplification of their messages.
Michael Thomas (00:38:34):
Yeah. I think if we look at Fox News in particular, they cover it in about the worst way you could desire if you want climate action. They often will interview people who are not climate scientists on the actual science of climate change. They will bring in, very frequently, someone who claims that he was a co-founder of Greenpeace ... I've forgotten his name exactly. I was looking into him a while back and learned that he was at Greenpeace for a bit, but Greenpeace says that he was not a co-founder. They kind of have put him at a distance. He goes on, and basically Fox News puts up the title and says, co-founder of Greenpeace says climate change, not a problem or something. I think that's a pretty common shtick that Fox News does and that some right wing media will do.
(00:39:36):
They do this with Michael Shellenberger too, who I think has been incredibly damaging to climate discourse and often spreads misleading or false information, where they'll have him on, say he was Time environmental person of the year in some year, but now he thinks that clean energy is bad. Now he thinks climate change isn't that big of a deal. They try to create a false sense of authority when what they're not doing or what they're choosing to not do is avoid talking to real climate scientists. They often talk about the costs of climate change, and they put these figures up without context on how much it's going to cost, without talking about any of the benefits or how much money people will save, or how much it'll do for the economy. It's a really insidious thing. The result is that when you look at the research, people who watch Fox News are something like twice as likely to believe that climate change isn't real as a average news viewer.
Cody Simms (00:40:44):
To some extent, I understand the ... I don't understand it, but the motivations of promoting fossil fuel as like, Hey, fossil fuels are responsible for creating jobs locally. These are small businesses that generations in America have grown up sort of building their family's businesses around and promotion of that, to some extent, I can understand where that angle comes from. It's the sort of tearing down of the growth of renewables that seems like, particularly in the social media world, the Facebook world that you went into, that is the part that I can't get my head around because they're not even polar opposites necessarily, but maybe they are. I don't know.
Michael Thomas (00:41:38):
Yeah. I think that that's one of the things that is frustrating to me as well, is that they just often say things that aren't true about clean energy and renewables. A recent example, something that I reported on is looking at the whale and offshore wind issue. I don't know how much you've heard about this, but if you've been reading the news or watching cable news in the last six months or so, this has started to come up and be much more popular and covered more, where ... If you took it from Fox News, you'd believe that, as the US is building all of this offshore wind and growing their total capacity, it's leading to all of these whale strandings and a large number of whales are washing up on the beaches. It's true that a lot of whales have been washing up in the last year or so. NOAA's been tracking this and has been putting out data, and it's very abnormal.
(00:42:36):
But if you talk to ocean scientists, again, you talk to experts, they say there's zero evidence that it's the offshore wind turbines and construction that is killing these whales. If you go back to where this narrative started in the first place, it is a right wing conservative group in the Koch network that has received a ton of money from fossil fuel interests, including a fossil fuel trade group that gets money from Exxon and all the big oil and gas companies. This guy, David Stevenson, has been spreading misinformation for the last two years and creating a campaign that is trying to convince people that all of this offshore wind construction is going to lead to huge environmental damage in the ocean, kill all these whales. That work sort of perfectly timed with this rise of whale strandings that was very alarming. You're walking along the beach and you see a massive whale, and the media's covering this.
(00:43:44):
A group that he started by sending 30,000 letters to people all along the East Coast, where some of these offshore wind farms were going to be built ... He sent them a letter, said he was just a local resident, which wasn't true, and that they're organizing and starting this group what's become Protect Our Coast, New Jersey. Since I first reported that story, and today they've gotten 600,000 signatures on change.org. I think that's a number that's large enough that the White House has to respond. They're demanding that the federal government take away all these permits for offshore wind farms. Meanwhile, Fox News picked up the story, interviews him and some of the other allies in this group, including another fishermen trade group that receives money from, or allies with the fossil fuel industry. You have this terrible situation where a lot of people believe that offshore wind farms are killing whales when there's zero evidence for it. It's a common playbook.
Cody Simms (00:44:50):
It's interesting. It really feeds into the whole dialogue on permitting reform too, I'm guessing, because in this case, the opposition group is actually using the existence of a permitting process to potentially halt clean energy progress.
Michael Thomas (00:45:07):
Totally. Yeah. That was actually why I started looking into some of these issues in the first place, was all of this debate in the summer over permitting reform.
Cody Simms (00:45:15):
Then another kind of key topic that I've seen you dive into is around mining and the message that, hey, the clean energy revolution is going to require this insane amount of mining, which, yes, it will require significant amounts of mining for battery metals and whatnot, but I think in theory, those metals should be infinitely reusable, whereas fossil fuel mining is non-renewable, you use it once and you have to go mine more. You had this bar chart on your newsletter on Distilled that was just awesome to look at, showing the amount of mining required for fossil fuel economy relative to a clean energy economy. Do you want to dive into a little bit about that? Where you saw this issue creeping up and then how you decided to go dive into that topic?
Michael Thomas (00:46:07):
Yeah. Again, this was a common argument that I saw in Facebook groups and in some of the right wing groups that are writing about this. I saw that people were making the argument that a lithium mine is really bad for the environment, which I think one thing that needs to be said in this conversation is, any time people are talking about this, is that it really is. Today, lithium mining is really environmentally damaging. There's tons of human rights and indigenous rights violations, and it requires a ton of water. That's true with cobalt and a lot of these minerals. I think those issues need to be looked at. There are people who are working in good faith to really raise awareness for that and work to address that.
(00:46:56):
When Ted Cruz tweets about this, as he did a few weeks ago, it's a little bit suspect because he doesn't pass any policies or doesn't advocate for anything that do actually solve that problem. He uses it to sort of weaponize against clean energy. That's often what people do. They make this argument that your wind turbine uses steel. Well, do you know how steel is made? 70% of it uses coal, so you need your fossil fuels for that. Or, lithium mining uses this much energy. I think a common thing that gets people tripped up or why people will believe that that's true, and therefore clean energy is bad, is not looking at the lifecycle analysis. A wind turbine does require a lot of energy and some fossil fuels today up front to build, but then it creates energy from the wind for 20 years or 25 years. When you look at the whole lifecycle analysis, something like a wind turbine uses just a tiny fraction of the coal that a coal fire power plant would use, obviously. Then that's true with just the whole economy.
(00:48:06):
If we look at some of the data from International Energy Agency, they've shown some estimates of what the total mining requirements will be in order to decarbonize our economy, and they're an order of magnitude lower than our current mining and extraction of fossil fuels. I think the real takeaway is just that clean energy is, of course, going to be a huge boon for the environment, and there's a ton of benefits, but if you kind of get tripped up looking at the upfront amount of energy or something like that, it's easy to get misled. I think that does happen to a lot of people in these groups.
Cody Simms (00:48:45):
I mean, I hear the same argument with looking at the embedded emissions in an EV and sort of comparing just the production of an EV, but not looking at the life cycle of an EV and a [inaudible 00:48:59] car from the moment they're manufactured all the way through their lifetime in terms of the emissions footprint.
Michael Thomas (00:49:05):
A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. It's a big issue.
Cody Simms (00:49:11):
You've not only dived into misinformation, you've dived into how communities have also rallied to push change in policies that are additive and helpful from a climate perspective. Most notably, I think, you spent a bunch of time looking at Amsterdam and what happened in Amsterdam to move it from a heavily car congested post-war city to sort of a beacon of bike based transport that it is today. What did you learn there?
Michael Thomas (00:49:46):
Yeah. I was going really deep down the misinformation rabbit hole. Honestly, just found myself feeling really depressed and cynical as I was reading through this stuff. I think something that I've really learned and try to keep mindful of is that things are both bad and good at the same time. There is all this misinformation happening. There's also incredible growth of clean energy and popular movements that are growing. I'll try to shift between some of that stuff and see what good is happening and what we can learn.
(00:50:29):
I went to Amsterdam last summer with my wife and son for about a month. We were just amazed at how livable the city was and how everyone's biking around and there are very few cars in the city and it's quiet. Just really an amazing city. When I got back, I started to learn about how they built this. I saw this image that blew me away, which was a picture in 1970 of a street in Amsterdam and it looked exactly like LA traffic. It was like tons of cars packed at rush hour and pollution. I learned that in the sixties and seventies, cities in the Netherlands, like Amsterdam looked just like the US. They were building out highways. They were considering filling some of their beautiful canals with concrete to make ring roads around their cities. They were knocking down working class neighborhoods just as we were doing in New York at the time, and building highways and roads. Really just building their society around cars and not people.
(00:51:39):
At the time, the number of people who were being killed by cars each year was also rising really dramatically. By 1970 hundreds of children were being killed by cars every year. Tragically, a journalist lost their child to a car accident. He wrote this article titled [foreign language 00:52:03] or translates to stop murdering the children, which is a very provocative title. This combined with the oil crises that decade and also just the rising cost of building that car infrastructure all culminated into this movement where people organized around this title, [foreign language 00:52:25] , and started going out in the streets and laying down in the streets and putting their bikes in the roads and trying to raise awareness for the fact that hundreds of children were being killed, thousands of people were being killed, we're destroying our environment.
(00:52:42):
Amazingly, they started to really shift the culture and they started to get politicians on board. They built an advocacy group of cyclists. They were able to pass policies over the next few decades that led to bike lane experiments in the eighties. Some of those, they learned and expanded and eventually built this massive bike network, the largest in the world. Today, I think a few people or a few children die each year from cars, which is still too many, but they've dropped the number of car fatalities or traffic related deaths by, I think, 98%. It's just this incredible story of what individuals can do when they organize and get together and just shows that the world is the way it is because to some extent we choose for it to be that way, and that a lot of us have agency to change it and hopefully make it into a cleaner, safer, healthier place.
Cody Simms (00:53:47):
It's fitting that we're having this conversation this week when this week's episode of Ted Lasso was my favorite one of all time where they went to Amsterdam and ... Gosh, now I forget her name, the owner of the team got knocked off a bridge by a bike into the water, but then ended up having a wonderful sort of romantic evening with the person who rescued her out of the canal. Anyway, sidebar, great episode of Ted Lasso called Sunflowers.
Michael Thomas (00:54:13):
We're big fans of Ted Lasso. I think we're maybe an episode or two behind.
Cody Simms (00:54:18):
Oh. All right. Well, you'll enjoy it. It's awesome. Michael, the question I have for you is like you're doing the work that professional journalistic outlets, for the most parts, aren't doing right now. You're doing it not with someone handing you a press release and saying, "Hey, this is the new thing. This is the new story that needs to be covered." You're finding these topics and going and diving in. To me that is what investigative journalism is about. As someone who hasn't been trained as a journalist, how do you decide when a story is something you should publish or not and when you feel like you have enough fact to publish or not?
Michael Thomas (00:55:08):
I generally kind of find topics by diving into research. It's often academic research and pretty wonky. Then the task from there is really trying to find the story, and especially people that I can highlight that will make it relatable so that it's not just a bunch of facts and numbers. I struggle with this, with trying to publish a lot and trying to not work on a story for three months, which I've done in the past. I try to publish every week. At times, I'll have to say, you know what, I'm not ready on this one. I don't think I have the story, or I don't think that it's going to be engaging enough. That happened recently.
(00:56:00):
I've been working on a series on the environmental damage of large cars and the rise of SUVs and then also what large electric vehicles will do and the environmental damage from them. When I was working on part one, I was about ready to publish and just looked at the draft and I realized that I didn't feel confident in it, and I felt like I was missing some pieces. I went back and I read a whole book on the topic. Spent a week really diving deep into the research. I think it made the work much stronger, because I was able to fill in some gaps. I corrected some things that I had not had a full grasp of and was able to really understand the context. Then I think with all of that information was able to distill it down, hence the name.
(00:56:51):
Something I really try to do is not just give you a lot of facts or not just tell some anecdotes, but try to frame it within a larger mental model or try to frame it within a story so that it sticks. I think that that often requires getting a lot of information and then cutting down 80% of it.
Cody Simms (00:57:10):
Do you worry about liable, potential legal ramifications of things you write? I mean, you're representing yourself, you don't have a company sitting on top of you representing you. Is that something you have to think about?
Michael Thomas (00:57:29):
Yeah. I've been trying to get a insurance plan that media organizations have that covers this type of things because I'm writing about groups like the Koch Donor Network or these fossil fuel interests that have targeted journalists, and they have launched lawsuits. I don't really worry about slipping up and making a typo and someone comes after me. I do worry a bit about some of the groups that I'm writing about coming after me and it is part of why I dialed back a little bit of the antagonism as soon as I started getting tweets sent at me and people raising my name on some of these blogs and climate denial forms and stuff like that. That made me uncomfortable. It's definitely something that I didn't like to imagine. Just as I've grown my online presence and have more followers on Twitter, just get tons of people messaging or tweeting at me.
(00:58:31):
It's not always fun. It turns out the insurance for that type of thing is very expensive. If there's any pro bono lawyers out there that do this type of stuff that want to chat or give me advice on how to defend myself on that, I'd love to chat with them. But the short answer is, I haven't really figured it out yet.
Cody Simms (00:58:50):
Yeah. How do you fund your work in general? I mean, you take small donations through your Substack I think for people who want to pay to subscribe. Relying on the goodwill of your readers, is that what is able to help you pay the bills?
Michael Thomas (00:59:07):
Yeah. It's a hundred percent reader funded. I take $5 per month contributions on Substack or $50 per year. I think right now I've got like 7,500 free readers and 350 paid readers. It's not enough to afford life in an expensive place like I live in, but it's growing. It's cool to see this model because when I first started writing, Substack wasn't around and that culture wasn't really around, but I get a lot of subscribers from the Substack network, and then of course on Twitter and then podcasts like this, and when larger media outlets cover my work.
Cody Simms (00:59:55):
When I look at what content I consume in the climate space, a lot of it is what I would call outsider content. It's you, it's Emily Atkin at Heated, it's Kim Zo at Climate Tech VC. It's independent journalism people who care enough and are just doing this on their own. I'm curious why you think this movement has attracted so many people to just do that. We talked about Rollie earlier, who's doing kind of the equivalent on YouTube with kind of fun videos, but informative. How do you see this climate sort of creator movement, I guess you could call it, continuing to grow? For anyone who's listening who has a little bit of an it to scratch but isn't sure how to jump in, what advice do you have for people?
Michael Thomas (01:00:52):
I think that the thing I've seen is that the ecosystem is growing. I think it was Rollie who, as you mentioned, has this amazing YouTube channel, Climate Town, that I think is some of the best stuff out there. Informative, funny, really engaging. I was talking to him and he said, "Hey, all boats rise with the tide. We lift each other up." I think there's a lot of creators out there who are incredibly generous. Rollie's been generous with his time talking to me, giving me advice on YouTube. Emily Atkin at Heated, who you mentioned was kind enough to reach out to me when I was first getting started and said, "Hey. How can I elevate the work that you're doing and use my platform to help you get started?" I did a co reported story or two of them with her, which has been really fun to collaborate with people like that, because she makes my work so much better. I get to learn so much from her. I think we put out a good product together.
(01:01:56):
I think that that's something that's just incredibly inspiring right now is that there's more and more people every year. I think that that'll continue as the movement grows and as we do start to grow the amount of clean energy out there and electrification and all this. In terms of advice that I'd have, I think that my story, I've just always just tried it, not overthinking it, not worrying about can I do this or is this the right fit? I've failed so many times. I think this is something that I do respect a lot about Silicon Valley culture, and I gained from living there for a couple years is this fail fast mentality. Especially, when it's something like writing a newsletter, not building AI models that might take over the world. I think fail fast is a good approach.
(01:02:50):
I've tried so many things over the years and launched them and then had to kill them and failed, sometimes publicly. I've grown each time from it. I think just taking that first step and putting yourself out there and writing and just trying to do the work every day. For creative work, I think that's the most important thing is just putting in the hours and publishing and then trying to learn from other people and having this combination of what, this YouTuber I follow in the music world, Andrew Wong, describes as a balance of taking in some of the more theoretical stuff and kind of the textbook stuff and then making and practicing some of that. I think that combination is really important, because without some of the theory, in his example, he uses music theory as the example, it's really hard to grow. You can't reach that next level, but if you only read that stuff and never figure out how to implement it, then you're not going to grow. I think that combination's something I try to keep in mind all the time.
Cody Simms (01:03:54):
Well, for those of you who only know Michael as Curious Founder on Twitter or maybe are subscribed to his newsletter, A, if you aren't subscribed to his newsletter, you should, and B, you should check out his new YouTube channel because I mean, Michael, you have been even leaning further into those creative tendencies, I think, and putting together some really compelling short videos that kind of go deeper into some of the stories that we've talked about here.
Michael Thomas (01:04:20):
Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. I started making YouTube videos about climate about four months ago. I had a personal YouTube channel about five years before that and kind of dabbled with it. I think it's a really cool platform and I think the way I see it's an opportunity to reach a group of people who might not be reading the New York Times climate section, or they might not be on Twitter seeing all of the latest climate news. I hope that there's people out there that I can reach and educate about the importance of climate action.
Cody Simms (01:04:57):
That was going to be the last set of questions I was going to ask you. I know we've gone a little long here. In terms of who to reach, what you uncovered in your reporting on the resistance movement around clean energy was the important people to reach were highly motivated people with time on their hands who would go actually take action. I see the climate movement obviously creating huge protests in the streets and giant sit-ins and what have you. How effective do you think those are relative to these more kind of microtargeted actions? How is that influencing your content strategy?
Michael Thomas (01:05:46):
Yeah. I think that the popular movements are essential. I think if you look at these two times when Congress was taking up a big climate bill first 2008, 2009, when Obama was president with Waxman Markley. This was a cap and trade bill when there really wasn't a broad popular climate movement. There wasn't as big of a coalition, it wasn't as diverse. Then fast-forward to 10 years later, after all of the protests, after all of the activism, all of the work that people have put in to build the movement, and miraculously, one of the only bills that Congress passed in this latest session was the Inflation Reduction Act on climate. I think that that's just impossible to get that kind of outcome without popular movements. I think you need people in every single congressional district around the country to really care and you need it to be a high priority issue. I think that activism is essential to that. I think we have a lot to really be thankful for the environmental movement of the last few decades. We're standing on the shoulders of giants today, I think.
(01:07:03):
Now, I think that as we get into this implementation phase, there's really important work to do on educating people who are aware of the impacts of climate change and who are concerned and want to do something about how important it is to advocate for the build out of clean energy or advocate for their school district to take some of the money from the EPA that was administered through the Inflation Reduction Act to get some electric school buses and get rid of the dirty diesel cars that are polluting their community. All this stuff really needs to happen at the grassroots level in towns and cities and counties across the country.
(01:07:43):
I think that that's inspiring, because it's not like you're trying to get Joe Manchin to vote on something living in California. You're not going to do it. It's hard. It's easy to become apathetic, but you can get your community to get an electric school bus and you can join groups like Climate Changemakers and figure out how to do that effectively. I think that one of the groups I try to reach and a message I try to really communicate is the importance of policy and how it shapes the world that we live in and then the agency that all of us have as individuals and as a collective in shaping some of that policy.
Cody Simms (01:08:20):
What I'm hearing you say is, over the last decade or so, the sort of the mass cultural movement about climate and climate action and big climate strikes and all of that has created popular awareness that helped push large scale federal policy through. That needs to continue to happen and continue to be important, but now we also have this policy through, and we're at the point in time where dollars are going from federal down to local level. It's up to each of us to try to get more involved at the local level to push for things where those dollars can actually impact our own communities.
Michael Thomas (01:08:54):
A hundred percent. There's just so many policies around the country that Congress isn't going to be able to pass. You look at land use on building denser communities where people don't have to drive cars as much, and we don't have to build as many big dirty EV batteries, that's going to happen at the city level, it's going to happen at county level in some cases at the state level. I just think there's a ton of opportunity for impact and action at these local levels of government where you can often call up your state senator and get a coffee. I've just sent emails to people and said, "Hey, I'd love to chat with you about this," just as an individual, not as the journalist, not as somebody who is trying to push anything. I'm just trying to understand their position, understand their background, and then share what I care about. That's an opportunity that, again, you just don't really have with the US Senate, for example.
(01:09:50):
As important as that area is, we need to continue to have federal policy, but I think there's just huge opportunity and really just an opportunity to do work that you get to see the results of immediately and build relationships within your community, which is really powerful.
Cody Simms (01:10:07):
Michael, thanks. We've gone all over the place with this conversation, which I knew we would and I was excited to do so. Any final thoughts you have for me or for the listeners?
Michael Thomas (01:10:18):
Just want to express my gratitude to you and the work that you're doing. I join My Climate Journey's Slack community a couple of years ago when I was first starting Carbon Switch and gained a lot from it and met some really great people. The fact that you guys are all building community and telling these stories and inspiring people is amazing. Then with Climate Changemakers, which you also started or helped start with Eliza and the folks there, I'm just incredibly grateful for you doing that work and for continuing to fight for some of these issues. Thank you.
Cody Simms (01:10:54):
Well listen from one outsider to another, it takes all of us to just understand our own agency and figure out where we can lean into the things that we think we can do and not always know if it's going to work or not, like you said, but jump in and go try to make a difference. Hopefully, folks hearing your story today can be inspired to think about where they could do something similar in whatever capacity they can to lean in and be curious and dive in.
Michael Thomas (01:11:24):
Yeah. A hundred percent. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Cody.
Jason Jacobs (01:11:27):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (01:11:31):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity.
Jason Jacobs (01:11:40):
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Cody Simms (01:12:03):
Thanks. See you next episode.