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 [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. A little bit earlier this season, we ran an episode on a global network of think tanks called the Atlas Network. We did a print piece as well. A version of that piece ran with the New Republic and a couple of other outlets. And in that work, we looked at some of the ideas and tactics that seemed to be spreading across the Atlas network, aimed at laying the groundwork to criminalize certain types of environmental protests.

I had actually reached out to Atlas, wanting to interview someone about the network and specifically wanting to talk to a woman. named Magatte Wade, who runs their Center for African Prosperity. I didn't hear anything back, and to be honest, I kind of assumed that they just didn't want to talk to me because Atlas sort of has that reputation.

So that was me maybe being a little bit lazy. Anyway, after that [00:01:00] story came out, Wade was pretty upset about it, and she took to Twitter and challenged me, our reporter Geoff Dembicki, and New Republic editor Molly Taft to a debate. I let her know that actually I had really wanted to talk to her for the story and I tried, so would love to schedule a time to talk.

And talk we did. It was definitely a little debate y sometimes, but also an interesting window into how certain ideas about the climate movement are being shaped. We're going to get back to our anti protest series soon, but in the meantime, I'm going to be bringing you some bonus episodes featuring what I've been calling...

messy conversations, sometimes with people I don't necessarily agree with, sometimes with people I very much do. First up, Magatte Wade, who heads up the Center for African Prosperity for the Atlas Network.

This week, she's at a convening for a new [00:02:00] group that brings together quite a few different ATLAS member think tank folks. It's called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It's spearheaded by Jordan Peterson, backed by several of the entities that funded the push for Brexit. And includes not only folks like Magatte and Arthur Brooks, the former president of the American Enterprise Institute , and the folks leading the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group that's funded by a whole batch of Atlas Network think tanks like the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and more,

But also a whole cast of folks from the climate skeptic slash climate denial crowd. You've got GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who's been sort of the king of the anti ESG or quote unquote woke capital conversations. You've got [00:03:00] Michael Schellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never. You've got Björn Lomborg, who pushes a similar kind of approach as Schellenberger, this idea that sure, climate change is happening, but it's not happening fast enough to warrant extreme changes. You've got Alex Epstein, the guy who authored the quote unquote moral case for fossil fuels.

This group, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC, was put on my radar by a tip a few months ago. I shared that with DeSmog who's written some really great and helpful profiles of both the organization and some of the members in it, which I'll link to in the show notes. It's been interesting to see how they've evolved, how they've added different people, and what sorts of things are getting discussed.

What's particularly interesting to me about ARC is that it's doing this thing that happens a lot on the right and not so much on the left, which is bringing together lots of [00:04:00] sort of cause célèbre under one tent. So you've got the anti climate people, you've got the anti feminist people, you've got the anti trans people, they're all meeting together to discuss the supposed end of Western civilization as we know it. They're all meeting together this week in London, so I thought it would be a good time to bring you this conversation.

I hope you enjoy it. And please get in touch with all the things you would have said in this conversation.

Knowing exactly what to say in the moment is not always my strong suit, which you'll see here because I definitely took the liberty

 of cutting in to say some things I wish I had thought of at the time. Anyhow, all feedback and complaints welcome. It might even turn into another messy conversation. Enjoy![00:05:00]

 Awesome. I'm going to turn my video on to say hi, but then I might turn it off just because I, uh, live in a place with pretty spotty wifi.

 So yeah, so first of all, for being here, I appreciate that. So Amy, I think first I'm going to start just for the people who are going to be listening to this and might be wondering how we got here. Maybe I'm just going to give everybody a background. So I think it was not Friday of last week, but the Friday of the previous week, I think it was.

I got a note from my team members over at Atlas and they said, Hey, Magatte, there's this article that came out on The New Republic and see, I'm reading here the title, it's, it was called Meet the [00:06:00] Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protestors, and so the whole thing was pretty much what I call a hit piece.

And on me, you give me a paragraph on there and uh, I'm gonna read it for people. And it says, Magatte Wade, who heads an internal Atlas project called the Center for African Prosperity, frequently cites De Soto as an inspiration for her take on Africa and climate change. In multiple op eds over the past few years and in an interview this year with Canadian professor and right wing figurehead Jordan Peterson, Wade, who was born in Senegal but moved to Germany when she was seven, describes climate activists as the new colonialists, arguing that climate action will keep Africans poor and deprive them of access to energy.

Wade often depicts those who would deny the continent its current fossil fuel boom as out of touch elitist and regularly claims that climate action will kill a billion Africans, all while [00:07:00] refusing to engage with the fact that African climate activists are being arrested at an alarming rate. So that's the piece that was written about me.

 Yeah, well, so two things. One, I would clarify that the piece wasn't about you.

As you said, there was, you know, uh, one paragraph in a 4, 000 word piece, which was not meant to give you short shrift. It's just, there's like, you know, nearly 600 Atlas Network think tanks to get to, and the thing that we were looking at was how ideas spread within and throughout the Atlas network, not, you know, any particular think tank's work, but in saying that, also worth noting, actually, the original piece is more like 6, 000 words and includes a lot more on your work and trying to look at different economic studies and things like that, which is on our site at drilled.media. But the New Republic trimmed out quite a bit of the story. So I'm happy to send you a link [00:08:00] to that as well. And yeah, I'm, I have actually a bunch of questions that I would love to ask you about your work. And I submitted a contact request through the Atlas network a couple of times and didn't get anything back, but I was looking through my inbox this morning...

 and did you ask to speak specifically to me?

 To you and also to fact check various things with the sort of Atlas Network headquarters as well. But I just saw in my inbox this morning that I got bounced replies to that.

 Yeah. Because me, when I'm trying to reach out to someone and they're not getting back to me, I, that's usually the to check. Do I even have the right email? Yeah. But I... It was like

 in my, you know, went to my Promotions folder. But I agree. Like I, I would have much preferred to speak to you before the piece came out and also like not just for that piece, but I find this area really interesting looking at the idea of how to address energy poverty and climate [00:09:00] change at the same time, how to do that in an equitable way.

All of those things are big questions that I frankly agree with a lot of your take on the failures of the climate movement to do that. So, I actually think... You might be surprised at how much I agree with some of the stuff you say.

 I am very happy to hear that you agree with most of my takes, and it will be good to compare notes, and we're going to compare notes.

So first of all, it's good that we basically settled this incident about you having reached out to me because when someone wants to talk to me, I talk to them, so I'm glad we clarified that, but I never knew from you, but you wanted to speak to me.

So that's number one. And then I'm, I'm very glad to hear that you share some of my views. And when you're talking about relations between climate change and Africa and all of that, the links, I really wish that this article had gotten into it. Yeah. Because I'm going to tell you where I'm coming from.

So when I go back and I read this piece. [00:10:00] Magatte Wade heads an international Atlas project, so that's fine. Frequently cites De Soto as an inspiration. The inspiration I'd cite is always, for the most part, George Aïté, Ghanaian economist, who really has put his finger as to why the reason Africa, despite its riches, and the riches of Africa, are its people, are its land, despite all of that, being rich in all of that, we still, to this day, remain, sadly, in such a wrong way, still the most poor continent in this world.

And I'm supposed to be happy with that as an African, and I'm not. So when you say that I frequently cite --you or the other three people, because by the way, I, I commend you for your courage to come here and speak with me, because I would have liked to have a courtesy from the other three people who have been involved in this piece.

But anyway, so whoever here did their investigation, And say that I frequently cite De Soto, I would like for me to put in my face, when I [00:11:00] cite this, usually George Ayite is who I cite, and the few times I cite De Soto, whom I also have a lot of respect for, has to do for, I have to do with his work related to the main cause as to why my continent is poor, because what Hernando De Soto did, for those who don't know, Hernando De Soto is a Peruvian economist.

And what he has done, him too, like me, has been wondering why are people poor, because his native Peru is a poor nation as well. And he said, I'm going to need to find out what's going on. And him, along people like Hayek, because I saw you citing Hayek, you see, this piece is citing a lot of great people, but really not even understanding why the rest of the world respects these people. I don't respect Hayek because supposedly he claims that all the ills of society are caused by socialism, as you put in the piece.

I really don't like socialism, the philosophy of what socialism is, not what the young people today think what socialism is, and that might be a different conversation for a different time. [00:12:00] But when you think of Hayek, the reason why people like me really appreciate Hayek is because of how Hayek really is one of the few, and I would say probably one of the first economists who ever started looking in the direction of the entrepreneurs as the solution and as the main creators of prosperity. All the other economists are out there doing some math, model calculations, all types of things that are completely removed from the rest of the world. And most importantly, Very important detail, the reason why some of us really, someone like me, enjoys Hayek, and I think he has contributed a lot to the field of economics, is because of the precise insight that he had about the entrepreneur.

And so going back to De Soto , Hayek has seen that the entrepreneurs have a role to play in fighting poverty, not NGOs. And that's another thing. So yeah, what De Soto did is he did an experiment he [00:13:00] established himself in a little bit of an outskirt of Lima, Peru, and he tried to start a little business.

A little business where they were sewing things like really mom and pop. He was thinking, what happens to people like my dad, because I have a small, medium sized enterprise in Africa, what, how does it work for us when we're trying to build a business?

What's going on? What's happening to us? And so he positioned himself as a nobody, and then he went through the process to legally register the business. He found that it took forever. We're talking here almost of two third of the year. The amount of money it cost in fees, it was pretty much close to somebody's salary. So he found that it was impossible for people like that to start a business. Impossible. And so he went on to write this book called The Mystery of Capital. And explaining all of that. And so the times when you would hear someone like me citing De Soto, it has to do with that. Not what you're saying here. And what the piece is saying about De [00:14:00] Soto, it was trying to make De Soto look very bad here.

I'm going to find him. Where is De Soto? When you're saying about De Soto, basically He went and he told the people in the Amazon forest, I'm just, you know, summarizing when you say that he went there and he told the indigenous people, you know, if we give you a piece of the action, it's a way to muzzle them up and I'm just like saying, Amy, have you spent time in, in African nations and which ones if you have?

 I have not spent much time in Africa. I've spent a lot of time in Latin America and I live in Latin America. So I'm very familiar with how things work in Desoto's territory. And okay, can I just say speak now? Because I. You know, you've said a lot of things, it'd be good to respond to.

So I don't think there's anything in there that says, you know, this terrible man de Soto. It just says what he's argued for, which is not inaccurate. It is true [00:15:00] that what he has argued for is for property rights and a profit share for Indigenous people.

 And what's wrong with that? And what's wrong with that? That's fine. I don't see anything wrong with it. It's not fine. I would treat it here, it's not fine.

 I would appreciate, yeah, being able to finish my sentence. Thank you. So he says that, you know, he argues that's the fix for Indigenous protests. And in terms of it being a strategy to shut down protest. That's very explicitly laid out on the ILD website. They have a whole site that's called the, I think it's the Avatar Myth Theory or something along those lines. And it very explicitly says, you know, for people that are concerned about the impact that indigenous protest is having on business and development, we believe that this is the solve for that.

And, kind of lays out how to do it. So all we were trying to show in the piece was how this idea kind of starts with DeSoto and spreads to [00:16:00] multiple other Atlas think tanks, which I don't think is inaccurate. You know, it was fairly easy to follow and whether or not that's a good or bad thing is not something that I, or I think any of my colleagues ever say in the piece.

It's like, look, this is happening. It's not very well publicized that it's happening, and it's a strategy.

 Amy, the title of your piece says it all, the shadowy global network vilifying climate protesters. And, uh, this is the long piece, so I will really recommend to everybody to go back and read it.

But the way this paragraph, anybody who would read this paragraph in the context also of the rest of the piece, and also the way this paragraph was written, you're making a commentary here. And with that, I'm going to move on because there's a reason why I really wanted to have you on here.

So the website, so I will ask people to go and read this piece, and then you let me know [00:17:00] your opinion. But this whole idea that de Soto is an anti climate person, I think that's totally misguided. But I digress. So next, I

 Well, that's, actually that's interesting. So how would you kind of frame De Soto's approach on, on climate action?

 So the bigger talk I want to have is, is bigger and it's bigger and better than De Soto. So if you hear me out, you'll hear exactly where it is that I'm going with all of us.

 Okay, so I'm just going to jump in here for a minute to remind folks of why we were touching on de Soto in both the written piece and the podcast episode about Atlas. It's because he really seems to be the person who began advocating pretty early on for a strategy that would later be called redwashing.

And it's a strategy that we see other Atlas think tanks, particularly the American Enterprise Institute in the U. S. and the Macdonald Laurier Institute in Canada, starting to deploy over the years, often using the same rhetoric and [00:18:00] arguments as de Soto. Here's a snippet from our episode on Atlas, just to jog your memory.

 One of the very first think tanks created by this newly formed Atlas Network was the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru. It was started the same year the Atlas Network started, 1981.

And its founder was a well known economist, Hernando de Soto. De Soto came up with a theory that wound up reverberating throughout the Atlas Network universe. It's a really good example of just how much these think tanks talk to each other and how ideas spread.

 Here he is giving a TED talk in 2011, [00:19:00] explaining his strategy for dealing with indigenous environmental activism.

 Bueno, la consecuencia son, por ejemplo, que no tienen títulos de propiedad. Y se nos dice porque esa es la parte que defiende ciertos organismos internacionales y de ecología, es que usted sabe los indígenas. No les gusta ser propietarios, deambulan por la selva, pero cuando hemos llegado ahí, hemos visto inmensa pobreza.

 He says, part of the problem is they don't have titles to property. And if you ask why, certain international organizations and environmental groups will say, well, you know, Indigenous people don't want to be landowners. They wander around the forest. But when he went there with his colleagues, he saw immense poverty.

De Soto started to think about this whole situation a lot more because of a bloody standoff between Indigenous land defenders and police in Peru.[00:20:00]

 Dozens of people are estimated to have been killed in clashes between police and indigenous activists protesting oil and mining projects in the northern Peruvian Amazonian province of Bagua.

 Indigenous leaders were protesting the encroachment on their land by various interests, including timber, mining, and oil and gas.

 Eyewitness accounts indicate the police fired live ammunition and tear gas into the crowd.

Alberto Pizango, the leader of the National Indigenous Organization, the Peruvian Jungle Interethnic Development Association, or EDICEP.

Accuse the government of President Alain Garcia of ordering the genocide of the indigenous communities.

Our brothers are cornered responsibility. I want to put the [00:21:00] responsibility on the government. We are going to put the responsibility on Alan Garcia's government.

 De Soto argues that the solution to all of this is just to cut Indigenous groups in on the profits,

 Entonces, muy bien, no los traigamos a la globalización. No los traigamos al derecho, pero el resultado, eso es que sus recursos van a ser retirados y quienes semana ser ricos con sus recursos van a ser otros y no ellos mismos.

 to give them property rights and a share of resource and mineral rights so that they will stop protesting for control over their land.

This idea shows up again in Canada a couple years later when the Macdonald Laurier Institute, another Atlas Network think tank and a partner of the Fraser Institute. [00:22:00] starts to put out a bunch of papers in the wake of indigenous led protests there .

Go back and listen to the rest of that episode if you haven't heard it yet. We're going to take a quick break here and get back to my conversation with Magatte Wade in a moment, stay with us.

Yes. So earlier when we started, you said that you don't actually disagree with a lot of things that I say about the climate.

For anybody that knows a little bit of my work on all of this, my whole thing, my full purpose in this world. The hill I will die on is prosperity for Africans, and I want that in my [00:23:00] life. And for prosperity to be built, there is only one way only prosperity can be built. Prosperity is built by entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs need what we call the toolkit of the entrepreneurs. In there, primarily the way you sum up everything that they need is concept of rule of law, clear and transferable property rights. All of it is very important for the entrepreneur to be able to enterprise. Economists also call it economic freedom.

The other best way to call it is just, is an individual, especially if you're a nobody individual, somewhere, can you or not start and run a business easily. And when it comes to that, you have multiple, you know, economic indexes that measure that very simple, you know, situation. And one of them was the doing business of the, the doing business index of the World Bank.

And then you have another one of the economic freedom index of the Fraser Institute. Another guy that you guys [00:24:00] make out to sound like these conspirationists out there, you know, trying to destroy the world with their right wing ideas. So there again, these people that you demonize, this piece seems to demonize people like me actually happen to love. I love the Fraser Institute insofar as the focus on economic freedom and really pointing there too, because when it comes to economic freedom, how easy or hard it's for anyone, anywhere in the world to start and run a business.

It turns out that the index is showing exactly what I as a business entrepreneur doing business, both in Africa and in the U. S. I have seen at first, I thought it was just an anecdote. I first, I thought, Oh, you know, it's normal. We're poor. So it's hard to do business back home and here very rich. It's easy to do business.

And instead I came to realize. We are, poor nations are poor because they make it hard for the wealth creators to create and rich nations are prosperous because they make it easy for wealth creators to create. So, the minute I understood that, my [00:25:00] whole life changed. So many things started to make sense and I started just to follow that path.

And so when you look there, you realize that it is harder for almost anyone in sub Saharan Africa to do business than it is for anyone in Scandinavia. And that fact is very important because if we want to fix the problem, and I would want, so this is actually, this is a question I'm going to have for you.

If we're serious about building prosperity in Africa, then we have to be serious about this issue around the lack of economic freedom. So Fraser institute measures, things like that. For doing business measures, things like that. Atlas Network has been working with people to kind of improve the situation.

So we need economic freedom to build prosperity. Our entrepreneurs need that. And you know what else entrepreneurs need? Access to reliable and affordable energy source. This is actually when I got into the fight. This is what, and when I got into the fight, into the climate action fight, because when you have these anti fossil fuel zealots who are sitting halfway across the world in very comfortable places telling me, [00:26:00] an African, what is it that I get to do or not do in my continent, when we happen to still be the poorest region in the world, and people are still dying, I say, I have a problem.

So Amy, do you believe? But do you support prosperity for Africa, even if it means the use of fossil fuels? This is a very...

 I do. So actually, yes, I do. This is...

 Pause. I just want to share that again. Do you?

 Do you support prosperity for Africa, even if it means the use of fossil fuels?

 Yes, I do. So this is why I was happy to talk to you, because I was like, I feel like this whole thing is getting...

It's getting really polarized in a way that's just not helpful. I was just in a room full of people this past week global north people saying, look, the solution is to turn off fossil fuels, that's it. And then, someone from India and another person from Africa saying, well, you guys don't understand that we're still dealing with X, Y, Z, and how do we deal with that? [00:27:00] Without fossil fuels. Right. To be honest, I think that the solution is that the global North transitions quickly off of fossil fuels while the global South, continues to develop . But when I hear people say, we need to solve energy poverty first. I'm like, well, yeah, I agree. I think we should solve energy poverty. I don't think it's an either or, I think they can happen at the same time. And I think that rich countries in the global north have a much bigger obligation to do what they can to reduce emissions and decarbonize as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, that's not happening, and neither are the Global North companies that are developing oil and gas resources in Africa doing anything at all about energy poverty. So that's the piece where I'm like, okay, yes, I agree, but the oil and gas that's being developed in Africa right now, more than half of it is exported to Europe and Asia.[00:28:00]

If the African countries that have those resources have terrible contracts that lock them into not getting anywhere near what they should be getting for those resources, none of those contracts require distribution locally. So like the, the best example is, is Nigeria. That's the oldest and largest fossil fuel industry on the continent of Africa, right?

Last in the world on energy access. So when I see people say, oh, fossil fuel development equals a solve to energy poverty. Where's the proof of that? It hasn't happened on the continent of Africa. It hasn't even happened in the United States, which is like the birthplace of the industry.

So that's where I'm like, okay, if we're going to talk about energy poverty, let's talk about, actually solving it. And also the fact that doing so and solving for climate, which will also impact people in Africa and Latin America, first and worst, why can't we do both together in a way that actually, like, solves both [00:29:00] problems?

Transcription

Welcome to a new Drilled miniseries we're calling "Messy Conversations," getting into all the complicated nuance that unfortunately gets cut out of a lot of climate conversations. This week, Magatte Wade, who runs the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network. She wasn't too happy with our recent coverage of Atlas, so we talked about that, the idea that solving poverty and addressing the climate crisis are mutually exclusive, where free speech ends and property rights begin for libertarians, and a whole lot more.

Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC): https://www.arcforum.com/

DeSmog profile of ARC: https://www.desmog.com/alliance-for-responsible-citizenship-arc/

DeSmog coverage of ARC 2023 forum: https://www.desmog.com/2023/10/26/gop-climate-denier-vivek-ramaswamy-headlining-jordan-peterson-arc-conference/

Narasimha Rao's Decent Living Energy Project: https://www.decentlivingenergy.org/

Our Guyana season: https://drilled.media/podcasts/drilled#season-8

Center for African Prosperity: https://www.atlasnetwork.org/partners/center-for-african-prosperity

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