Jan 30, 2022 Hot Take

Some (Podcast) News, plus: Packing the courts, abolition is a process, re-thinking Paris

Some (Podcast) News

By Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt

So, most of you know that Hot Take started as a podcast back in late 2019 and we expanded with the newsletter in the summer of 2020. We took the podcast on hiatus last summer and we’re thrilled to finally share why we’ve been away so long: we’re moving to the Crooked Media network!

What does this mean for the podcast? For listeners, it will be a seamless transition; if you're already subscribed, you don't have to do anything (and if you're not, subscribe wherever you get your pods!). And once we re-launch, you'll get episodes in your feed every week. For us, it means we have more support. We got started based on a swift friendship and deep frustration with the state (and dearth) of climate discourse. But we didn’t have a ton of resources at our disposal. Amy used the resources she could from her own company, Critical Frequency. Neither one of us has ever taken a salary from the pod or the newsletter. Amy did the audio editing and producing on her own time. Mary did most of the research and outlining on her own time, and we booked the guests and planned the seasons completely on our own. If that doesn’t sound like a lot of work, let us assure you that it is, especially when it's all unpaid. Any money the pod (or this newsletter) brought in went toward paying for stuff like graphics, music, equipment, and production support whenever we could get it.

Moving to Crooked means we'll have production and marketing staff. That means we'll have help getting Hot Take out to a broader audience, and we'll be able to concentrate our work on the content—and actually be paid for it! It also means that Critical Frequency will re-focus on what it's always done, reported narrative podcasts with a focus on climate. In addition to co-hosting Hot Take, Amy will continue to work on Drilled and a new climate law pod Damages (more on that next week). And you'll still see both of us writing in various outlets along with the newsletter.

We’re proud of what we've built with Hot Take, and incredibly gratified that we managed to catch the attention of one of the biggest, most successful podcast networks out there. We firmly believe that if we’re going to avert, or even survive, the climate crisis, we have to learn how to talk about it, both in the media and among ourselves. People always talk about how the key to moving on climate is building political will—but how do you build that political will? We can’t wait to take that conversation to the masses, and we think Crooked gives us the perfect platform to do that. It says a lot that rather than create their own new take on a climate show, Crooked is trusting us to bring climate to their audience. We're not only their first climate show, but also one of their first acquisitions of another podcast (the other is a great legal podcast, Strict Scrutiny, both announced in Variety this week)

None of this means that Hot Take will no longer be a labor of love. Even though we’ll have the support of a major network, we will remain ourselves, just better rested and better resourced. We can’t wait!

We'll share more updates soon, including our re-launch date! If you can’t wait either, we suggest going back to the beginning with our just-before-COVID episodes looking back on climate change in the media in the Trump Era.

2019: It's Go Time

2018: The Wake-Up Call

2016-2017 in Review: The Hangover

BONUS: 2020: The Shitshow

The Climate Argument for Packing the Courts

By Amy Westervelt

Back in 2016, climate policy researcher Peter Erickson published a paper that looked at how expanding oil production in the U.S. increased oil consumption worldwide. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: despite all of its claims to the contrary, the fossil fuel industry does not just supply a demand. It manufactures demand.

Erickson used the Department of Interior’s own math, which has historically been quite friendly to the fossil fuel industry, to determine that if the U.S. were to expand oil production by X barrels, global oil consumption would increase by about 0.5X barrels, because the fossil fuel industry somehow always finds a way to spur demand. He shared his findings with the Department of the Interior, and this week a D.C. federal court judge used those findings as part of his justification for canceling oil and gas leases of more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico.

You might recall that President Biden canceled those leases himself earlier this year via executive order. But almost immediately a group of 13 Republican attorneys general, led by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, sued and a federal judge in Louisiana blocked that order mandating that the Biden administration hold the lease sales that had already been scheduled. (If you’re wondering if Louisiana is an oil autocracy, the answer is yes. Yes, it is.)

Environmental groups sued to block them again, saying the Department of Interior had used outdated environmental information to authorize those leases in the first place, and had thus violated the National Environmental Protect Act (NEPA). That’s what federal judge Rudolph Contreras affirmed in his decision this week, making the very obvious, but somehow also groundbreaking, conclusion that If you expand oil production, you also expand oil consumption and, therefore, greenhouse gas emissions. What’s really huge about this decision is that it actually takes into account the fact that U.S. oil companies supply the rest of the world too: In other words, when we’re calculating climate impacts we can’t limit that to just what’s getting consumed in the U.S. In his decision, Contreras wrote that the Trump Department of the Interior had “acted arbitrarily and capriciously in excluding foreign consumption from their greenhouse gas emissions” and that whatever business disruptions halting new leases in the Gulf might bring, they “do not outweigh the seriousness of the NEPA error in this case and the need for the agency to get it right.”

This case is a perfect example of how and why the courts are so critical when it comes to climate accountability. First, you’ve got the initial actions of the Republican attorneys general, which was coordinated through the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). RAGA was organized back in the late 1990s by Republicans as a response to the tobacco litigation, which had been spearheaded by Democratic attorneys general. Republicans looked at that and realized (a) it was a good idea, and it had worked, (b) Democrats outnumbered Republicans in attorneys general offices, and (c) if they were going to protect other industries from legal action (like, oh I don’t know, the fossil fuel industry), they needed to tip that balance and start strategizing their own multi-state cases. The attorneys general of Alabama, Texas, and South Carolina came together to start RAGA, and then set about fundraising and strategizing to get more Republican attorney generals elected. Within a decade, they had tipped the scales in favor of Republicans. In the past decade, RAGA has spearheaded multiple suits pushing a conservative policy agenda. Thanks to Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that gave corporations the right to donate anonymously to political campaigns, RAGA was able to create a Political Action Committee to funnel dark money from industry groups and corporations straight to the attorneys general that are supposed to regulate those industries, but are now working on their behalf instead.

But what we also see in the case on oil leases decided this week is that RAGA doesn't always win. That their opponents are getting wiser. The suit environmental groups filed to combat RAGA's efforts successfully blocked those Gulf oil leases again. And the federal judge in that case set precedent with his decision, ruling that yeah, you actually do have to consider climate implications when you’re weighing whether or not to open up land to offshore drilling.

And then of course, all legal roads—or at least most—lead to the Supreme Court. Just as this momentous decision was coming out of a D.C. federal court, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced he’s retiring, which means Biden will have an opportunity to nominate a new judge to the Supreme Court bench. Most on the left are hoping Biden puts the youngest, most progressive Black woman on the bench he can. It would be the first step toward shifting the ideological balance of the court. But that shift won’t happen for another 30 years. In the meantime, we’ve got a very pro-corporate, conservative Supreme Court that will be weighing in on critical climate issues. It’s one reason that the idea of packing the court while he can is something Biden should seriously consider. Radical as it may seem—or even be—allowing a handful of politicians and corporate titans to, once again, dictate whether or not we will act to avert climate catastrophe is far more radical.

Abolition Is a Process

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

Last March, right after we recorded one of my favorite podcast episodes—the one about prison abolition with one of our favorites guests, Drew Costley—I decided to take my personal education about prison and police abolition more seriously. It had always seemed like such a beautiful concept, but I still had so many questions. I understood that “accountability” is not synonymous with “punishment” and that a world without prisons is not necessarily a world without consequences. But… we can talk all day about what a world without prisons is NOT, but what IS it?

In trying to answer that question, I ordered a hefty amount of books, but I didn’t get around to finishing one of them until last week (shut up!). I started with Derecka Purnell’s Becoming Abolitionists. I started the book looking for answers, but found far more questions. I would have expected that to be frustrating, but it wasn’t. It was actually clarifying. I learned that abolition is less about having all the answers and more about having the courage to ask the questions.

And it’s not about an overnight process, either. It’s about dismantling the systems that lead to crime in the first place, instead of punishing it once it happens. It’s about caring for the victim as well as the perpetrator—because both are human—and trying to make them whole again. In other words, it’s about creating a new world while living in the old one. That takes time, and intention. And iteration. Which is something that probably sounds really familiar to climate folks.

I think all of this applies to fossil fuel abolition too. As much as I love the idea, we are not going to get off fossil fuels overnight. And we still don't have a clear picture of what that new world looks like. Right now, we’re talking less about “abolition” and more about “deconstruction.” But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t state abolition as our ultimate goal. Otherwise, we get so lost in “process” that all we ever get is gradual steps and “bridge fuels.” All trees, no forest. Instead of passing through the middle, we get stuck there. And getting halfway out of an emergency is still an emergency. There’s no middle ground when it comes to a livable future.

Dreaming in Paris

By Amy Westervelt

In the aftermath of the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, advocates for climate action almost universally agreed: The targets set in that agreement were weak. Not only was the goal of keeping warming "well below 2 degrees Celsius" weak, but also the details of the agreement wouldn't even get us to that target. In the seven years since that agreement was reached, as we've watched country after country fall short of their targets, a significant number of folks have begun talking about Paris as a real goal.

James Hansen—the climate scientist who first testified to Congress back in 1988 that global warming was already evident, and whose 1990s predictions for warming have predicted exactly what we're experiencing today with eerie accuracy—has been saying since even before the Paris summit back in 2015 that the 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming is dangerous. Hansen has argued for goals that align with science. In the simplest possible terms: burning fossil fuels has created an imbalance in our atmosphere, pumping too many greenhouse gases (and especially CO2) into it, leading to runaway climate change. To address that problem we have to get back to a balanced atmosphere, of no more than 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide. In other words, zero degrees of warming. Zero is the goal. Not 1.5, not 2, and certainly not "net zero," which means nothing. The goal is zero. We’re at 1.2 degrees now. Look around you. Does it look safe to you?

Are we on track to get to zero? Hell no. Can we get on track to get there? It's not looking great. Does that mean we shift the goalposts and aim lower? No! “When all else fails, lower your expectations,” is the worst possible mantra for the climate movement. Realism is fine, necessary even, but you don't stop fighting for what you know is right, or change your definition of “livable”, just because it looks like you're not going to get there.