Theo Von: who was that like uh save the whales kid or whatever that was like "You are not speaking for us."

Mark Normand: What happened to her by the way?

Mark Normand: she would take a steamboat from Sweden to to yell at somebody on a on a on a soap box. How old is she now? Is she got an Only Fans

Mark Normand: what Oh 22 all right she's of age

Theo Von: Oh we're going to hell we're going together

Mark Normand: dude oh she got a solar powered vibrator. check out my carbon foot fetish

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

 And that was a clip of podcaster Theo Von and comedian Mark Normand talking about watching Greta Thunberg’s Only Fans

: Last time on Carbon Bros, we travelled back in time to unspool the connections between masculinity and the domination of women and the natural world. We took a whistlestop tour of the latest in 17th-century thinking: Man’s dominion over the creatures of the earth (and women).

 And The Sanctity of Private Property. Keep off the grass.

And we ended with a gusher on petro-masculinity, this idea that modern manliness, with its obsession with cars in particular, is premised on light, sweet crude. And why some men will defend to the death their right to burn down the planet.

 Today we’re looking at why climate protest gets labelled “hysterical” and how the techno-solutions offered by eco-modernists and abundance bros traffic in the same tropes we’ve been seeing since the 1960s, when silly women like Rachel Carson just didn’t understand the science.

 So that’s one side of the coin: a bunch of overly optimistic tech-bros who think carbon capture and geo-engineering are all we need to live long and prosper, but there’s also the other side of the coin. The guys who are certain that civilization is coming to an end—and it is overwhelmingly men who hold this view—and who think we should either all start building bunkers and stocking up on canned beans–or more radically, who want us to ditch planet earth and start colonizing space.

And don’t get me started on the shape of those rockets.

Radar guy: Colonel you better take a look at this radar

Radar guy: I don't know sir but it looks like a giant

What these two reactions to the climate crisis have in common is a weird masculine certainty: that the solutions are easy technical fixes, or that they’re so out of reach we might as well give up now. One is a capitalist fairytale where everything will be fine if we just turn on enough nuclear reactors and start hoovering carbon out of the sky, and the other is a vision of apocalypse and survival of the fittest.

 But ultimately, they’re both fantasies of control, independence, and escape that ignore the messy reality of … other people. Or the possibilities of other ways of living.

 Let’s start with climate hysteria. This is a major talking point used to smear people who want to address the climate crisis. And obviously, it’s pretty sexist.

HYSTERIA CLIP:, doctor, what do you know of hysteria? Nothing?  It stems from an overactive uterus in its most severe forms. It demands drastic measures, institutionalization, surgery even

 While hysteria has long been debunked as a medical condition, it’s hung around as a way to insult and dismiss women as irrational.

 In the case of the climate crisis, female hysteria is used to paint protestors as unreasonable. Their claims about what’s happening to the planet are too emotional. And they should just be quiet and leave the climate issue to experts. Nobody is on the receiving end of this attack more than climate activist Greta Thunberg.

: Let’s go back to 2019, when the climate movement was at a high point and Greta Thunberg addressed the UN. Here’s Australian conservative commentator Chris Kelly.

Chris Kenny:  Instead of debating facts, science, economics, technology. Costs and benefits, and of course policy options. The United Nations hands the floor over to a hysterical teenager.

Greta: You all come to us, young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I'm one of the lucky ones.

Chris Kenny: Whew. Well, aren't we the lucky ones to hear about it?

 The Aussies are particularly obsessed with Greta actually.

NEWS HOST: Remember angry little doom goblin Greta Thunberg?

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of Rupert Murdoch to blame there. And partly because of him. Now it's not just his media, but other, you know, coal and oil barrens have kind of gotten in on gobbling up media entities. So at this point, around 70% or so of Australian media is actually controlled by fossil fuel interests of one kind or another.

There's this woman named Gina Reinhardt, who's like a coal baron who owns a bunch of stuff too. Anyway, I feel like Australia does not get enough credit for being a full, hardcore petro state, and their version of petro masculinity is like right up there with the US variety.

yeah. Okay. So for sure if it's a Murdoch network, they're gonna be Greta bashing all day long, and they've done a lot of it.

And it’s not just in Australia either. Here’s Michael Knowles, a Daily Wire contributor who was banned from Fox after making this remark. I guess it was a bridge too far?

Michael KNOWLES:  The climate hysteria movement is not about science. If it were about science, it would be led by scientists rather than by politicians. And a mentally ill Swedish child who is being exploited by her parents and by the international left there you.

So what you're seeing here is a political movement. And a religious movement, and it's a fulfilling religious and political goals of the left, but it isn't doing very much for science.

: Greta’s being painted as just a poor little girl with mental problems being exploited. We need to leave this to the real scientists - of course they don’t actually want to do that either

No, because of course when women with actual scientific training do speak up, they get hit with the same attacks, and even stalking and death threats. Here’s Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, one of the world’s leading climate scientists. (She’s written more than 150 peer-reviewed abstracts, journal articles, and other publications including four National Climate Assessments for the

) She was venting to me about how she’s treated a couple of years ago,

 I even get people telling me to go back to the kitchen. That's the problem we have is that too many women are working that, um, you know, I should be back taking care of my children that, you know, stuff like that. And then there's the safety concerns because most of the people are men and there are some serious concerns with safety. this past year, two people found my home address and send stuff to the. That was really concerning and disturbing. I have, um, walked down the hall to my office And I have multiple times seen men kind of wandering up and down, looking at the doors to see if they can find my name and the people I don't know. And then when I see me that, oh, are you Dr. Hayhoe? and I don't know who they are, where they come from.

Unfortunately, there’s a much longer history of these sorts of attacks against female environmental activists and scientists. This goes back to the very beginnings of the modern environmental movement and the work of one woman in particular.

CBS: this is one of the nation's best sellers first printed on September 27 1962 up to now 500,000 copies have been sold and Silent Spring has been called the most controversial book of the year.

 If we are ever to solve the basic problem of environmental contamination, we must begin to count the many hidden costs of what we are doing.

That of course is Rachel Carson, talking after her book, Silent Spring, was published, in 1962. For listeners who haven’t read Silent Spring yet, and you really should, it was an investigation into the damage pesticides and other agricultural and household chemicals were doing to the environment and human health.

: The book revealed that the chemical industry and the US government had been lying for decades about the dangers of these products, and it kicked off a public debate about just how much the public should trust the word of industry experts. This is an industry scientist responding to Carson at the time.

Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man.

Whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist, the modern scientist believes that man is steadily controlling nature.

It’s important to remember that the chemicals industry was relatively new. And there was this idea that these guys–and they were always guys–in their white lab coats creating things in the lab were like the REAL scientists …this was the future,

DuPont “Better Living through Chemistry” song 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJtKkBYlHFw

… this was like progress for America, as opposed to those primitive biologists out doing field research. The guys in the lab were creating the future, while the ones in the field were off catching butterflies in nets. Add to that the fact that Carson was a woman and… you get the idea.

 But it wasn’t enough for them to constantly point out that she was a woman, they really threw everything at Carson.– that she wasn’t a “real” scientist, that this was some sort of personal vendetta because she had cancer, that she was a lesbian. Here’s that industry scientist again in a CBS News special. His name was Dr. Robert White-Stevens:

 Miss Carson is concerned with every possibility of hazard and danger, whereas the agricultural school has to concern itself with the probability, the likelihood of danger, and to assess that against utility.

If we had to investigate every possibility, we would never make any advances at all, because this would require an infinite time for experimental work, and we would never be finished.

 the public was being asked to accept these chemicals, was being asked to acquiesce in their use and did not have the whole picture.

So I set about to remedy the, the balance there.

Wow, Sounds like a classic case of hysteria.

Godfather clip - Michael Corleone: She’s hysterical… hysterical

: Right?! And of course what we see in the Carson episode is not just women and environmentalists being branded as hysterical, but also the emergence of this notion that chemistry and tech are uniquely masculine and therefore uniquely good at solving problems. And that using science and tech to solve big problems is obviously superior to caring about pussy shit like birds.

 But yes, that’s very much the same attitude you’ll get from the folks who push things like nuclear, geoengineering and carbon capture as climate solutions. It’s also not a coincidence that the oil industry’s favorite climate solution, and the only one whose funding wasn’t cut in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, was carbon capture. I spoke with Micahel Levien, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins who studies the oil, coal and gas industries, about the hype around Carbon Capture in his home state of Louisiana and what he calls “Reactionary Decarbonization.”

It's being promoted by the fossil fuel industry. All the companies involved are pretty much in the fossil fuel industry. And this is just an extension of fossil fuel infrastructure.

But instead of just sort of denialist talking points, they're now kind of positioning themselves as leaders in carbon management, right? So they're actually, um, gonna be the leaders of the energy transition and all the kind of. You know, silly protestors and so on who, you know, go on about emissions are sort of like childish.

And we're doing like the serious, you know, work of building the kind of low carbon future and right.

 Which is basically where CO2 either from refineries and factories or from natural gas production is captured) and stored, either underground or in containers above ground. , Or it’s transported to an oil field where it’s blasted underground to get more oil out…through a process called enhanced oil recovery. Which is pretty far from a climate solution

:Yeah. I love, I mean, this is like the most amazing magical thinking I think I've ever seen from the oil.

And I mean it like, honestly, kudos to them. Fucking genius move.

I prefer the CO2 sky vacuum…also known as Direct Air Capture, where they just try to suck CO2 out of the air so that we can emit as much as we want. Really, carbon capture is a way for oil companies to maintain the status quo and pretend it’s a climate solution.

 But setting aside the fact that the math behind Carbon Capture doesn’t add up, Micahel’s more interested in the politics of this “climate solution” and how people are accepting or fighting it.

the other piece of this is, you know, that, and this is why a lot of environmental justice groups are opposed to CCS, is that it Perpetuates the existing petrochemical plants who they wanna shut down that are poisoning their communities. Especially, you know, in Louisiana, black communities in Cancer Alley and around Lake Charles, CCS kind of prolongs their life and makes them seem clean when in fact, the carbon capture technology only captures the CO2, it doesn't capture the additional pollutants,, that are coming out of those factories.

 And you’ve got an industry that already has quite a few spills from its pipelines, building a whole new pipeline infrastructure for a substance that can cause some real problems if it leaks. while climate deniers. Love to talk about CO2 being good for plants. In high concentrations it will kill you.

So, CO2 is not toxic, but it's an asphyxiant, so it displaces oxygen and can suffocate you. in, uh, Satartia, Mississippi, maybe it was four years ago, one of the existing CO2 pipelines running through that state, it runs from Mississippi, Texas. it leaked and it sent 40 something people to hospital almost, you know, uh, almost dead. Um, asphyxiating, foaming up the mouth.

Which begs the question: why would anyone want this in their community? But Michael says so far it’s mostly environmental justice groups fighting it, and that not surpassingly, there’s a pretty significant gender divide on the issue.

:  is there a reason why we see a lot of the environmental justice struggles being, you know, organized by women? Um, is that because of the way men are more, um, absorbed into the industrial economy through their jobs? does it have to do with the division of labor in the household and who is home, um, suffering from the pollution more of the day? Or who is doing the care work for people who are sick, dying of cancer, or kids who have respiratory disease?

, and they’ve pulled a neat little rhetorical trick, too. Oftentimes you’ll see technocratic folks using the language of environmental justice to push their ideas as better for the world than things like reducing consumption or increasing efficiency. The argument goes roughly: those environmentalists want to go back to some sort of primitive state of pristine nature, but we want HUMANS to thrive, and technology can do that for us.

 Yeah. Don't you care about people in the third world? Amy,

 Yes, exactly. It's that. It's that thing.

 you're denying them the right to have microwaves and, uh, you know, take away containers made plastic and yeah, childhood obesity.

Yeah. How dare you rob them of type two diabetes? You bitch.

This has basically become the abundance line.

: Yes! And of course we’re talking here about the book Abundance by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that you’ve probably been seeing clips about all over social media if you’re a person with internet access in 2025.  And this view  has been circulating in the climate space under a different brand name for a while now. Back when I started working as a climate journalist, we called it “ecomodernism.”

: And we, and we should say about abundance as our Klein's book., we don't wanna paint it in like a completely broad brush. There are some ideas in there that are worth debating or um, but the thing is that it has become a kind of wedge or like an icebreaker being used by the right to force through all kinds of policies that are absolutely not climate solutions

: totally. The thing that, um, I find really interesting about the abundant stuff is that I don't know whether Ezra Klein Knew that the Koch brothers and people like Chris Wright, our, our energy secretary, were using this framing for like the last 10 years as like a really pretty clever way to push, um, expansion of fossil fuel development.

But they were, um, they have been for quite a while, and this just, he just mainstreamed it, you know? I don't know if he meant to, but that's the, the net result. And so now it's become this shorthand of like, you're either for abundance and like who's against abundance, right? Or you're like, you know, a colorless shrew who doesn't want anyone to ever have any fun like Greta Thunberg,

 Every time I hear the word I think of this, like I, I think of like a really like foul smelling men's cologne

Transcription

Stop listening to hysterical Swedish teenagers and start listening to reasonable men! Some dudes do have solutions to the climate crisis; they just don’t involve messy interpersonal stuff, changing their lifestyles, or reorganizing the global economy. From techno quick fixes and visions of abundance to carbon capture and geoengineering to doomerism and colonies on Mars, we’ll take a look at how gendered notions of the climate crisis have led to individualized, “masculine” approaches to solving it.

Carbon Bros

Carbon Bros, Ep 3: Climate Hysteria, Doomers, and Boy Math Solutions

A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted by investigative journalist Amy Westervelt. Listen here, or 

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

Carbon Bros, Ep 3: Climate Hysteria, Doomers, and Boy Math Solutions

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