Talking Climate with Conservatives

Ralph Levinson: Hi, I'm Dr. Ralph Levinson, Health Sciences Professor Emeritus at UCLA.

Luc Lewitanski: And I'm Luc Lewitanski, a French journalist covering technology, politics, and power.

Ralph Levinson: Welcome to Your Planet, Your Health, where we share stories about the environment without falling prey to despair. In these conversations, we explore the knowledge and tools we can use to be good Earthlings.

Luc Lewitanski: Now, today, Ralph... We're going to be bridging the political divide. We're going to try and unpack some of the assumptions that we may have about Republicans' views on the environment, and the blinders that might result from having an overly partisan mindset. Isn't that right?

Ralph Levinson: That's totally right. It's important to get out of our bubble and find common ground. Right? And some people have really worked hard at this and made it their life's mission to transcend, and so we have this guest here who's, that's part of what he does.

Luc Lewitanski: It’s Michael Jefferies. So welcome, Michael. Michael's the regional coordinator for the Citizens' Climate Lobby. His focus is particularly on addressing conservatives and on finding common ground. Now his own background is right of center, and he'll be sharing his journey on these climate issues. with stories about outreach and advocacy efforts, particularly in his work with American conservatives.

Ralph Levinson: So Michael, welcome.

Michael Jefferies: Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me, guys, absolutely.

Ralph Levinson: So, you're really in the belly of the beast!

Michael Jefferies: Well, that's my old bio and my old title. I have a new title and one day we'll update everything… It's Regional Conservative Outreach Coordinator. Yeah, really what I do is I go and I talk to conservatives, people who are right of center, communicate with them on climate issues, let them know that there are solutions that are in line with conservative principles to address these problems, that this doesn't have to be a partisan issue. I always say, you know, Citizens Climate Lobby wants to take this issue that’s considered a wedge issue, an issue that divides us, and we want to make it into a bridge issue, an issue that unites us, and I'd love to talk more about the work that we do there. But for my background on kind of how I got into all of this, so I mean, I grew up in Indiana, a conservative state and I grew up in a conservative family. I today call myself a pretty conservative person, and while we never really talked about climate change, the first time I remember talking about climate change was when I heard about it on the Rush Limbaugh show. My mom listened to Rush Limbaugh every day. I would hear it every day in the car. Sometimes she would even play it in the kitchen on the kitchen radio. You know, they’d just talk about, oh, this is just this huge hoax. The government's trying to take control of all this stuff in order to… and they're trying to pull our heartstrings with polar bears and stuff like this.

Rush Limbaugh (soundbite): I think these militant environmentalists, these wackos, have so much in common with the jihad guys. Because the jihad guys have to maintain control. The environmentalist wackos are the same way. What the hell is living within your environmental means? Whatever it is, it's asinine, insane climate change claptrap. There hasn't been any global warming, not man-made, there isn't any of any kind. The number one agent causing it has increased in volume exponentially, CO2, and there hasn't been any warming. It can only be politics keeping this alive. Just vote for us, and you can save the planet, and that's how they prey on them, and they can make a difference. Hitler made a difference. Stop and think about that.

Michael Jefferies: So, you know, my initial assumption was like, yeah, this is all just a bunch of hooey. But beyond that, you know, my dad has always had a really deep love of the environment, and so as a Christian home, my dad was a big lover of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers. I'm a big fan of them as well, and they kind of put forth this vision of recognizing that the world that we have as a gift from God and we should be seeking to take care of it, and we really lived this out. We lived on a half-acre home in a semi-suburban neighborhood, but we grew a ton of food, and recycling has always been big for us. Like we didn't go to Disneyland for vacation. We went to national parks and hiking was our kind of like weekend outings. So that was always just really important to him and he always really tried to instill that into me and I think that those kind of things sunk in like I thought it was important, but also you know, when you listen to Rush Limbaugh every single day growing up and you and his group, you get a certain kind of economic theory, right? Basically, everything is like, we need to have free markets. Growing up, I heard all about, "Oh, we need to have free markets all the time. The Democrats just want to bring government control over our economy, which will make us all poorer and less free." And everything is about, "We need to level everything in order to have exploding economic growth," all this stuff, and it made a lot of sense. right? Like we need to do this because we'll all become, you know, we'll all become richer, we'll all become, we'll reduce poverty, and the market truly has been one of the most effective forms of reducing poverty around the world. I mean, if you look at global poverty 40 years ago compared to today, it's just massively changed. But that really kind of shifted for me when I started getting more into theology. Really, like I would say, like my journey when it comes to working in climate issues really has to do with my faith. So I started kind of delving into this stuff when I was 17 or so. I was really wanting to learn more about this faith that I've been given and I and I started reading people like C.S. Lewis and I was reading you know a lot of his Christian apologetic work that he wrote on like Mere Christianity and The Problem with Pain and him and J.R.R. Tolkien who of course wrote Lord of the Rings, they had this writing group of friends called the Inklings and they were these groups of English Christians so they often get called […] as like neo-romantics and they really hated the gritty realism of the literature that was being written at their time and they just kind of met together at this pub in Oxford called Eagle and Child, and they would regularly meet with their friends and they called themselves the Inklings, and one of these people was a woman named Dorothy L. Sayers, and my dad had this book called Creed or Chaos. She had this speech called "Why Work?" So she was writing during World War II and she's kind of writing to people about the meaning of work and she's talking about by coming into the full meaning of work, we can return to a more natural, more human economy, a more human way of living that truly values the work that people are doing, not just the profit that can be extracted from that work. And she has the scathing critique of the pre-World War II economic system, and of course, they have all kinds of regulations on the way they have to live because of the war effort, which is really shifting the way in which the whole economy was happening, and she says, you know, this is giving us the opportunity to really kind of continue and living in a more natural, more sustainable way, in a way that values the that we're doing, and the thing that struck me as a 17-year-old reading this is that her critique of the pre-war economy was an incredible critique of the current economy, and it was like, wow, we just went back to exactly the way things were and said that all these things are actually good. And that really changed my mind about what it means to be a conservative and a Christian, how maybe our ideas of economics don't have to be tied to our faith, as if the Republican Party platform is on par with the Bible, and we should look at what's a Christian way of living out, as Christians, we would say, "What's a Christian way of living out our faith?" in regards to the economy, and that's more important than what the kind of political trend of the time is.

Ralph Levinson: Let me read a line that I just saw, that I had marked in that book after talking to you earlier. It's a little out of context, but just you'll get the feeling and she goes – "I do not think we will ever escape from the appalling squirrel cage of economic confusion which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon envy and avarice." And […], in Buddhism, one of the three poisons is greed, you know?

Luc Lewitanski: Well, even in the scriptures, and if you want to be a textualist about it, I mean, she is linking her critique of, as you're saying, sort of this pre-war hyper-productivist system as being antithetical to the values of Christianity. I had a couple quotes in there too that I found. "So the greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of the work, and to force him to dedicate his life to badly making things which were not worth making in the first place. The church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours and come to church on Sunday.” So, and excerpting a little further, she talks about, "Let the church remember this, that every maker and worker is called to serve God in his professional trade, not outside it." And so she was making an argument, basically, as you're talking about, in this moment of wartime, there was a real re-examining of society that could be done.

Michael Jefferies: I read her, wow, it would be probably over 10 years ago now. Back then, I was just leaving high school, so I was 17 years old at that time. Yeah, and so that kind of led to a shift in thinking about how I needed to be living, you know, be really like, I as part of person who wants to live out my faith fully I need to be considerate about the kind of relationship that I have with nature, and I thought about it during COVID when there was all this talk and there was a lot of conservatives you know I listened to I respect in ways and they're kind of talking about, oh man, like they're wanting to use this this is a manufactured crisis to try to change all of our behaviors and all these things… And my first thought was thinking about oh well like Dorothy L. Sayers was talking about like we should be using World War II to be like this is not a manufactured crisis, it's a true crisis, but it allows us the space to recognize like the way in which we've always done things doesn't have to be the way in which we continue to do things. We can change course. We've already seen how we can do that. Yeah.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, no, and that's super enlightening. So you had these formative texts sort of informed your vision of the world and how to be in it, and then you made the connection. Later on during COVID because yeah there is something about like what we can turn our machinery towards when the times call for it, you know, in times of great need. We took our industry and produced vaccines, produced masks, like you can see what happens when you put society to an effort. I think this is a bit of a digression, but when you talk about the virtues of the market, one might say, you know, oh, the thing that brought most people out of poverty recently was, you know, the Chinese Communist Party. But then again, they're not very communist in the way they've approached their economy. They kind of, it's them bringing in the market economy that allowed so many people to prosper. Though they have a very planned one which allows them to make investments in things like infrastructure and transit.

Michael Jefferies: Mm-hmm.

Luc Lewitanski: It's obviously also an authoritarian society and one that we don't want to model ourselves on, but there are ways in which it's not entirely a free-market society and still is able to deliver wealth and maybe wealth isn't necessarily the thing that we need to strive towards, right? I mean that's also part of what that essay was about: the valuable life isn't necessarily just about having the highest GDP.

Michael Jefferies: Yeah well, that's yeah, that's very true, and I, yeah, I used to read The Economist all the time. I remember reading, they would have these articles being like, you know, is growth exponential? And like, we could just continue having economic growth infinitely? And like, I was like, what a dumb thing to like, even –

Ralph Levinson: Yeah, I can answer that question, no. It's pretty simple, and I agree, Luc, that's part of stewardship, and that's a word we haven't brought up yet, but it's not only a Judeo-Christian idea, but Indigenous peoples and many Eastern philosophies about stewardship, about not having the, so much focusing on that we are the boss of nature as much as that we're in nature.

Michael Jefferies: Francis of Assisi talks a lot about those kinds of things, and specifically one of his disciples, Bonaventure, talks about that in one of his works. It's called "The Ascent of the Mind of God."

Luc Lewitanski: So this text was by Saint Bonaventure, who was a disciple of Francis, does the current Pope's name choice have anything to do? Is it a reference to this theologian or is there like a link in the name Francis?

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, so he did choose Francis as a name out of a reference to St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Francis is one of those figures who has been widely admired throughout the Christian tradition. You know, I grew up as a Presbyterian, but I would grow up hearing about St. Francis. We didn't call anybody saints, but except for the theologians that we like. So the old people that we like, they were saints, but everybody else was. So I'd hear about St. Francis.

Luc Lewitanski: What about him specifically did you hear? What was he associated with?

Michael Jefferies: He is associated with a radical devotion to poverty. I mean, he came from a rich family. He literally gave up everything that he had and wandered around the streets wearing a sackcloth without shoes. And his order did the same thing. They all gave up all their belongings. They wandered around without clothes. I mean, they had sackcloths on. They weren't naked. And they were barefoot, and they would go around, and they would preach, and they would teach, and they would serve lepers, you know, the people that the rest of society rejected, and they relied on just people giving them food and the things that they need to survive.

Ralph Levinson: With our son, my wife and I had just been shown a movie called Brother, Son, Sister Moon, which was about St. Francis. So my son's middle name is Francis, just from that.

Michael Jefferies: Oh, that's funny.

Luc Lewitanski: So you and the Pope have similar references!

Ralph Levinson: And for the same reason, admiring, I mean, how more hippie can you get from the point of view of, you know, it's a spiritual thing to not go after riches.

Michael Jefferies: He's also known for his love for nature, viewing all created things as fellow creations of God. So there's stories of him – like there would be a worm in a cart path and he would he would stop to pick up the worm and put it over in the grass so it wouldn't get run over by a cart.

Ralph Levinson: And a lot of people in the East, the Jains would do the same thing. They would sweep, you know, I don't know if you know who Jains are. They're a religious group in India that would sweep away the, you know, the insects from their path.

Michael Jefferies: And they'll wear masks so they don't accidentally inhale a bug or something.

Luc Lewitanski: I also feel like this might be a natural bridge onto his more contemporary namesake, you know, the guy who named himself after him. So I thought I could read a little bit from the papal encyclical from 2015, Laudato Si.

Ralph Levinson: Yeah, great document.

Luc Lewitanski: So here you go, this is the Pope in 2015, Pope Francis. It is not enough to balance, in the medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain or the preservation of the environment with progress. A technological and economic development which does not leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress. Frequently, in fact, people's quality of life actually diminishes by the deterioration of the environment, the low quality of food, or the depletion of resources in the midst of economic growth. So sort of playing with that discussion we had earlier about growth and sort of markets, but also this thinking of if you're only thinking about economic gain and you're not considering quality of life, there can be real destructive blind spots in a sort of a “greed is good” mindset.

Ralph Levinson: That certainly goes along with what Dorothy Sayers was writing about as well.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah exactly. You mentioned, Michael, that the Pope's thinking was part of your journey on climate issues, right?

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, I had all these thoughts, they were just kind of like always floating around in my head, like "boy, I wish that the Republican party was doing something about the environment"! I went to a Catholic university to study theology as well as political science. I was randomly paired up with a set of roommates and one of them had started a group inspired by Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato Si called Students for Sustainable Stewardship and it was a faith-focused approach to caring about sustainability and we did all kinds of stuff. We organized recycling drives, we organized like to help get people to use reusable cups at Starbucks instead of single consumption items. We discovered that our recycling was actually, on campus, was just getting thrown out. So we were lobbying our administration to actually have the recycling bins get picked up by recycling trucks that would get taken to recycling facilities. That was a tough effort, and, you know, we organized nature walks and stuff like that. It was just a really wonderful experience of finding people who cared about the environment, and although most of them didn't identify as being politically conservative, and it was an excellent way for me to bridge this, kind of, I don't know. I felt like I had like this like gap or a hole in my heart as I'm like sitting here advocating for politicians to get elected, that like I was, you know, quite concerned, you know, either did not care, or would not seek to help the environment, and it's like, I might agree with you on all these other sets of issues, but like on this issue, which I also think is very important, like I think that you really might hurt it. So it was a really great way for me to live out that aspect more fully within what I was doing personally.

Ralph Levinson: Well, to live your values. Yeah, absolutely. It's an important thing.

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, and that's, that's how I actually got connected with Citizens’ Climate Lobby, was my friend who started this group, who was a roommate of mine, he learned about Citizens’ Climate Lobby, which he, he views himself as being politically conservative, but he learned like, hey, like there's this climate group that like actually talks about bipartisan political things and, you know, this seems to be the kind of thing that we're really looking for and that we've talked about so many times, and I learned about it and was like, "Oh yeah, this is exactly what I'm looking for." Because one of the things that I was given the opportunity on very early on when I started volunteering for Citizens’ Climate Lobby was to go and lobby my members of Congress and ask them to start doing things about climate, so like I found myself in this place where it's like I'm trying to get you guys elected, now let me tell you what I actually want you to do, you know particularly on things that you're not acting on. I mean that was a really, that was really a powerful experience to like be able to engage them directly on those issues.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, could you share a little bit about that, actually? How were they responding to this?

Michael Jefferies: Well, I mean one of the great things about CCL is that they do give you training and people who have also been doing it so that way you're not approaching it by yourself. I started lobbying actually Senator Mike Braun, who is my local Indiana senator. We have two senators who are actually pretty surprisingly good on climate issues. But so that was really kind of the really cool experience was I was gonna go lobby Senator Mike Braun, who when he was campaigning he would say "you know actually I'm a rare Republican who actually cares about the environment", and I was kind of like, oh yeah. So he was running as like kind of like the most like pro-Trump politician and he would say all the time, he's like, "I was inspired to run because of Donald Trump". So I was somewhat skeptical of his claims to really care about the environment but when I went and lobbied him he said that this was an issue that he really cared about. It was an issue that his grandchildren were talking to him about and his children were talking to him about and felt was extremely important, and he viewed one of the things that he wanted to do in his time in the Senate was to work on turning climate into a bridge issue. He felt that the climate was really changing. He wanted to make progress and trying to find bipartisan ways to do that. He was one of the founding members of a group called the Senate Climate Solutions Caucus. It's a bipartisan group of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats who meet together to discuss bipartisan ways to address climate change. And so he did that, and he's done a number of bills that CCL has endorsed, one of which has been signed into law called the Growing Climate Solutions Act. What happened was it passed out of the Senate, and then it didn't make it out of the House, but it got included in a budget package. So the budget package got signed into the law. So all the provisions got signed into the law. The provisions got in. So it got in.

Luc Lewitanski: And this Growing Climate Solutions Act was a product of the Senate then at the end of the day?

Michael Jefferies: Yes, it came from the Senate. Actually, Senator Mike Braun was the lead author of the bill, and the actually funny thing is that he ended up voting against the budget package that passed the bill, like, that got the bill signed into law, but that's just one of those weird quirks of American politics.

Luc Lewitanski: It's like an omnibus bill, right?

Michael Jefferies: All this stuff gets just thrown together, yeah.

Luc Lewitanski: Because otherwise, you need 60 votes, and so they put everything into the budget and you have to do an up and down on the whole thing.

Michael Jefferies: Right, and so, like yeah, this bill that was like something that he had worked on so long and so hard like technically the thing when it got signed in the law he voted against it, but yeah.

Ralph Levinson: Well, you know that brings us up to something about realpolitik. You mentioned this guy was really pro-Trump. Yeah, and how is there not cognitive dissonance there? How could you say, you know, I mean Trump – the first – There was nothing climate about Donald Trump.

Luc Lewitanski: No, he got out of the Paris Accords immediately.

Ralph Levinson: Immediately, and while the Paris Accords-

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, which my senator supported, right? Like he was, he is not in favor of these kinds, he is not in favor of those kinds of approaches of dealing with climate.

Ralph Levinson: But you know, that approach is like so benign and toothless. It seems to me that's just kind of flipping the bird. You know, it's, it's just a symbolic thing to get out of it. It has no teeth.

Michael Jefferies: But maybe it was also a symbolic thing to even sign on to it, right?

Ralph Levinson: Right, it's symbolic of actually caring, you know, and saying-

Michael Jefferies: And we're going to try to meet these requirements when, like, we all know that the rest of the people who are signing on to this are not going to meet those requirements. So, like, why are we holding ourselves up to these fake standards?

Ralph Levinson: Actually, if everybody assumes that, that's like game theory. If everybody assumes it, of course, that's what's going to happen, and at least it's aspirational. After all, certainly China has gone a long way in terms of solar and wind, and everybody said, oh, China's not going to do it, but they've, they're still using a lot more coal than we like, but you know, it takes time to transition. But it is saying something to the rest of the world that, well, blaming other people for not doing something to me is not a very – and of course, many people are not faith-based, but it certainly isn't what faith-based people should be doing, I would think. You know, it's like saying, "Well, other people aren't doing it, so I'm going to blow it off." I mean, that's not what the Pope said, you know, right?

Michael Jefferies: Right, I agree with that approach, you know. But for Senator Braun, specifically, you know, you can say, like, how could Senator Mike Braun support Donald Trump, when Donald Trump has been bad for climate? And it's like, well, Senator Braun has been quite good for shifting the Republican Party to be more amenable to talking about climate. But like, kind of one of the unspoken rules of politics is like, well, the Democrats can get what they want as long as we increase defense spending. So it's like, you know, and I think that he's kind of sick of that. You know, we want to look at things like the Growing Climate Solutions Act as like, this isn't enough. There's this like, planting trees, like this is the smallest thing that we can do. Making some changes so that way we can make it easier to buy carbon credits, which is what the Growing Climate Solutions Act is. It's a bill that adds a federal framework to get people registered as third-party verifiers who can identify the kind of criteria that you need to start selling carbon credits for private forests, landowners who grow trees, and also for farmers who will start doing regenerative agricultural practices.

Ralph Levinson: Very important.

Michael Jefferies: This sounds like not a lot, right? And ultimately, like, is it going to get us to where we need to go? Definitely not. But a really good thing about it is that, you know, when you're coming from a party, who, you know, back in 2016 every single presidential candidate other than Lindsey Graham basically said that they didn't think that climate change was happening and were ultimately mocking this whole idea, it's going to take time for a lot of people to be comfortable seeing climate as a bipartisan issue, and one of the great ways to do that is by having people learn that they can support climate bills, and then they start becoming comfortable with the idea that we might be doing other things to address climate as well. That might have a climate aspect to it. So I think that these are small things, but they get us, they are getting legislators in a habit of, Republican legislators specifically, of recognizing that like, oh hey, we can support some climate things too, and then that kind of opens up the door to what else can we do down the road. There's been kind of four major climate bills that have passed out of Congress in the last couple of years, or bills with climate provisions in them. So there was IIJA. the Infrastructure [Investment] and Jobs Act, which included a lot of money for taking into climate considerations when building out new infrastructure. Because as the climate's changing, you don't want to build a road, a bridge, for how the climate is today. We want to be keeping in mind resilience and thinking, "Well, what is the climate going from now based on our best climate data, our best climate science?” That passed with bipartisan support. Then we also had a bill called the CHIPS and Science Act, which my other senator, Senator Todd Young, was a major player in the creation of that bill, although that was Chuck Schumer's bill, ultimately. But there was a lot of money in there for basically trying to attract investment for the kinds of, you know, for companies and investing in kind of the critical technology that we need in order to build out more clean energy and going into hydrogen as well. There's a lot of money in there for that kind of stuff. That was a bill that kind of went under the radar, but that was a major bipartisan bill. Then there was the Growing Climate Solutions Act, like I talked about, and then there was the Inflation Reduction Act, which like basically, like those are four bills, three of those four bills had bipartisan support in getting them across and had climate provisions, I mean the Inflation Reduction Act being the exception. So like there is a lot happening. There's other things happening as well. There's a current bill, they actually just passed out of committee a couple of weeks ago called the PROVE IT Act. What it does is it directs the Department of Energy to create a database that would essentially, it looks at key products that we make that are carbon intensive products like plastic, steel, aluminum, etc., concrete, and then it will look at how many emissions go into making those here in the U.S. and how many emissions go into making them in places like China and India. You know, first of all, this is going to be really helpful data, and it's been supported by many Republicans. There's, I think, five Republican co-sponsors on the bill from places like North Dakota, Louisiana, and basically, I mean, this will help us to come into compliance with the European Union's-

Ralph Levinson: I was just going to say the European Union has really been forward on that. It's been very important since they do have carbon pricing, you know, they don't want people just getting around that by getting it from China, you know.

Luc Lewitanski: Right, and you have to have the infrastructure to trace these things, and so it makes sense to build that out.

Michael Jefferies: Yeah… we want to have our own data on this information that we can use. We want to have good data that we could bring up in a World Trade Organization dispute, right? So it's really important for us to have that information, but it's also really important for us to go and use that information to hold places like China and India accountable for their emissions.

Ralph Levinson: Especially if they're using a lot of coal to make it.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, that's part of what a carbon pricing scheme would be accounting for and hopefully correcting for.

Michael Jefferies: Right, exactly.

Ralph Levinson: Exactly.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, and again, it's totally from like a competitive advantage perspective. It's just like basic economics. It's in the US's interest to collect its own independent data in order to, as you said, audit it, and interesting to hear your emphasis on three of these four climate bills having been passed as a bipartisan initiative, it sort of speaks to these issues not being as immediately sort of siloed.

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, it's no longer like a poison pill just to have something about climate in a bill, which is a major step forward from where we were 10 years ago.

Luc Lewitanski: 10 years ago, and so say more on that, the idea of a poison pill, right? That's when you put in a provision in a bill when you want it to be sunk because it could be used in campaign ads, basically painting the person as having supported a bill that does X, Y, Z, and so the climate was like a toxic subject in a bill for a conservative legislature 10 years ago.

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, it would be a toxic subject that's in a bill and I mean it goes both ways, something that's key to, you know, your party's political agenda that you know you can't get passed. So you're gonna throw it into some kind of giant package. It wouldn't be able to get passed on its own merit, so you throw it into a big package and being like, "Well, we really have to have this money for all these programs that we need to fund. And we refuse to remove this language from the bill". So you're kind of forcing the hands of people to try to get this thing implemented, and so a lot of conservatives will see these kinds of bills come about, and you might say, "Oh, you have climate language in that bill. You're trying to sneak it through. We're not going to support the bill unless you remove the climate language." So, for a lot of Republicans, having climate provisions in a bill is no longer a poison pill. I mean, it depends on what they are, but it's not an immediate, absolutely, we can't do it.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, that's fascinating, even just the evolution on that, and I'm sure this is partially because of the work of people like yourself, in terms of thinking about angles on climate change, framing and messaging, right? You know, as you're saying, you can approach these environmental themes without saying, like, "Let's save Mother Earth." You know, there are ways in which that language can be coded. I can see how, yeah, protecting our nature and our resources. Or, you know, again, thinking about this competitive advantage framing might be a more appealing way to bring these issues forward. We spoke about carbon pricing in general. I know that's a big area of interest for CCL, so I wondered maybe bringing in a little bit my French perspective here I think it's a very interesting point of debate because some people argue a carbon tax could be done fairly or could be done unfairly. It's not inherently a progressive tax, right? It can be done in ways that would accentuate inequalities and could severely impact people who debate, like, I'm thinking in France, I don't know if you recall, in 2018 there was a gas tax that got passed into law, right? We made it, suddenly, like during the summer the government passed this law, it became much more expensive to buy your gas, right? And ostensibly the government said like, "Oh, we're doing this to fund climate efforts," but internally you saw there was an audit done. Only 10% of the money was going to fund any climate projects. Most of it was an offset for a tax break on large businesses, and so this is part of what the people who couldn't depend on public transportation, who therefore had to drive back and forth to work, these people who lived in rural areas came and drove with their yellow jackets, which is an example of the onerous security regulations that the French state mandated – they had to have these high-vis jackets, you know, in their car at all times. So the people were like, "Okay, well, screw you, then. We'll put on the jackets and we'll say, like..." And basically, they were saying, like, "We don't care about making it to the end of the world. We can't live to the end of the month. Like, I'm living paycheck to paycheck." And so this was a way in which something that was intended as, like, the new Macron government had just come in to power the year before, and they were saying, like, "Look at us. We're doing this big stuff on climate," but they did it in such a tone-deaf way that it almost polarized and made environmentalism less popular amongst sort of more working-class French people who depended on driving back and forth to work because they said like you're not even doing this for the motive, it's just punitive, you're not putting the money to help with the issue and you're just making my life more inconvenient. So I thought that was as negative of a case I can make for the bad way in which France tried to implement carbon pricing. But obviously you can see how there are ways in which, if it's only done to offset tax breaks, then it doesn't have this sort of redistributive element, and I'm using language which is kind of coded left there, but I'm kind of interested in seeing how CCL would think about these sort of these debates.

Ralph Levinson: Or what you're suggesting!

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, yeah. So Citizens’ Climate Lobby has primarily been a carbon pricing organization over its history, and we've always advocated for an approach that is what we call a carbon fee and dividend, and this is, you know, so you collect the money from the polluters so it's not, it's not a per liter, it's not per gallon tax on gas or anything like that, although the price would find its way down into gas prices assured, of course, but it would be paid directly by the producer. So when they sell their oil, you know, from the oil refinery, there is going to be a price based on how many carbon emissions will be produced when this oil is burned, right? So it's what we would call an upstream tax, and we then would support that all of the money gets collected from the carbon price and gets distributed in a revenue-neutral way to households, right? So each household gets a share based on, you know, how many people are in your household. You get a share per person and then per child. You get a half share for your monthly or quarterly payments that you would have, and you know, the price starts out really low. We start at $15 per ton, so we don't start anywhere near what some people would like to see. But, I mean, that's because if we started up really high, I mean, you would have an enormous shock.

Ralph Levinson: To the system, yeah. Not only in your personal pocketbook, but also what it's going to do to businesses, especially small businesses.

Michael Jefferies: Oh yeah, and I mean the price of everything.

Ralph Levinson: Transportation.

Michael Jefferies: All the transportation that it takes for food and all of that. So these are $15 per ton, which is about 8 cents per gallon of gas, for relatively minimum. It would increase $10 every year. So really the point is not to be incredibly punitive, but the point is to be sending a signal to the market that, hey, like right now the carbon price is very small, 30 years from now it will be quite different. It will help to redirect investment into cleaner technologies and then that offset will help households to afford to buy these new products.

Ralph Levinson: That seems to me a big part of it, right? This redirecting long-term investment, and sure, we'd all like it to be, boom, one and done, and, you know, but that's not how the world works.

Luc Lewitanski: But no one realistically talks about one and done solutions. That's why this type of phasing in allows people to make the investment decisions and price in with these increased taxes, assuming they have faith in the stability of the political system to deliver on that continued process. If carbon pricing were coded as a partisan thing in the same way that for instance the Paris Accords were, you might imagine it might be a big showy thing to then undo these regulations. So you kind of want buy-in from both sides of the aisle for it to sort of become a sustainable thing, year over year increases. But totally seems to think about this redistributive aspect at least in terms of not overly harming people who just depend on these necessities.

Michael Jefferies: I know that some conservatives would be uncomfortable with the idea of like, "Oh, we're going to give that money to households." I know that there have been numerous, actually, Republican-led carbon pricing proposals here in the U.S., and there has been for years. So there's a guy who got voted out of office over just for money issues named Bob Inglis. He was a Republican member of Congress. He's incredibly conservative.

Ralph Levinson: (Laughs) We know. Actually, Luc was thinking of bringing him up.

Michael Jefferies: Oh yeah, so he supported a carbon pricing bill which took that money and has a corresponding income tax cut. So yeah, your energy prices will go up because of this carbon price, but you'll actually have more money as a household because you're going to be paying less income tax. So that makes sense to me.

Ralph Levinson: Yes and no to me personally, because on the other side, poor people don't always pay income tax, right? Working poor who may need to drive to work, they aren't necessarily paying income tax, but they'll be paying more at the pump.

Michael Jefferies: Yes, I mean, if you're making an incredibly small amount of money, then yes, sometimes you don't even have to file –

Ralph Levinson: 40% of Americans don't pay income tax. But these are the people we're worried about, right?

Luc Lewitanski: I'd say it's even more than that, actually. It's not just about the matter of leaving the poorest Americans behind, who are excluded by these income tax-focused mechanisms, not unlike what happens with being in blind spots of the earned income tax credit, for instance. But of course, perpetually lowering income tax reduces government revenue, which the spending needs to be offset by cutting government programs, right? Makes sense, you know, you lose revenue, you need to balance the budget. In order to account for that loss in money going into the government, you'll need to reduce funding to some government programs. But when you think about what the government is actually funding, that means concretely cuts to either healthcare, education, infrastructure or defense spending (and we all know how likely that last one is), all in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Michael Jefferies: I think that with Republicans, politically, that aspect goes over better because the income tax is incredibly unpopular among Republicans, so we can reduce the income tax while, you know, helping the planet, like, you know, it plays very well, among the Republican voting base. But one of the advantages of the method that we advocate for, and it's not just us, right? Like there are other conservative, like there's a conservative […] group called the Baker, they call it the Baker-Schultz plan, and this is actually, of all people, I mean, the American Petroleum Institute supports the Baker-Schultz plan for carbon pricing.

Ralph Levinson: So right away, my –

Luc Lewitanski: Alarm bells!

Ralph Levinson: The alarm bell goes off, but again, that's my bubble. I'm willing to listen. Go ahead.

Michael Jefferies: It's a carbon pricing scheme. It starts higher than our plan, but it doesn't increase as much. It increases like 4% every year or something like that, which is a very, very gradual increase, and also would like basically repeal all environmental regulations for oil companies.

Luc Lewitanski: So, that's the Trojan horse.

Michael Jefferies: This is why they support it. So, in case you're wondering, like-

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, there you go. Thank you.

Michael Jefferies: I mean, but you could say, and they would say, at this point it's just like a bureaucratic exercise. Like, we're not going to remove all of the things that we've put in place. For us, it's more about the monitoring and reporting and the army of bureaucrats that we have to hire in order to meet federal regulations, even though we already have all of these things.

Ralph Levinson: Because the oil companies have been so, so responsible over the years. Oil companies have to trust– oh no no we don't need those bureaucrats. Trust us. You know, so for some of us, that's a non starter, but okay.

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, well, I just have to throw that out there, you know?

Ralph Levinson: Yeah, yeah. No, good, good, good. I'm not holding you responsible.

Michael Jefferies: The basic idea is to protect people from energy increases, and so that way it isn't hurting people, and even with that, you know, I mean I've talked to Republican senators who shall not be named who have told me essentially that like, I know I understand economics like I know that a carbon [price]…like I believe that climate change is happening, I think that we should be addressing that and obviously like a carbon price is the best way to do it, and what they don't say, but what I kind of have gathered is that, like, the first time I had this conversation, I was like, "Boy, if only there was a Republican who could introduce carbon pricing legislation and could lead on this," and they hadn't. But, like, when you think about it politically, and our political system has so much to do with this, is, like, you can support a carbon price, but if you introduce a carbon pricing bill in Indiana the way that our primary, you know, we have primary elections where our parties will vote for our candidates and then the general election where everybody votes for the actual representative. You know, if you are a Republican who has authored a carbon pricing bill, all you have to do is factually show, like, the effect that this bill will have on your gas prices and you can just say "this person authored a bill to raise your gas prices by three dollars in the next 20 years" or whatever. Like, you can sit there and explain to people while the bill, like you know, there would be a dividend and it would offset, and the market effects that it would have, and it would, you know, make it so much easier for people to afford electric vehicles and etc., like you're never gonna win that debate, especially with your hardcore voting bloc, and that just completely blocks people from really stepping in and leading on this issue in that way, and it makes it very difficult to move it forward, frankly. Not that there isn't hope. I mean, there is hope.

Ralph Levinson: (Laughs) Yes, please.

Michael Jefferies: I talked about the PROVE IT Act. And Senator Bill Cassidy is a co-sponsor of the PROVE IT Act, but Senator Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham have introduced their own bill, which goes a step farther than the PROVE IT Act. The PROVE IT Act just creates a database of emissions data in our country versus other countries. It goes a step farther. It's called the Foreign Pollution Fee Act, and it essentially places a carbon border adjustment mechanism. It doesn't talk about carbon pollution at all. And they probably don't want me talking about it as a carbon thing. But the point is that it looks at, you know, how much pollution gets produced in American products versus foreign products, and then the place of the tariff that corresponds to the difference. So there is hope that if it's marketed in the best way possible, you know, you can actually get these kinds of things done.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, that's a very interesting way to look at it. It's sort of linking this protectionist agenda with putting tariffs on climate polluters. I mean, in a way, it's sort of counterintuitive if you think about what gets brought up there, but pardon the pun, but the protectionism trumps the aversion to environmentalism there. So that's an interesting... because obviously it's not framed in those terms, as you sort of said, it's putting the protectionism first, but circling back to the idea of the primary system in the U.S. and the pressures within one's party, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit, you alluded to Bob Inglis being ousted?

Michael Jefferies: It was several years ago. I think it was 2012, and this was kind of that peak time when anything climate related, like that's what Obama wants to do, and it was the Tea Party surge and everything related to Obama is evil and this is what caused, like you know when Newt Gingrich in 2008, Newt Gingrich who was Speaker of the House for a time and was one of the lead Republicans in Congress, you know he sat down in 2008 and did an ad with Nancy Pelosi and they're both was like, oh wow. Like, it's kind of funny because yeah, Nancy goes, "We don't agree on much, do we, Newt?" And he goes, "Oh, no, we don't, Nancy. But one thing we do agree on is climate change." And like, they talk about, you know, how they should, they're going to work together to address climate change.

Nancy Pelosi (soundbite): Hi, I'm Nancy Pelosi, lifelong Democrat and Speaker of the House.

Newt Gingrich (soundbite): And I'm Newt Gingrich, lifelong Republican, and I used to be Speaker.

Nancy Pelosi (soundbite): We don't always see eye to eye, do we Newt?

Newt Gingrich: No, but we do agree, our country must take action to address climate change.

Nancy Pelosi: We need cleaner forms of energy, and we need them fast.

Newt Gingrich: If enough of us demand action from our leaders, we can spark the innovation we need.

Nancy Pelosi: Go to WeCanSolveIt.org to get involved. Together, we can do this.

Michael Jefferies: And then Obama gets elected. The Republican-led cap-and-trade, you know, cap-and-trade, which is a carbon pricing scheme, and it was led by many very influential and powerful Republicans, it all fell apart. Yeah, so 2012 comes around. Climate is like, we can't touch it at all, that's just liberal nonsense. You know, as a person who grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh every day, I was hearing this is all a hoax. My point about this is that there were a lot of things happening where now like even the pro-climate Republicans were like, oh yeah, never mind, like let's stay away from this. Newt Gingrich totally disavowed his support for climate action and his sitting down with Nancy Pelosi on a couch.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, within a couple years of doing it, I mean, that's the irony, right? He records that and very quickly, by the time it's time for him to run for president in the Republican primaries, he's completely disavowed this pro-climate stance.

Michael Jefferies: And so Bob Inglis was in this whole time and like he came out as being like... I think he voted against cap-and-trade because he thought it was a bad scheme, but he proposed a different carbon pricing bill, which was taking, you know, placing a price on carbon that was charged upstream, it didn't have all kinds of complicated credit systems, and then you had an offset with income tax. Anyways, he supported it because he went on this expedition that he, you know, kind of saw the effects of climate change. Because he went to Antarctica and actually saw them pull out the ice cores, and then he also saw the effects it was having on the Great Barrier Reef, and he was like, wow, this is really bad. We should do something about this. So he introduced a carbon pricing bill, and he had served in Congress for over 10 years. and he got beaten, like, his opponent got like 70% of the vote, and his opponent was a person who didn't have a lot of political experience or name recognition, but the big thing was that, like, he's supporting climate stuff.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, I mean, that primary attracted outside interest, didn't it? Right? I mean, it's sort of a leading question there, but my understanding is that part of the reason why this nobody was able to unseat six-term congressman Bob Inglis, was that they had some support from the oil industry, right? And ostensibly they were able to tar him with the image of being a climate activist and that drew up all these negative frames. As you said, in 2008, the mainstreaming of disbelief in what climate scientists were saying sort of coincides with this moment, but obviously this was a manufactured crisis that had outside money drawing attention to it, right?

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, well, I don't know. I don't doubt that that's true. I've met Bobby Inglis a couple of times. I've heard his story. When he tells a story, he doesn't put the story as "the oil companies tried to unseat me from office". He doesn't frame it that way. He probably doesn't frame it that way, even if it's true, because like, you know, he doesn't want to piss them off, right? I mean, he ultimately needs their support. Now that there are many oil companies who are, at least ostensibly, supporting a price on carbon, you can view them as allies in a sense. Anyways, so if a conservative person in a state like Indiana was to do that I wouldn't be surprised if there was, there would be a candidate who would be able to get a lot of money from donors who would have an interest in unseating a Republican looking to pass serious kind of legislation. It probably wouldn't go as over as well in the general election, but honestly Indiana has become so red that you can talk about gerrymandering and stuff, but take gerrymandering out of it. I mean, Indiana is so red that even in a statewide election, it's very, very, very difficult for a Democrat to win statewide right now.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, I mean, that's part of self-sorting in general. It's not just gerrymandering. It's just how people choose to live their lives and increasingly just shut off opposition. A lot of districts are safe, and then the real action is in the primary. Just to go back on the Bob Inglis primary where he got ousted, basically the turning point in that primary was he signed a carbon pledge, Bob Inglis, and as a result Koch Industries stopped funding his campaign, right, and obviously the Koch brothers. Their reputation precedes them, right.

Michael Jefferies: Did they fund as a, did they shift all their money to his opponent?

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, to Trey Gowdy, who was running against him. Okay, and so not only did, like, they take money away, but obviously they funnel it into the other guy, and then as you said he won 70-30 even though Bob Inglis had been representing this district for decades. I mean, there's something worth unpacking there about that turning point. Actually I've taken the liberty of compiling a few snippets of Bob Inglis talking about this very issue, so buckle up.

Ralph Levinson: Thanks, Luc. I think Bob Inglis talking about his journey is really interesting. Let's take a listen.

Bob Inglis (soundbite): When I first went to Congress, I said that climate change was a bunch of hooey. Al Gore's imagination. It was all based on ignorance for me. I had not looked into the facts at all. All I knew is that Al Gore was for it, and therefore I was against it because I represented perhaps the reddest district in the reddest state in the nation, Greenville, Spartanburg, South Carolina. My son came to me when I was running for Congress again in '04. He was voting for the first time. He just turned 18, and he said to me, "Dad, I'll vote for you, but you're going to clean up your act on the environment." It was the first of three steps in a change for me. Because now I had this new constituency. My son, his four sisters, his mother, all agreed, all of whom could change the locks on the doors, and so I had to respond to this constituency. Second step for me was getting on science committee, but I got the opportunity to go to Antarctica and saw in the ice core drillings at the South Pole, the evidence is pretty clear: long stability followed by an uptick in CO2 that coincides with the Industrial Revolution. So I saw that evidence in Antarctica. The third step for me was actually amazingly another opportunity to go to Antarctica. So I went and got surprised by like I say, the third step in my change. We had the opportunity to go to the Great Barrier Reef and see coral bleaching, and I was inspired by an Aussie climate scientist who shares my worldview, and who, in the course of snorkeling with him, I figured out that we shared a worldview, that he was worshipping God in the creation, not worshiping the creation, but worshipping the God behind the creation. Subsequently, I had plenty of time to talk with him and he talked to me about changing his life to love God and love people, people that he would never know, could never know, because they'll come long after us. Because a few loudmouths in the crowd have succeeded in cultural norming and causing everyone to sit there not willing to cross the current tribal orthodoxy. The challenge here, Paul, is that is the conversation is started by liberals, right? And what we're used to as conservatives is they gin up the hysteria and then they drive through some regulations and some tax increases and grow government, right? And so it's natural that we respond with, "No, we don't want to do that." But what if we had a different conversation? It's all about economics. You're taxing something you want more of, which is income, and you're not taxing something you maybe want less of, which is CO2, because if you believe in taking care of this part of Eden that's left, and if you believe in creation care... The way it is, is we're trying to understand our responsibility in this incredible bit of Eden that's left, and to maintain it and to shepherd it. We know what to do here. The thing to do is to make it apparent in the marketplace what the costs of energy are and eliminate all the subsidies, and have a level playing field and a strong competition. If you do that you can fix climate change. I mean that's what needs to be done. The real dating of this problem starts in 2008 because in early '08, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House at that point, was on the couch literally with Nancy Pelosi in an ad saying, you know, Nancy says, "We don't agree on much, do we, Newt?" “No, we don't, Nancy, but we agree that climate change is real and we got to do something about it.” That was early '08. By the end of '08, Newt Gingrich was saying that climate change wasn't real. So was Mitt Romney. So was John Boehner. They'd switched their position from early '08. So what is it that happened? Well, I think it's the Great Recession that happened, right? I mean, what happened in October of '08, the wheels are coming off the financial system. Some people saw their opportunity. They saw the very high tide of discontent and distrust. Some people came along and spent some well-timed campaign money to create a wave against climate change and it came over the seawall and shorted out all the climate change equipment. We've been bailing ever since. Really it's '08 is when this happened.

Stephanie Sy (soundbite): Who are these people you're talking about?

Bob Inglis: Well, there's some people with some money and some vested interest. I mean, the Koch brothers, you know, apparently have some industries that wouldn't do well in a carbon-constrained world.

Stephanie Sy: And you're saying they took advantage of that period when the nation was reeling from a financial crisis to pour money toward campaigns that then came out and said we don't believe in climate change, we don't believe this is happening, we don't need to do anything about it.

Bob Inglis: Right, because what happened was in early '08 it was okay. Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Newt Gingrich, people like me, saying we think climate change is real, we don't believe in it. We believe, we just accept the data. Our faith tells us how to react to the data. But, but, you know, there was acceptance of the climate science at the beginning of '08. At the end of '08, no more.

Stephanie Sy: And it happened just like that. It seemed to happen overnight.

Bob Inglis: Oh, yes, it did, and, of course, a lot of people attribute this solely to the campaign cash, right? If in '08 people had trusted the government and trusted institutions, all that campaign cash would have created a wet ripple on the water. It wouldn't have come over the seawall, and so, therefore, campaign cash isn't the most important thing. It's a factor.

Luc Lewitanski: The cultural markers are a big deal of how people became sorted on climate issues, and I think this brings up the interesting idea of straw men, right, because I think this is interesting in terms of people's ideas about the climate and maybe this is largely because we're not talking, people are in their own bubbles, and we're talking of cross-purposes so you interact with a caricature of your opponent's viewpoints or the other party's viewpoints. And on climate issues I think the idea of you know, "environmentalists want to regulate all your pleasures and your comforts away".

Ralph Levinson: It's often a vocal minority, you know, making those claims.

Luc Lewitanski: So then it becomes about you're interrogating the motives of an individual person rather than having the debate about the issues and like, how are we all living and sharing this planet and this space? So I think it's political messaging to have driven those wedges because there were environmentalist Republicans all throughout the ‘70s and the ‘80s. Now, they didn't think of themselves as tree huggers, right? They didn't have those codes. But I mean, I think this could be interesting to talk a tiny bit of history. I mean, this is before Michael and my time. But in a way, I know this is very much your expertise as well. You can talk to us maybe a little bit about Nixon's efforts, right, in setting up the EPA, or maybe Reagan's efforts with the ozone regulation. I also think Al Gore, as much as he was well-meaning, probably also polarized it as sort of identifying it as an issue for the Democrats.

Michael Jefferies: I think you're incredibly… I think that's definitely the case. I mean, he did a lot of good and in some senses, like CCL was spurred on by the Inconvenient Truth documentary. So our founder, Marshall Saunders, saw An Inconvenient Truth, was so moved by it that he was like, "I have to do something," and we've developed out from there. But at the same time, yeah, I think that it's been a huge factor in polarizing the topic, and we're only just now kind of, I think, getting away from that.

Ralph Levinson: Al Gore was a Democrat, so you can tar him with that broad brush of being partisan, but that didn't inherently mean that what he was saying was going to be polarizing. The oil companies, the Koch brothers, as we've described before, put a lot of money in opposing narratives.

Luc Lewitanski: This goes back to what we alluded to earlier. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in the ‘70s, right?

Michael Jefferies: Yes.

Luc Lewitanski: Ronald Reagan was instrumental, even though he had factions in his cabinet who were more skeptical on regulating ozone, he ultimately pushed for the precautionary principle and said the risks of this are so great that we might as well do something about it, and this was specifically on acting about ozone depleting gases and-

Ralph Levinson: Chlorofluorocarbons. But that's my point, is it's not inherent, inherent that it was polarizing. Exactly. I think it's a little unfair to say that inherently, because he felt strongly about this and happened to be a Democrat, that that was polarizing. You know, Reagan didn't worry about that, Newt Gingrich didn't worry about that. There was even a time where Fox News didn't buy that. That was a very brief period. So Al Gore becomes an easy target.

Michael Jefferies: I don't think it was just Al Gore, and I mean that Nancy Pelosi/Newt Gingrich commercial is actually organized by the organization that Al Gore created to publicize climate solutions. I would put more of that on kind of the way in which polarization has moved in our politics. Well, when I do talk about these things, I always am going to start with talking about shared values, and I think that whenever I'm talking to people, I'm coming from a place where it's like, "I'm also a conservative. I share a lot of the same values as you do. I think that this is a serious issue. Here's why." And I try not to be super heavy-handed on science, because that raises just so many hackles. and it's like I'm not going to get anywhere when I comment and start talking about why I know that climate change is actually happening. I don't lead with science. In fact, I usually don't mention science at all when I give a presentation to conservatives. I might say, "I'm not going to lecture you about climate science. All I'm going to say is that 97% of scientists agree that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it and that it's going to be a problem that we should address". Typically I start with, you know, talking about why it is that I support this and it comes from a place of my faith. It comes from a place of wanting to pass on a good lovable world to my daughters. It comes from seeing the area that I had that was largely farmland and lots of trees and forests get turned into warehouses. I mean, that's what happened to my home, and I want to make sure that we're fighting to preserve these kind of places of natural beauty so that we can pass them on to the next generation and all the good things that they provide for our planet, the benefits they bring. I think that you really need to meet people where they are, talk about the good, talk about what you're trying to protect, and talk about the kind of benefits that could come by implementing these things rather than focusing on the doom and gloom. So yeah, I would say those three things would be really what you want to focus on. There's an economic argument to like, wind and solar are the cleanest fuel source, nuclear is extremely expensive. We should build as much wind and solar as we can handle, but we recognize that we can't only have wind and solar.

Luc Lewitanski: And there's arguments for like developing technological know-how by manufacturing these things in America, since undeniably there's going to be global demand. You don't want to be dependent on other economies who'll be able to produce solar panels for cheap, right? You don't want them to sort of steal that big business from you either, even just thinking of it from like a purely competitive economic –

Michael Jefferies: But I mean there's a national security concern of, you know, yeah, China does control, like is producing most of the solar panels and so like, you know, bringing it all full circle, like bringing back, like these kind of like faith concerns, right? It feels hard to get to a place where we're talking about realistic solutions that can pass through our political system, but also get to the heart of the matter of what, you know, Pope Francis was talking about in Laudato Si' of like having a true conversion about our whole relationship with nature and looking at our economies just focused on ‘mere consumption’ and needing to, like Dorothy Sayers was saying, are we creating a better world for ourselves, creating useless products that will end up just being thrown away and needing to create new markets to shove off our products on so that way we can continue to pursue infinite growth. You know, we're not, these solutions don't really get away from that. Like it seems to just be like, how can we continue to do what we're doing? And it's like, there's a real tension there, right?

Ralph Levinson: Absolutely.

Michael Jefferies: But at the same time, we have to say, like, is climate change such a serious issue that we just kind of need to focus on addressing that now and, like, recognize the economic issues as, like, being more, like, long-term?

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, these approaches can be complementary. But I definitely hear the contradiction that you're sort of drawing between ostensibly measures that are on the tinkering level that bring us towards where we want to get and sort of the structural change in approach that these thinkers brought into your mind. I mean, I definitely see how one can get us closer to the other, but they are kind of distinct visions in a way, and I think they might be compatible, but certainly I don't know that we get to degrowth via carbon credits. It just seems like we're incentivizing another kind of growth so far.

Michael Jefferies: Right.

Ralph Levinson: Clearly, I get what you're talking about, Michael. What is the world we want? Michael, thank you so much for your time and your energy and your efforts. I really appreciate you, not only for your time and generosity here, but for what you're doing in our country, in your community.

Luc Lewitanski: I learned a lot from this. So thank you so much for what you've shared and what you do.

Michael Jefferies: Yeah, thank you for having me on, and I really appreciate the opportunity. People who are interested in learning more about Citizens’ Climate Lobby and might be interested in, you know, we also have like a conservative action team. We do very specific conservative outreach. Please go to cclusa.org/join. You can get plugged into your local chapter that we have. We have 400 all over the United States. We have international chapters as well if you're outside of the U.S. So the best way to learn about CCL would be to either attend a local chapter meeting or to attend one of our weekly informational sessions that we do live every Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, 5 p.m. Pacific Time. So hopefully we'll have some people joining us from there.

Luc Lewitanski: Yeah, absolutely, and we'll put that in the description so that people can reach you directly. But, well, on that note, thanks again, Michael, for joining us on this episode. of Your Planet, Your Health.

Ralph Levinson: Whether we like it or not, we live in a world where people aren't going to always agree with us and see things the way we do, and to move forward, the first step is to listen.

Luc Lewitanski: And people who disagree often don't get opportunities to interact with each other these days. In our siloed environments, it becomes increasingly rare to encounter divergent views and so I think we're just trying to find common ground and understand the frames that might be more intelligible to conservatives or American Republicans in this particular instance in terms of understanding our common goals ultimately as earthlings.

Ralph Levinson: And of course with Michael we knew that there were, that it could be good faith. We understood that even if we are not faith-based, even if we're not conservative, there were clearly things that we agreed on.

Luc Lewitanski: Well, we hope that we've left you with some hope. Always, that's the driving notion here. You know, on our next episode, we're going to be talking to you about the Montreal Protocol on Ozone and how countries came together. But one of the interesting aspects of the story of how the world came together to close the ozone hole is that Reagan and Thatcher were instrumental in this and so ultimately I think getting buy-in from conservatives on climate is going to be a necessary step. So walk towards your conservative brethren and treat them with compassion and understanding.

Ralph Levinson: You mentioned Thatcher and Reagan. Interestingly, Michael mentioned that when he talks to conservative lawmakers, he brings up Ronald Reagan and the Montreal Protocol.

Luc Lewitanski: So, on that note, Ralph, I want to thank all the listeners for being part of this journey with us, and so, if you like this, feel free to share it amongst your friends. Go on your podcast player of choice and you can rate it. You can find our episode even on YouTube now and you can subscribe to the channel, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast. Whatever your preferred place to listen to long-form audio is, we'd be delighted to count you amongst us for our next adventure on the stories of climate messaging history. So Ralph, on that note, I hope that you stay planet and stay healthy.

Ralph Levinson: Thanks, Luc. That's the plan.