Photo:  President Donald Trump delivers delivers remarks to troops at Al Udeid Air Base, 
Thursday, May 15, 2025, in Doha, Qatar. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

Thinking about getting into the influence-peddling game in Washington? It’s hard to imagine a better time than right now. We’re nine months into the second Trump regime, and already, as the journalist and author Casey Michel 

, “America has never seen corruption like this.”

Michel’s argument rings true no matter what kind of unsavory influence you’re interested in. Bribing foreign officials on behalf of American corporations? One of Trump’s first actions was an executive order 

Former politician or White House official looking to leverage your connections on behalf of foreign regimes — particularly the authoritarian ones as committed to oil extraction as they are disinterested in human rights and political freedoms? Recognizing, alas, that that characterization increasingly applies to the United States as well, the volume of fossil fuel money seeking an investment home is seemingly limitless.

Or, perhaps you’d rather shape U.S. domestic policy. In that case, you might follow the lead of the oil and gas industry, which, by one measure, 

poured some $450 million into the 2024 election cycle

 to support Trump and Republican politicians. The payoff came quickly: Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” 

gives the industry $80 billion in subsidies

Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World

, was published during the innocent days (joking!) of the Biden administration. The book explored the web of lobbyists, PR gurus, and former politicians who are paid to influence the U.S. government on behalf of foreign regimes. It’s a slimy world — but also a prestigious, a lucrative, and an enthusiastically bipartisan one. (For a deeper dive into 

 and foreign lobbying’s lengthy legacy, you can read or listen to 

In mid-July I spoke with Michel about the unsettling proportion of authoritarian influence peddling that is funded by oil, how petrostates are seeking to buy influence among the White House and its tech oligarch backers, and whether the sheer shamelessness and clumsiness of Trump-era corruption might prove to be a silver lining in spurring future reforms.

The conversation below has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy.

Want to listen to the whole thing? Adam’s extended interview with Casey Michel is available on the Drilled podcast here (or wherever you get your podcasts). 

, “America Has Never Seen Corruption Like This,” pretty much sums it up. Let’s start with some of the arguments you make.

The article was trying to survey the field of the last six months or so — how historic the scope and the scale of the corruption emanating from and running through the White House and the world of Trump affiliates and the Trump family and, of course, the Trump Organization, truly is.

Donald Trump is by no means the first president or administration embroiled in corruption scandals. Go back to the days of Ulysses S. Grant and his family members and inner circles. Warren Harding and Teapot Dome. Richard Nixon and Watergate. Even though [Watergate] is predominantly remembered as a political story, which it absolutely was, it was also a story of rank corruption, especially corporate corruption, regarding linkages with the White House. Those are all scandals unto themselves.

But what we have seen over the last six months blows all of that out of the water. There really is no historic comparison for the scope, the scale, and the speed with which all of this has happened. You can talk about the Qatari jet, the $400 million luxury liner gifted from a foreign dictatorship directly to a sitting president. You can talk about the crypto and the meme coins. You could talk about the Trump Organization itself. That’s all beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.

You could also talk about the policy developments and how the administration has taken an absolute sledgehammer to whatever kind of anti-corruption bonafides the U.S. once had. Almost all of those have been completely decimated, either unenforced, completely dissolved, [or had resources slashed] for investigations themselves.

, focuses on governments, authoritarian regimes around the world, hiring [former] U.S. officials, politicians, influencers of various kinds who have access to the U.S. government and can shape American policy. What is the state of the corrupt union when it comes to foreign influence on the United States?

The state of affairs right now is, I don’t know, terrible? Terrifying? Unsettling?

I guess it depends if you’re making money or not.

Well, sure. It depends on what kind of line of work you’re in, I suppose. What kind of scruples [you have] about working with some of the most heinous regimes around the world.

Just as a bit of context, in the United States of America it’s perfectly legal for you or I or any other American to go lobby on behalf of not only any cause that we want, but any regime that we want. You and I can, right now, go talk to our legislators about how wonderful the regime in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates or Gabon or Venezuela might be.

That’s predominantly because in the First Amendment we have the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, which is just an old-timey way of saying 

. If [people are] being paid to do that by these foreign governments, they just have to register with the Department of Justice and declare what they’re doing and disclose how much they’re making.

And you and I can go online to the Department of Justice website and look through that database of all of these American lobbyists who are selling themselves to regime after regime around the world. It’s not just traditional lobbyists in DC. It’s PR specialists, consultants, many former members of Congress or previous administrations. A whole constellation of American industries are now congealing within the one broader umbrella industry of foreign lobbying.

This is now a multi-billion-dollar industry. These are extremely effective networks at implementing policies that these foreign regimes want to see implemented. It’s things like arms sales, things like the lifting or prevention of sanctions. It’s even things like fast-tracking energy policies that benefit hydrocarbon producers. Pushing off or gutting green or clean tech reforms that places like China or Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia — major oil producers — do not want to see pursued.

It’s not just that they’re lobbying officials. These lobbyists [are] really enmeshing themselves in the highest levels of American policymaking. In many ways, crafting American foreign policy that should have been crafted by American legislators or those in the White House.

It very much seems like we’re in a golden age of these foreign lobbying networks being able to operate in the shadows without the rest of us having any idea what they’re doing.

I wanted to ask you about the state of the influence industry in Washington right now. On one hand, there’s tons of money to be made from foreign governments seeking access to the Trump administration. On the other hand, [there] is the fact that the administration is so shameless — or the fact that Trump himself makes decisions based on who talks to him most recently, who flatters him the most, whatever. Does that make it harder for some of the traditional levers of influence in Washington to sell themselves as having access that the average person doesn’t have?

Far be it from me to feel bad about any of these figures, but yes. Through Trump’s first term and certainly well into the Biden era, there was a playbook that they had followed for decades. It was an outgrowth of what traditional lobbying for domestic causes looked like: back-room conversations, one-on-one meetings, in some cases donating directly to election or reelection campaigns. There was no secret sauce. It was about who you knew and who you could access and what kind of doors you could open.

Now what we see with Trump’s second term is that that playbook certainly still exists. And of course much of it does come down to, at the end of the day, who these figures know and what doors they can open. But the range of tactics and tools now available has just been blown out of the water.

I never thought I would see a world in which a sitting president has direct access to not only the so-called meme coins, but is more than happy to host effective pay-to-play dinners for those who have given or invested the most amount of money in a specific crypto venture. I should have had an idea with Trump’s first term, but I never thought I would actually see the day where a sitting president has his real estate company gallivanting around the world and signing up deals in dictatorship after dictatorship, foreign country after foreign country.

I don’t know how traditional lobbying firms are adapting, but I think it is indicative that one of the key figures that has opened up Trump to the world of crypto and crypto-related investments is someone who emerged from that traditional lobbying world, 

, who was jailed on foreign lobbying charges, then pardoned by Trump, and in the last year or two has emerged as this key player in the crypto space. Manafort is many things, but there is a certain skill set that he brings to bear in terms of opening up avenues of influence.

What are the currencies of influence these days? You mentioned crypto. There’s been reporting about the Saudi government, among others, 

and data centers to woo the administration and its tech oligarch backers. But what are they trafficking in these days?

The barest explanation is money, right? It’s whatever means of financing directly into the American president’s pocket, his family’s pockets, his businesses’ pockets, his allies’ pockets. It’s whatever the vehicle of value is. If that’s opening up a new Trump resort in Vietnam, so be it. If that is investing $300 million on a Trump meme coin so you can have dinner with the president, so be it. If that is an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates agreeing that it will participate in exchanges using that Trump meme coin or whatever the other crypto venture is, so be it.

You mentioned AI. This is a space I don’t think has gotten nearly enough attention. It’s a very clear direction that especially the Saudis and the Emiratis have gone in. The most recent agreement between President Trump and Gulf partners is hundreds of millions of dollars in Gulf investment in artificial intelligence, opening up of data centers, and, of course, providing leverage from these regimes over American AI companies themselves or American AI policy writ large.

You do have to comment on the relative savvy, I suppose, of figures like MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] in Saudi Arabia or MBZ [Mohammed bin Zayed] in the United Arab Emirates realizing which way the wind is blowing: that there are all manner of tech oligarchs surrounding Donald Trump and his presidency, and more than willing to back him come hell or high water, and then opening up these new streams of investment from these dictatorships elsewhere. It’s one investment vehicle after another.

It is remarkable how much money these regimes have access to and how desperate they seem to be to find anywhere to invest it. And most of it comes from oil. Some are maintaining the facade of participating in global climate negotiations, transitioning their economies away from oil. But this money is related to the extraction and production of fossil fuels. And it finally has somewhere to go.

It seems like any reason for which a Western investor or fund manager might have had for not accepting that money, any compunction, no longer exists. Is that a fair way to put it, [that] there’s really no shame associated with taking that money anymore?

There’s no shame. There’s no compunction. There’s no reason and no structural incentive to say no. Not only because you should have extremely minimal concern about any kind of investigation or prosecution so long as you remain in the current administration’s good graces. But also because if you do say no [to this type of foreign investment], then your competitor down the street will say yes.

This is a dynamic we have seen elsewhere. It’s a dynamic that does predate the current president. It’s something that we saw in the lobbying industry writ large [and] in the consulting industry, in particular, 

. You can look at oil-producing regime after oil-producing regime around the world — Russia, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan. It is breathtaking to see the scope and breadth of opportunities that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has opened up for the regime. Almost all of that money, if not all of it, [comes] from the production of oil and the broader climate destruction therein.

If you go back to 2018, 2019, after the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia and MBS weren’t exactly 

, but they were having lobbying clients, consulting clients, even investors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere turn them away and turn them down, and say, 

We will not be seen doing any business with this regime.

 That was only six, seven years ago. I can’t even fathom getting to that point again. I have no idea what the Saudi regime would have to do to get to that point where American lobbying shops, American investors are turning down Saudi money.

You can cast around the American economy, whether it’s in Hollywood [or] the sports industry, especially things like golf or tennis or boxing. I’m sure at some point down the line the NBA and the NFL will be opening themselves up to Saudi money. I hope it’s not my beloved Portland Trailblazers, who are currently for sale. I live in dread that the Saudis will be the one to purchase them. Or, again, all of the image management shops or even things like Twitter or X. It’s a bottomless list of industries that have opened themselves up to investments from the regime, or opened themselves up to the private equity, hedge fund, and venture capital firms that have opened themselves to Saudi financing.

It’s not just [Trump son-in-law Jared] Kushner. It’s the [venture capital firm] Andreessen-Horowitzes of the world. It really is the biggest names across industry after industry that are now being bankrolled directly by, or at least indirectly via these private investment funds, Saudi wealth. That oil money that the Saudis now have — I think they’re [the Saudi Public Investment Fund] going to pass the $1 trillion mark, if they haven’t already. This is just one regime of many that are realizing, 

Oh, in the United States of America, it is now the golden era of white-collar crime.

 And it’s not going to end anytime soon.

There’s obviously the scale of the literal corruption, as we’ve talked about. But there’s also the sense of shame that used to be associated with it. You mentioned the years following the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, [when] there was at least a 

 that companies were turning away from doing business with a regime that would murder journalists.

There was always an element of performance because they were clearly hungry for that money and got back in as soon as they could. But what feels different about the last six months, even the last couple of years, is just how quickly that pretense has faded, or at least the sense that they need to keep up that performance. There’s been sort of a collective shrug, in some ways, because it’s just too much [money].

Again, charitably, if you pull back and examine the incentive structures that these firms, these industries, are engaging in — there is a reality that if they have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, or if they just have any kind of general profit-driven motive, yes, morals are great, but if you’re not committing any crime and don’t have to be concerned about prosecution, then all you’re doing [by taking a moral stand] is ceding ground to your competitors who have fewer scruples than you. Or, who knows — maybe they have just as many scruples as you but also can read the landscape and realize that if they don't do this, someone else will.

You can look at this from the perspective of people who are hired as representatives of these regimes saying, 

I’m actually a good guy. I’m going to put this money to good use. If I’m inside the tent rather than outside it, I can make more of a difference.

 You can look at it geopolitically. I remember [presidential] candidate Joe Biden saying we’re going to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah.” And [then as president] he’s there 

The American-Saudi partnership has decades and decades behind it at this point.

 which quotes one of these lobbyists from back in the early 1990s. [He] was working for people like Saddam Hussein or the then dictator in places like Liberia. I mean, truly the world’s worst. Someone asked him about it. He said, 

Look, at the end of the day, it’s just money, and shame is for sissies.

I think that is an ethos that was maybe a little ahead of its time because that is certainly something that we see every single day. There is no, if there ever was, space for or consideration of something like shame. Every day, it appears an outdated phenomenon and term. And that’s too bad because shame can be a wonderful tool in the right hands.

The ethos of the first foreign lobbying regulations was, 

 This is all the way back in the 1930s, when they [U.S. lobbyists] were exposed as working for the Nazis and the Soviets and Mussolini. 

We can’t ban this, but if we bring it to light, bring some transparency, we can shame these Americans into no longer working with these regimes.

 Rarely has that worked. It’s very nice in theory, but when you talk about the kind of money involved in practice, it is very rare.

 has [reported] over the last couple of months about the General Services Administration [GSA] — which, tellingly, is now run by a former KKR private equity executive — 

 like McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, my former employer EY, and others, justify their huge federal contracts. I wonder what you make of that effort, whether it’s just an anti-“woke,” anti-DEI effort, or if there’s some substance to telling consulting firms to justify billions of dollars’ worth of contracts.

I would think that if anyone is well placed to justify billions of dollars of contracts, it would be these consulting firms.

It’s like DOGE, right? In theory, yes, we should root out fraud and waste and abuse. And yes, American taxpayer dollars should be used to the furthest extent they can. Maybe they [the GSA requests] stem from DEI considerations and anti-“woke” considerations. Maybe there was just someone at BCG or McKinsey or whomever that caught the ire of someone who has Trump’s ear. I don’t know what is actually leading this push itself.

I will say, of course, I have no love lost for any of these firms. Maybe a few of them. Something you and I have talked about in the past is how many of these firms — McKinsey, Teneo, Boston Consulting Group — have worked for regimes like Saudi Arabia and opened up the U.S. to all manner of Saudi influence, as well as plenty of other regimes around the world.

The one that comes to mind recently — the 

 on how Boston Consulting Group had been involved, or at least a number of senior partners had been involved, in, euphemistically, creating “exit packages” for Palestinians from Gaza to effectively whitewash Israeli ethnic cleansing campaigns. So, no, when it comes to the Trump administration and some of these consulting firms, please don’t ask me who I’m rooting for.

I suspect they’ll all find a way to win at everyone else’s expense, as they typically do.

I wanted to ask how you’re personally, as a human being, covering this stuff [and] processing this time in history.

On my most optimistic days, it is trying to convince myself that this is a period similar to what we saw in the 1880s, 1890s, and what we saw in the late 1960s, early 1970s in terms of not only things like wealth inequality or corporate sway and lording over American politics, but abuse of power, especially out of the executive office itself. No historic parallel is exactly parallel. This era is completely different in so many ways. But trying to find a historic resonance gives me reason to believe that there is, to use an overused image, a pendulum swing coming in the near future. On my most optimistic days, that is what I like to consider.

Now, on my most pessimistic days, it is simply the reality and the notion that all empires fall and the United States of America has always been and continues to be an empire — in some cases in the most literal sense, with any number of territories that we still have not yet elevated to statehood.

So I swing between those, depending on the day. One thing that gets me through this — [there is] a stack of Batman comics behind me. That always helps. But also just reading widely on things that have nothing to do with American history or, in some cases, nothing to do with history whatsoever.

You’ve got to have those mental health breaks. You can’t just be following the news all day long or you’d probably die.

I too am finding a lot of solace in books — analog, print book[s], where there are no links, no ads, no breaking news. I know it wasn’t written by an algorithm. There’s sort of a hard separation from the reality of the world. And I will, actually, say: The version of the world that comes through the media is not the whole reality. This is not [me] raging against the “fake news media” or whatever. There is an algorithmic bias toward outrage, and there is a rebalancing, whether it’s a graphic novel or a comic or a print book, that helps me reset.

I have to read analog books. I don’t have a Kindle. I have a pen and I have my book.

One of the benefits of reading history is realizing that the sky has been falling for every nation for centuries, for millennia, so on and so on. Who knows, maybe we’ll get through this or maybe we won’t, but much of it is beyond our control.

And you try to do your good work where you can. You try to make a difference where you can. And you try to spend time with people that you care about and who care about you in turn.

I’m glad you’ve kept the faith and the strength to keep doing this [work] because it is important. Even when it feels like the stuff that you and I talk about — human rights, democracy, corruption — [are] not at the top of the Project 2025 [agenda], let’s say.

Well, to quote one of my favorite Batman movies, “the night is darkest just before the dawn.” Maybe things will get darker yet. I suspect they probably will. I certainly hope that there is a dawn coming.

You’ve got to look for those silver linings where you can and try to have conversations that are worthwhile.

The Golden Age of Oil-Funded Influence

JORDAN PETERSON: One of the most useful things that you need I think was to work on this idea of the integration of the shadow because he was really interested in the idea of evil

What do you do with the part of you that's aggressive and and potentially malevolent? you just crush it? that's the super-ego response in some sense you just put it behind you so to speak is that a possibility or do you admit to its existence and bring it into the game?

DANIEL: You’re listening to Carbon Bros. I’m Daniel Penny

DANIEL: And that’s our old friend, Doctor Jordan Peterson, speaking in 2018 to a young man about integrating the so-called “shadow self.”

“Integration” is one of Peterson’s favorite concepts, borrowed from the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. It’s the idea that through a series of direct confrontations with our darkest fears and desires, we can come to accept and even channel that side of our personalities in a constructive way. You often hear about shadowwork from manosphere types when they want to defend the idea of masculine aggression.

PETERSON you should be able to do things that you wouldn't do that's that's like the definition of a genuinely moral person they could do it but they don't and then that's not cowardice and so that's you burn off the things that get in the way of that Integration.

it's a forest fire that allows for new growth because if you burn something off you might think well there's nothing left it's like that's not true if it's Deadwood then you have room for new growth.

AMY: Love that he’s using a forest fire as a metaphor, given all the climate denial he peddles.

DANIEL: Yeah I included that bit on purpose. But on this fourth and final episode of Carbon Bros, we’re thinking about Integration a little more broadly. The question we’re trying to ask is how do we bring men back into the climate movement? How do we shift the terms of the climate conversation from energy dominance and macho climate denial–

AMY: Or techno-fixes and planetary escape—to something else? Because the earth is getting warmer every year. We’ve already passed 1.5 C and with any limits on oil and gas drilling lifted, the Department of Energy putting out reports that climate change isn’t a big threat after all, and the all out assault on the EPA, we’re on track to hit 3C of warming by 2100. If we’re leaving men to get suckered by gender grifters and climate disinformation, we’re not going to fix things anytime soon.

DANIEL: So how do we integrate the shadow? The manosphere, and all of the angst and toxicity it represents? Because ignoring it didn’t work in 2024 and it’s not going to work in 2026 or 2028 (assuming we still have elections then). Is there a place for a different kind of masculinity in the climate movement?

That's what we're talking about on this episode of Carbon Bros.

Amy: Again and again, the biggest issue we kept coming up against in our research for this show is that men feel an intense social pressure to provide, and when faced with a choice between the economy and a livable planet, a lot of guys are choosing their jobs. This is the essence of “breadwinner masculinity.” And it’s especially true among energy workers, who are overwhelmingly white and male.

I believe the tariffs are a good thing. It is gonna bring jobs back to America. Um, and what comes with American jobs is energy.

President Trump, I just would like to personally thank you for what you do for the coal industry and what you're doing to make our everyday lives better.

President Trump, for the bottom of our hearts, truly thank you for everything you have done for the coal industry and for the hardworking blue collar American person. Um, we are truly better off today than we were under the last administration.

DANIEL: These are clips of coalminers the Trump administration brought to the white house recently. They’ve got these strange looks on their faces, like hostages reading off cue-cards.

AMY: Trump followed the same playbook back in 2017, blame Obama-era regulations for keeping fossil fuel workers out of jobs. And he’s doing it again now, blaming Biden’s climate policy. It’s an old trick the Republicans have been using since the Reagan era to divide the working class. But these frenzies of deregulation don’t actually bring back the jobs. In fact they’re just cutting more jobs.

DANIEL: Yeah, even though they’re making record profits, the oil and gas industry is shrinking its workforce because of automation. And the coal industry in the US has been declining for decades because coal is a more expensive source of energy compared to solar and natural gas. The cause of all this isn’t Washington or blue-haired trans climate protestors. It’s bosses and bottom lines. But the solutions Democrats have offered so far have sucked pretty hard.

BIDEN: “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well. Give me a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”

AMY: Learn to code! Not surprisingly, most of these computer science retraining programs have been a bust. And telling fossil fuel workers they were just going to have to switch to entirely different careers reveals a deep ignorance of life on the ground for these guys and their families.

DANIEL: At the end of episode 3, we heard from Mike Levien, a social scientist  at Johns Hopkins who studies the oil and gas industries and the push for carbon capture in Louisiana. And toward the end of our conversation, I asked him about this problem. How to win over men who think their interests are with the status quo.

MIKE LEVIEN: You know, it's a problem I've thought a lot about. My mom's family's all from a small bayou in Louisiana, shrimpers and my grandpa's generation, the second generation, you know, didn't see much of a future in shrimping. And they all, a person, work in an industry, whether, you know, machinists and fabrication shops, or they're working in shipyards or, you know, as welders or they're doing something related to oil and gas drilling.

On the coast people think, “oh, we have these sort of backward looking coal miners and conservative guys who work out on oil drilling rigs, who are our opponents in dealing with climate change.”

if they could lead this whole thing, I mean, that would be amazing. But of course there is this huge problem and, you know, which is just that their current interests are completely aligned with the perpetuation of these industries because they depend on it for their livelihoods.

DANIEL: So how do we get these guys to join the climate movement?

I think this is where like, you know, thinking about this material program, but not just the material program, but kind of the cultural politics, which we could kind of challenge the hegemony of fossil fuel industries without kind of, you know, throwing lots of blue collar workers, uh, you know, out of their jobs with sort of nothing for them and emboldening of reaction and throwing them into strengthening the right wing, you know, counter movement against climate action.

your question about gender is an interesting one, right? Because. You know, you might be right that there's a, to toxic masculinity, you know, that is involved in people's identification with, um, work in the fossil fuel industry. Right. Um, and so, um, are we going to denounce people for being, you know, for, for that? Or are we going to, um, in a sense try to like tap into it or pivot from it in a way by saying like, there there is a, you know, a job here or there is a program here that you know, is recognizing like the sacrifice that you made, right? By working for all these years and risking black lung and risking occupational disease and, you know, all these other things.

AMY: There has been a lot of talk—and some real effort over the years about a just transition, which means everything from making sure energy is affordable to taking care of energy workers. But the idea of gender affirming jobs is uhhhh interesting!

DANIEL:  It also wasn't just that it had to be a gender affirming job, but that any kind of wage replacement program that would be initiated would have to be marketed and, and kind of conveyed in such a way that it's not seen as welfare.

DANIEL: Exactly. You know, that like we accept the idea of veterans benefits, but many people reject the idea of welfare for those who are out of work.

But those two I, those two things are actually like, pretty much the same. We've just decided that people who've served in the military get special social privileges because of the job that they had.

however we deal with all of the people (mostly men) who will inevitably be put out of work by the switch to renewables, we have to find a way to show they’re not being forgotten, that they’re not looked down upon. Even if I hate oil, I respect the people who put their lives in danger to drill it.

AMY: Yeah definitely! None of these folks are responsible for decisions being made in the C suite.

DANIEL: guess what, it’s capitalism. And of course the fossil fuel industry jumps at every chance to remind people that real men work the rigs and we’ll all be screwed if those jobs go away. But that doesn’t make any of it less 

al. In fact a recent Equimundo survey found that men are actually feeling more anxious about being a good provider than ever.

AMY: Yep, exactly. Surprise, surprise,. Um, it's like, of course everyone is feeling the pinch more and men have this additional layer of. Having this social expectation that they are providers and that they're, you know, breadwinners and all of that stuff.

Um, this Mundo report and survey was really, really interesting. I was surprised by a few of the stats that they found. So, um, I reached out to the researchers who led that effort, Caroline Hayes and Dr. Isha Gupta to talk about it.

so men who are in what we have called, and others in our field have called it the man box, right? And so this idea that when you are following these very stereotypical, rigid norms of masculinity, you're in the man box.

Those men tend to. Be the ones who are actually denying climate change. And from what we understand, this idea of sort of this very manliness of eating red meat and, driving these gas guzzling trucks, et cetera.

It's a sort of heuristic of what it means to be this very typical man box man as opposed to ,soy boys or beta males who eat things like plant-based diets or something like that .

when we're thinking about, you know, as Isha talked about the man box and norms around masculinity, you have things like hyper individualism. You have things like, um, resource accumulation in order to be the provider.

And this idea of economic stress, right, which is linked to their kind of identity as a provider, has been so prominent as a finding for us, and it's consistent.

taking those to the extreme and, and wealth extraction and resource accumulation. You can see the direct link between, you know, the, the consequences, um, for our environment when, when that sort of, um, you know, globalized on a mass scale.

DR. GUPTA:  When we think about the harmful aspects of masculinity. it is things like being dominant, self-reliant, being very tough, and all of all of that is in complete juxtaposition, right? To what we need to be, to be actually concerned about the climate and the environment, which requires care and compassion, and a desire to think about public good, ?

Compassion is something that we have seen in our work in terms of how we see men sort of, we actually come from a starting point that men are carers,

that we want men to be carers. We want men to be caring in all their relationships. Not just when they have children, but to partners, to their elderly parents, to their, to themselves, right? And then with that comes the idea that you care for your community. You care for your planet. So we, we have been trying to work on several solutions we, you know, that promotes caring masculinity as the core solution For this planet.

When men care, they have better mental health, they have better relationships, they're happier overall when they care for themselves.

DANIEL: Care is definitely at the core of this shift. And you’ll hear this keyword from a lot of the folks in this episode. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is this idea of the “girl dad,” when kind of macho guys have daughters and realize that women are human, too.

LOGAN PAUL CLIP: Thinking about having a daughter, my mind went to some dark places. I don’t want to sound like a woke asshole, but dude, women have it hard.

AMY REACTION:  . I'll take it. Fine. Logan Paul, I'm glad you realize women have feelings.

DANIEL: So I thought, there must be guys who go through  similar thing when it comes to the climate crisis. Like being a dad isn’t going to get you to believe in the existence of climate change, but it might increase how much you care about it, because now you’re thinking about the future of your child and the world they’re going to live in.

AMY REACTION: Totally. And actually we know that it impacts some people's, um, thinking around whether or not to even have kids.

DANIEL: So to understand the climate dads, I spoke to Jason Sandman. He's a community organizer and co-founder of a group called Climate Dads

DANIEL:  Jason, welcome to Carbon Bros.

JASON:. It is so nice to be here. Thank you for the time to, uh, share my perspective.

DANIEL: And, and you're, are you calling from a, a garage right now? Are you getting your car repaired?

JASON: Yeah, yeah.with the federal tax rebates, um, for electric vehicles closing pretty soon, my wife and I decided to. To purchase one, and we are at the dealership. they're redoing the software and updating it

JASON: we will be taking this conversation while I'm here at the. dealership. we're always multitasking as a parent,

DANIEL:  could you just tell the audience a little bit about what Climate Dads is and, who you are?

JASON: So climate dance has really started from just like, two guys, two dads with two sons about the same age, who, uh, both realized that they had some of the same concerns about raising a, a child, uh, during this time.

JASON:,  having a child is like this eureka moment. You're like, wow, I'm not only responsible for myself, I'm responsible for another human being forever,, until I die. So you start to think about. Like, what does that mean? How can I support and uplift them?

What challenges are they gonna face? And you get in, they have all these questions, you're like, oh, maybe this climate change thing impacts us.

DANIEL:  let's talk about the specific dadliness of it. Often it's moms or women in general who take more initiative, in terms of the family, you could say green lifestyle: things like composting, or even in advocacy, you know, putting, their identity as a mom first.

JASON:  We were way behind the moms Clean Air Force. Moms doing this, matriarchs, grandma's doing that. It's been for decades and I think I can say this, even though it's controversial dads, we got some catching up to do. It's not the burden of, of the mom to carry this stuff.

And so we just wanted to, like, part of climate Dads really is just to like change that stigma

And so it was like, let's lead by example. let's go get solar panels on our house and, and then say like, Hey, we can do this together and here's how dads can be a part of it. Let's, uh, let's start bringing our kids hiking or camping together and let them see the natural world and take the lead on that.

DANIEL:  So often the right is able to pit climate and environmental concerns against job growth, against wages, and that makes a lot of men in particular say, you know, okay, maybe climate change is real, maybe it's not, but I gotta worry about how much gas costs.

climate Dad was kind of a convener and almost a facilitator initially, locally.

Here's what's going on at the local utility. Here's how they're providing rebates, sir, here's a contractor that's doing this kind of work. Um, give them a call.

JASON: And then we just kind of found out through. unsolicited messages from a dad in Tempe, Arizona or or a, or a grandfather or an uncle in Australia. It was like, damn, kind of thinking about starting a chapter of climate dads out here. What are you guys working on? Can we, can we incorporate together?

DANIEL:  the 2024 election, in many ways was seen as, as kind of the, the, the toxic masculinity election,  powered by this kind of male grievance culture in addition to a lot of fossil fuel money.  How do we win some of those guys back?

JASON:  if you really want to get the, these fathers on board, it's not a responsibility of any one person

It's think about how you can maybe at the micro scale at your house, just kind of work on that and lead by example or your family work on, work on yourself. And then maybe, maybe that's an example of how like, oh, I feel pretty confident here. I did some things. This looks kind of good.

And then you, just, like you, you reach out to like a, your, your Reddit, your subreddit or to like your Facebook group or to like, you know, your local church group or like whoever you're with. Like, Hey, this kind of matters to me. Does somebody else, does it matter to anybody else? Let's talk about it. Let's get together.

AMY REACTION: This actually reminds me of one of the first episodes of Hot Take Mary Heglar and I did. We had done a couple of episodes talking about how the climate movement needed to be more intersectional and open up space for new leaders, and we were really surprised to get a flood of emails from climate concerned white guys who were like totally agree but also I care about climate and it sounds like you don’t want me here. So we did a whole episode about all the things you can do in between being in charge and not participating at all. Jason seems to be offering an option here!

DANIEL:  Yeah,  the people who have the most power in the climate movement in terms of being heads of organizations or involved in policy are men. But the everyday spaces of the climate movement have become so feminized that then when men are interested in participating, they feel this sense of like, well, is this even for me?

AMY:  Yeah, it's really interesting. It's a whole interesting dynamic.

DANIEL: and that's such a mistake, right? So we gotta, we gotta fix that. And I think, I think Jason is, is offering one way out of that trap.

AMY: These are middle-aged guys. And I think it’s great that Jason and the other dads are getting together to swap notes on heat pumps and bike lanes. And that does change how we perceive climate as a feminine or masculine issue. But there’s still the question of the young guys, the dudes we started with in episode 1 of this series, who swung for Trump because he appealed to their most bro-ish instincts.

DANIEL: Yes. There are a lot of rightwing fitness and martial arts influencers out there, but it’s a bit harder to find the lefty version. BUT I DID FIND HIM AMY! And his name is Colin Davis. Now I’m not saying Colin is the left’s Joe Rogan–and we don’t endorse the idea of trying to build one–but he is a charismatic fitness coach and former wrestler who comes out against the Andrew Tate types. And he’s been quite outspoken about climate. And it really gave me a moment of hope amidst so much despair.

COLIN:  I do personal training and coaching full-time. I guess I do social media full-time now. I mean, in the last three months, Instagram has become like a job. previous to that, it was still just an app on my phone. So this is a, this, this is a very new world for me, um, of like, like content creation for things that I really care about. And not just using it as like, for my personal training. Um, and all, like, all of the advice that I got from other coaches and people in the business was like, yeah, just don't talk about politics, just. Be apolitical, whatever you want to. I don't know how you can be apolitical right now

And then as soon as I started being open about my politics and essentially talking shit. my following blew up and I've had the opportunity to meet a ton of other leftists gym goers and people that I am politically aligned with that also are in the fitness space.

And it's been incredible. Um, 'cause I, yeah, I think it feels isolating for a lot of guys that are left-leaning and still traditionally masculine to be like, uh, where, who do I fit in with? You know, like, So, yeah, I'm trying to that gap a little bit. At least online.

DANIEL: Colin has a “silent majority” theory of the case, which is basically that the loudest right-wing fitness and manosphere voices don’t represent the views of their audience, but because they mostly go unchallenged, they win by default.

AMY:  That's fascinating actually. 'cause I have that same theory for climate deniers in general. Like, um, there's this huge perception in media that there's way more climate deniers than there actually are because they're the people who take the time to like write angry letters or actually call newsrooms.

DANIEL:  How does bodybuilding or strength training, or combat sports e, how do those things fit into a left leaning point of view, or a vision?

Transcription

The kings of the manosphere love to talk about “integrating” a man’s warrior and civilized self, but how about integrating men, and new ideas of masculinity, into the climate movement instead? What does that look like, who’s doing it, and where are there opportunities for repair and progress?

Carbon Bros, Ep 4: Integration

Carbon Bros

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Photo: Offshore wind turbines in the Irish Sea, by 

The plan was to sink more than a billion dollars into the ocean off Rhode Island to build Revolution Wind. The 705mw, $1.5bn offshore wind farm had been 15 years in the making. The first environmental assessments started in 2011 and the first turbine was installed in September 2023. As planned, the turbines would power 350,000 homes and operate across two states. Its developer, Ørsted, might be Danish but in its corporate communications it sought to emphasize how the work would be all-American. The manufacturing chain the project depended on spanned 40 U.S. states and employed hundreds of unionized workers. By August 2025, Revolution Wind was four-fifths complete, with 45 out of 65 wind turbines installed. 

So far, the Canadian province of Ontario has been the only jurisdiction in the world 

, but the U.S. looks like it is about to join them. Revolution Wind was not the only offshore wind farm to have its approvals yanked by the Trump administration in an effort to plunge its value as an asset into the sea. On his first day in office Trump signed an executive order that “temporarily” halted all federal wind permits. The passing of the federal government’s finance bill ended tax credits for wind and solar projects unless construction started within a year of the bill’s passage. The Trump administration pulled approvals for the 

 in July as the President stood in front of a bank of television cameras to rail against “windmills” he described as a “con job” and “ugly”. The result was an effort to encircle the U.S. renewable industry: the “temporary” block on approvals meant no new construction could begin before tax credits were phased out even as the Trump administration repeatedly demonstrated that, going forward, it might pull approvals that had already been given at any time.

The attacks went even further, including efforts to undermine the very foundations of climate science itself. Over the last few months the Trump administration has sought to attack data collection, proposing to allow satellites relied upon by 

 to burn up in the earth’s atmosphere, and shutting down the 

 in Hawaii. In a cruel irony for the “America First” Presidency, that facility is itself a monument to American scientific excellence. The atmospheric CO2 readings the lab has been collecting since 1958 provided the evidence for establishing that climate change is occurring, and underpin the Keeling Curve, which describes how concentrations are increasing in the atmosphere. Not content with shaping the direction of policy into the future, the administration has reached back into the past 

 – an act it described as an “update”. In the process, Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, replaced the 721 volunteer scientists who had previously worked assessing the latest climate science from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Science with 

 with scientific credentials. Meanwhile, the administration has appointed climate deniers to key decision-making roles within the administration. One of them, Lee Zeldin, now heads the Environmental Protection Agency where he is pushing to overturn the crucial 

 that first listed CO2 as a pollutant, allowing it to be regulated.

With the administration hostile to large-scale renewable energy, anti-wind groups have even been emboldened to attack those who have been monitoring and reporting on their activities. On August 11th, an anti-wind group in Rhode Island issued a legal threat 

retract three published papers analyzing its links to the fossil fuel industry

network analysis of the activity of the lawyers representing the group, who issued the demand

The result is an unstable and deeply uncertain operating environment that makes investment in new renewable energy projects impossible and threatens to render existing assets worthless. To those on the outside this might seem like madness, but Brown University Professor Mark Blyth says there is a method to what is taking place. The political economist, who had no involvement in the research into anti-wind groups, says the Trump administration is engaging in what he calls a “strategy of carbon dominance”.

“Carbon dominance is basically when you turn stranding assets into a political strategy, and that is essentially what's going on right now,” Blyth says.

The Golden Age of Oil-Funded Influence

Trump Is Trying to Kill Renewables Everywhere

Uganda’s Crude Oil Pipeline Faces Fresh Hurdles from Campaigners

“There Was So Much Death.” A Toxic Algal Bloom Is Ravaging Australia’s Southern Coast—Warming Waters Are to Blame.

The Kill Step, Part One: “They’re Waiting for Someone to Wink”

Carbon Bros

SLAPP’d

Information Pollution

The Real Free Speech Threat

Carbon Bros, Ep 4: Integration

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

The Golden Age of Oil-Funded Influence

Trump Is Trying to Kill Renewables Everywhere

Uganda’s Crude Oil Pipeline Faces Fresh Hurdles from Campaigners

“There Was So Much Death.” A Toxic Algal Bloom Is Ravaging Australia’s Southern Coast—Warming Waters Are to Blame.

The Kill Step, Part One: “They’re Waiting for Someone to Wink”

Carbon Bros

SLAPP’d

Information Pollution

The Real Free Speech Threat

Support our reporting,subscribe today!

Carbon Bros, Ep 4: Integration

We are a global team investigating the obstacles to action on climate change, all over the world

Support our reporting,
subscribe today!