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

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

Mark Normand: Oh Greta Tunberg

Theo Von: Greta Tunberg

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

Theo Von: I Don't

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

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

AMY: And I’m Amy Westervelt

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

AMY: Ugh, classic.

DANIEL: 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).

AMY: The Doctrine of Discovery.

DANIEL: 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.

HESTON: From my cold dead hands!

AMY: 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.

DANIEL: 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.

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

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

Colonel: what is it son?

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

[grunty theme music in]

DANIEL: 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.

AMY: 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.

DANIEL: After the break, Climate Hysteria

AMY: Doomers

DANIEL: And Boy Math Solutions.

[music out]

[break]

DANIEL: 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

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

DANIEL: 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.

AMY: 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?

DANIEL: The Aussies are particularly obsessed with Greta actually.

NEWS HOST: Remember angry little doom goblin Greta Thunberg?

AMY:

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.

DANIEL: Crikey.

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.

DANIEL: 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

AMY: 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 US Global Change Research Program) She was venting to me about how she’s treated a couple of years ago,

Hayhoe:  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.

Daniel: 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.

CARSON: 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.

Daniel: 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.

Amy: 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.

Dr. Stevens MAN (on film): 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.

Amy: 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.

Daniel: 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:

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.

Carson:  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.

Daniel: Wow, Sounds like a classic case of hysteria.

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

Amy: 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.

Daniel: 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.”

Michael Levien: 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.

Daniel: 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

Amy: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.

Daniel: 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.

Michael Levien: 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.

Daniel: 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.

Michael Levien: 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.

Daniel: 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.

Michael:  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?

Amy:, 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.

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

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

Daniel: 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.

But yeah.

Daniel:

This has basically become the abundance line.

Amy: 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.”

Daniel: 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

Amy: 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,

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

Daniel Penny: Passion, fire, abundance.

Amy Westervelt: abundance.

Strangé clip: It stinks so good!

Amy Westervelt: So, you know, this is not a new idea for the climate sphere either. A lot, there are a lot of people who have been kind of pushing the argument, which is overarchingly the ar. You know, this is obviously, it's a whole book, so like, don't let us stop you from reading it. By all means, read the whole book. Um, there are some good ideas in there.

And there are some, you know…

Daniel Penny: Some stupid. there are some some really, there's some stupid ones too.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Um, but, but in general, it's, it's the, the same old, same old of like, you know, if we can get everyone up to a certain level of, of economic stability, then that will be what kind of fixes everything else. Um, we can. Tech and growth hack our way to solving a bunch of these problems.

And that way we don't have to ask anyone to sacrifice anything or scare anyone with climate crisis narratives and things like that. Um, a lot of that stuff, and that's been around. For quite a long time, especially the the techno optimist side of it, although it has gone under a different brand name in the climate space for a while back when I started working as a climate journalist, we called it Eco Modernism.

Here’s Ted Nordhaus, author and the director of research at The Breakthrough Institute, laying out the ecomodernist argument in an interview we did a couple of years ago.

Ted Nordhaus: Historically there have been sort of two defining ideas in the modern environmental sort of discourse. And one is that we sort of need to shrink the human footprint, the footprint of human activities to reduce the impact on the environment. And the second is that we need to harmonize human societies with nature and with the natural world, we need to get back closer to nature. And in the manifesto we argue that you can do one of those things but you can't do both of them. And obviously we argue that it's the former that in a world with 7 billion people going on nine or 10 billion people, most of whom wanna live something that looks like a modern life, even if it's not an American lifestyle, You just need much more efficient technologies, you know, environmentally efficient. You need cities, you need energy density, you need intensive, really efficient agriculture. And if you don't have those things, you're just going to turn the entire, planet into like a kind of big farm basically. People are going to be poor. They're actually gonna be higher emission. It's gonna be much more higher emissions intensity. And you're gonna just destroy all of the biodiversity that remains. So that, you know, we kind of go like, you know, technology is the critical thing that mediates the relationship between human wellbeing and environmental impacts. And so, you know, better technologies are the thing. And technology is the key fulcrum that mediates that relationship between living standards and the environmental consequences of those living standards

Amy: But Nordhaus didn’t spread the good word alone. He co-authored The Ecomodernist manifesto with a guy who’s already appeared in episode one of Carbon Bros and who is a frequent guest on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Shellenberger on Rogan: climate change is just going to be solved by producing energy without carbon emissions. Like, it's just a technical problem. It's not like, oh, we all have to ride our bikes. Like, I love riding my bike, but it's like it became the moralizing and the woke culture.

Joe: Global cooling is way scarier than global warming.

Daniel: Michael Shellenberger. Of course. In case some of you missed this Easter Egg. He was the guy saying that we needed to stop scaring kids about climate change. And his story is kind of a perfect illustration of the way the manosphere and climate discourse overlap. Amy, I’m going to hand you the mic, because I know Shellenberger is kind of an obsession of yours. What’s his deal?

Amy: Oh man I am fascinated by this guy because he was seen as this kind of genius propagandist of the left. Actually, he like radical left, far, left. He worked. For all of these environmental nonprofits. But he was also Ugo Chavez's PR guy for some period of time and he, um, you know, like lived in Brazil for a while and he was hanging out with all of these kind of really like radical leftist groups.

He was actually the guy who really got the world to start paying attention to Nike's use of sweatshop labor in like late nineties, early two thousands, for example. Then he started to get a few criticisms here and there for occasional blind spots around gender or race or class.

Daniel: A classic manosphere villain origin story. Unfairly cancelled man would rather become a right-wing grifter than apologize.

Amy: Right. So in the early 2000s he teams up with another guy who’s been working for environmental orgs and is similarly annoyed with them, and they co-write this essay laying into environmentalists, called “Death of Environmentalism.”  and they like printed it out and handed out print copies of it at this big like conference in Hawaii that all of these like high level environmental philanthropists were at. And they argued that the environmental movement had gotten too set in its ways that it needed to stop being so afraid of capitalism and technology, that it needed to focus less on polar bears and more on people.

Shellenberger: Oh, my God, I bring back some history.

Amy: This is from an interview Shellenberger did with me back in 2021 when his book, Apocalypse Never, came out.  this is from an interview Shellenberger did with me back in 2021 when his book Apocalypse Never came out. So this is like his big. Addition to the universe of climate skeptic literature, Shellenberger is an interesting case 'cause he definitely acknowledges that climate change is real and it's happening and it's caused by human emissions.

But his argument is that like, it's not as bad as everyone says, um, and that we should stop freaking out about it. So he described the book as sort of a bookend to the conversation that he and Nordhaus started with death of environmentalism.

Shellenberger: for me, it's really a bookend on death of environmentalism. I think there's almost no chance I'm going to do another book on the environment. I anticipate I will always write on everybody's work on the environment. But I feel like I've cleared this part of my. I've kind of got to the bottom of it. I've said my piece.

Daniel: So he…got on the gender train because he ran out of things to say about climate? That can’t be right.

Amy: I mean…i wouldn’t put it past him, but no. A few things happened. First, he and his best bro Ted Nordhaus broke up.

Daniel: Noooo!

Amy: Yeah, it was kind of sad 'cause they were like real, I don't know. It's just like they were always together. They co-authored everything.

Like every single thing they wrote was co-authored. They're always in interviews together. Every like event they did, they were on panels together. It was just like a total broman. They were best men at each other's weddings, like they were tight, really tight. And in 2015, Michael and Ted worked on the last thing they would ever co-write together.

An eco modernist Manifesto. Sort of an updated version of this Death of Environmentalism thing that they had written before, laying out a pretty similar argument to the one that they'd made that time. But this time with more defense of tech. And after it came out, Michael left to start his own organization, environmental Progress focused at the time on saving nuclear plants from angry mobs of environmentalists who wanted to shut them down.

Daniel: But how does he go from defending nuclear reactors to defending the rights of downtrodden young men?

Shellenberger at ARC  thank heaven for young men finding their testosterone around the world, breaking from the woke orthodoxy, saying masculinity is not toxic. Masculinity is natural and healthy and needed.

Amy: It’s really this knot of things we’ve been talking about: first, he keeps kinda getting kicked out of the clubs he’s in and finding new groups of people to take him in and they are progressively more right leaning and conspiratorial. AND, of course, money. So he gets in with the heterodox Free Press folks and he starts his own newsletter too and then Bari Weiss invites him in on the Twitter files. And all the while, his profile is rising and he’s starting to bring in big subscriber money on Substack and a lot bigger checks to his organization, again from more and conservative entities.

Daniel: Right, and I notice at some point he just starts calling himself a journalist, too! Which gives me some agita.

Amy: I know it's galling. It really is. He has changed his bio four times in the past 5 or so years. First he called himself a writer and an author, then he was self-publishing a blog so he called himself a journalist, then an environmental journalist, and a “leading” environmental journalist. Then his friend Baris Weiss brought him in on the Twitter files and it became “leading investigative journalist.”

From that point on, because of the Barry Weiss, Elon Musk effect. He really blew up. So three of his four Joe Rogan appearances have been since late 2022. His substack exploded too, so he's had to kind of keep feeding the beast on that one. The post there have gotten increasingly more conspiratorial and he is kind of just become like the manosphere's climate guy.

None of that is really because he is so good at promoting himself, although he is, it's more that he has a certain amount of credibility that most of their other guests who talk about climate just do not. So, you know, Jordan Peterson talks about climate change, but like he's a clinical psychologist, right?

He doesn't, he knows Jack shit about climate science. You know, Shellenberger was like a pretty legit climate dude for a really long time. He might have had opinions that mainstream climate people disagreed with. But like he was in the conversations, you know, so he actually knows stuff and he can play this whole reformed environmentalist card that's like catnip for people.

Plus he still totally leans on his connection to the Breakthrough Institute for Credibility

Daniel: and did the breakthrough Institute still support him because it seems like he's gone way past. The eco modernist zone into the danger zone.

Amy: Yeah. Yeah, he totally has. And for a long time they kind of kept quiet about it. Like the most they would do would just sort of be like, you know, that's him. He hasn't been with us for a while. Like, our take is this and, and like, kept it at that. But in 2024, Ted Nord house finally, like fully publicly denounced Shellenberger in this very scathing blog post that I'm convinced, like sent him further down the path to the manosphere.

Nordhaus post: His original superpower was for finding an audience and getting its attention. I find what Michael has become in recent years, on the one hand, entirely predictable - not because of his politics, which were always more malleable than many might have imagined, but because of his personality, which always cast himself as a heroic agent of history. And yet, it is also completely gobstopping. His politics, his writing, his demeanor, and even his physical appearance is hardly recognizable to me any longer.

Daniel Penny: That's. Sad,

Amy Westervelt: It is sad! I actually, when I read it was like, Ooh, like, ouch. I feel bad for anyone that, that like would have a close friend write this about them. That's like,...

Daniel Penny: and then, it's, it's kind similar to what happened to Naomi klein, I think.

I think.

Amy: Wait, you mean the other

Daniel Penny: sorry, not Naomi. Klein. This is what her whole book is,

Amy Westervelt: Her doppelganger.

Daniel Penny: Naomi Wolf. Ha, that’s what her whole book was about

Amy Westervelt: Yes. Yes. Like the whole feminist community turned on her, or she felt like they did. Right. And then, um, yeah, I mean, I actually feel like this is a thing that happens not infrequently, and it almost, it, it like kind of gets weirdly discounted, but like, man, people's personal feelings. Um, do tend to be major drivers of things that they do in life.

Daniel Penny: Yeah, I mean, I think people in the manosphere would disagree because you know, facts don't care about your feelings., we're all about facts here

Amy Westervelt: Fuck feelings. Yeah.

Daniel Penny: this is like a story that, you know, you could go back to the, like, origins of the neo-conservative movement.

Like so many of those people were leftists who then became somehow disenchanted with the left and wound up on the right.

Amy Westervelt: And a lot of times it is like a personal slight of some kind. I, I know so many climate operative guys, like hardcore climate, you know, that spend all their time just trying to like tear down environmentalists. Right? And like almost all of them have some story of like being a. Pretty standard, you know, scientist or something.

And then like an EPA official was, was like condescending and rude to them. And then like, here we are,

Daniel Penny: Their vegetarian girlfriend broke up with them.

Amy Westervelt: Yes. I mean, Tucker Carlson, right? Like, that's his mom was like a hippie, vegetarian and, and, uh, like abandoned him. And I swear to God, that has so much to do with his entire trajectory.

Daniel Penny: Hmm. That's actually an interesting theory. Um,

Amy Westervelt: Everyone go to therapy!

Daniel Penny: so. Shellenberger has really landed at this point where he's saying climate change is not that big a deal. We have the technology to fix it, and that tech is nuclear for him, and climate activism is just part of like the woke mind virus.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah, that totally sums it up. And he's really emblematic of eco modernists, even though some of them think climate is more of a problem than he does, and others might have a different preferred technological solution like geoengineering or carbon capture or whatever their thing is. But it'll be really interesting to see if his new friends in the tech world, he's hanging out a lot with like Elon Musk and JD Vance and that whole universe.

It'll be interesting to see if those guys shift his thinking any, because they have a completely different tech will fix it. Worldview.

Daniel Penny: So unlike Shellenberger, they think the climate crisis is apocalyptic to some extent, and tech will fix it by protecting us. Or protected them from that apocalypse and the hysterical climate activists and anyone questioning gender norms, those people are still the enemy and they're an enemy that hopefully will burn up in a fiery explosion or drown in a rising sea.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, it's like very eerily similar to the beliefs of a lot of like end days religious groups actually, which I'm sure the tech guys would totally reject that comparison, but like having spent time with those people and. Talked to them about their beliefs, it's really shockingly similar. Um, so before Shellenberger took the stage at Jordan Peterson's ARC conference this year, the audience heard from a guy named Eric Weinstein and this guy's like, he has like a weird space within the manosphere and the tech kind of universe.

He was the former longtime managing director of Thiel Capital. That's Peter Thiel's Venture Capital Fund.

Weinstein claims to have coined the term “intellectual dark web.” Do you remember this?

Daniel: Oh yeah, I remember the intellectual dark web.

Amy: Yes. Of which, you know, Barry Weiss and Michael Shellenberger definitely count themselves members, and he is also a repeat Joe Rogan guest

Eric Weinstein at ARC:   All of these people appear to be in lockstep. This is coordinated through the whole of society approach. Because they have chosen the name for it, we will call them hoes.

Daniel: did he just call us “hos”?

Amy: Yes. Yes, he did. Uh, this talk that he gave at ARC was like, was like very unhinged. It was really, really something.

Daniel: More unhinged than Shellenberger’s. That's impressive.

Amy: Yeah. He really went there.

Weinstein: I would put to you that we are the benighted rest of society. ARC represents the bros, benighted rest of society, fighting Klaus and Davos and the World Economic Forum, who at least know there’s a war when we do not.  The new culture war hypothesis is, is that the culture war is domestic hybrid war.

Earth is our womb, not our home. We cannot stay here. Because we have to go. We cannot all share one atmosphere safely. The tools are too powerful. If an indefinite human future can be restored, and I believe that it can, there is one way out, and that's physics.

Daniel: When he said we couldn’t share the same atmosphere, all I could think about was that scene Total Recall where everybody is slowly asphyxiating.

Total Recall clip: Henchman: Sir, the oxygen level in sector G is bottoming out. What do you want me to do about it?

Villain: don’t do anything.

Henchman: but they won’t last an hour, sir.

Villain: Fuck ‘em

Amy: Such a weird thing to say. Uh, but yeah, like a lot of these guys talk like this. Here's Peter Thiel just a couple months ago on one of the New York Times opinion podcasts.

Thiel NYT   Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It's supposed to be a political project. And then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through, well, the ai, the woke AI will follow you, the socialist government will follow you. And then, um, maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.

Daniel: You can’t even escape the woke mind virus on Mars! Of course Thiel also spent a large segment of that podcast interview obsessing over Greta Thunberg as, no joke, “the antichrist.”

Thiel NYT  The way the antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop.

You talk about existential risk nonstop, and this is what you need to regulate. It's the opposite of the picture of Baconian science from the 17th, 18th century, where, you know, the antichrist is like some evil tech genius, evil scientist who invents this machine to take over the world. People are way too scared for that.

Um, in our world. The thing that has political resonance is the opposite. It is, it is. Um, the thing that has political resonance is we need to stop science. We need to just say, stop to this. And this is where, yeah. I don't know. In the 17th century, I can imagine a doctor strange love Edward Teller type person taking over the world.

In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg.

Amy: Yeah he did. that part was really something. And puts Thiel and his pals squarely in the camp of what researcher Hanna Morris calls Apocalyptic Authoritarianism.

Hanna Morris there was a lot of anxiety and fear and recognition of the risks of climate change. Why I introduced apocalyptic authoritarianism is that with this feeling of just total instability, total anxiety there became this, this imagining of a certain group as being saved.

And this led to a lot of reactionary posturing that united the traditional figures of power on the right and in the center who are united around this common enemy of the so-called new new left that was blamed as further suspending the nation and the world into total crisis and positioned these sort of traditional figures as the ultimate authorities that must be followed.

Daniel: For all their obsessing about Greta being apocalyptic, Hanna says it’s Musk and Theil who are part of the grand tradition of apocalyptic environmentalism not unlike a group that started in the 1950s called the Peak Oil Movement. Those folks–they call themselves peakists– have for decades been predicting that we will run out of oil and it will cause sudden chaos.

Hanna Morris  a part of this is apocalyptic fear of total destruction. But key to this, and what you can see from apocalyptic environmentalism as it comes, comes and goes, is that there's this assumption that there is a saved group, And so for the peak oil movement, it was those who knew about peak oil and who started preparing. You know, these are the origins of preppers and prepper societies and building post apocalyptic bunkers and learning how to survive in harsh conditions. And so. Those who are part of the peak oil movement, imagine themselves as surviving this total collapse of industrial civilization.

Daniel:  I would say peak oil is kind of the right wing mirror image to the population bomb.

Amy: Yes! Totally

Daniel: So yeah, like in the sixties there was this kind of. End of the world conspiracy more associated with like the left side of the environmental movement, that, um, the population was increasing too quickly and that we would consume too many resources and we wouldn't be able to handle all the people on planet Earth.

And that we would have a kind of civilizational collapse as a result. And the right loves to bring up the fact that the population bomb

Predictions did not come to pass. And,

Amy: YES. In fact, actually, Michael Shellenberger does this all the time, except he references not just that, but he takes it all the way back to Thomas Malthus and he, and he says the word Malthusian in such an annoying way that I'm gonna have to play it for you here.

Shellenberger: Malthusian, Malthusian. Malthusian

Hanna:  there's this consistent tapping into this, this real disdain and, and this real feeling of needing to control people. And also it, it's taken to an extreme when it's people are sort of positioned, you know, the masses that people are positioned as also, um, unnecessary. And this is what you see or, or, or, you know, unnecessary and need and almost welcomed there. There this chaos that is predicted with climate apocalypse, for example, and the mass death that's imagined is almost welcomed by some figures. For example, with figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, the techno libertarian extreme where they almost morbidly celebrate the prospect of there being this apocalypse, this mass death and destruction of the masses, because then it affords them the opportunity to have total control power. there's no accountability, there's no need for that pesky thing called democracy because everyone's gone, it’s just them and they can build their fiefdoms, their colonies on Mars, they can do what they want

Daniel: If you’re hearing a lot of the masculine tropes we’ve been talking about this season echo through that, there’s a reason for it. Morris says this is a distinctly male phenomenon. Here she is on the peak oil guys again.

Morris:  They learned about this peak oil and this collapse of civilization. And this provides them a sense of control, a sense of power because of feeling like they are among a minority, a small minority of people who knew what the future holds, and that they can then navigate through that, through their sort of rugged individualism, this frontiersmen kind of identity.

And so tapping into really longstanding American masculine identities of feeling as though there's a special trait among American men who can really grapple with harsh conditions and build a new society, build a new civilization. And it's interesting to see that there was this sense of control and empowerment that came over the members of the peak oil movement, which are 89% white, middle class men.

So it's a certain very particular demographic. That are clearly trying to find a sense of purpose, a sense of direction, a sense of control in their lives among periods of social change.

Amy: Holy shit it’s the Cool Dudes, just over and over again, world without end, amen. But I think this thing she said here, about these men wanting a sense of purpose and control is really clutch to how we fix some of the issues we’ve been talking about in this series.

Daniel:  Next time on Carbon Bros. We'll be talking about the real solutions, whether that's finding democratic candidates who can actually appeal to men using language that resonates with them. Policies that help men and women connect their everyday lives to the problems of climate change narratives that we can use to change the conversation and invite men back into the climate movement because frankly, we can't do it without them.

Join us next time on Carbon Bros for “Integration”.