 Hello and welcome back to Drilled. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today we are continuing making our way through the book Climate Obstruction, a Global Survey and good news. This book is now officially out available for free download. We'll stick a link in the show notes and on the website. Today I am joined by Jen Schneider at Boise State University and Gregory Trencher from Kyoto University to talk about the coal, utilities and transportation industries. So we talked last time about the fossil fuel industry and the role that it has played in obstructing climate policy at the global level, but it's not the only industry that is working to do that.

And today we're gonna dig into three more. All three of these industries have mounted efforts to stop governments from regulating emissions. Or transitioning to cleaner energy. And a lot of times they kind of dovetail with each other. So [00:01:00] coal, for example, and railroad companies often lobby together because in some ways the railroad industry has been heavily dependent on coal and vice versa.

We are gonna dig into those intersections and what the strategies from these industries look like and how they differ from the fossil fuel industry's approach in today's episode, I learned a lot. I hope you will too.

So you wrote in the chapter about why you ended up looking at coal transportation and utilities together.

But I was wondering, reading it, if you were always looking at them together or if the research sort of led in that direction.

 I wish I had an exciting answer for that, but I, I actually have always focused on the coal industry and I think Greg has written quite a bit about coal as well, but also transportation. I. I think you could write a whole chapter just on coal, I think that would be fascinating. But the editors asked us to connect [00:02:00] them and I think the, I think the argument really was that when you think about coal and transport and the, you know, steel industry or railroad, they're very, very connected in terms of the way things flow globally.

So it's pretty hard to talk about the coal industry without also talking about the trains that carry coal, for example. So coal's futures are connected to the railroads futures. So I think it made sense sort of from a logical perspective to think about them as connected. And then as we were writing Greg, it just became clearer and clearer that so many of them were kind of borrowing ideas each other, or had some of them had shared kind of front groups or shared strategies for speaking about climate change or climate policy.

 I agree. Yeah. And I think, um, if you went looking for the links across the sectors or these industries, you would find. But I think it's just, uh, like a habit of a lot of researchers to sort of focus on particular silos. So I [00:03:00] think there's a lot of people that sort of identify themselves as coal researchers and they don't really sort of do research on the transportation industry.

I myself have been doing research on transportation and coal separately, but we've had very few occasions I think to look at this from that more of a macro picture. So I think the chapter provided this.

 I was actually like, wow, I never thought of these things as being linked, but there were so many connections between all of 'em. Even just the thing about trains and coal, it's like, of course I've thought about that a little bit, but I don't know.

The railroad industry always sort of gets a pass on this stuff. 'Cause we think it's just like romantic train travel and not, you know, chemicals and coal.

 Yeah, until there's an accident or something, and then people will pay attention to things like that.

 Yeah. This is a, a struggle for any book, but especially climate right now. How much do you feel like the research has changed even just in the last six months, especially around coal. Not that it was dying before, as [00:04:00] you point out, but even more so it seems like it's, it's come roaring back. How much is the landscape changing in which these tactics are being deployed?

 Well, I can maybe speak in the US context. So I think in the United States, the challenge for scholars is that on the one hand there might be federal rhetoric or executive actions that point towards, say, the president's values or the new administration's values, but then there's reality. A lot of which I think is determined by industry and by economic trends.

So for example, I think during the first Trump administration, president Trump really argued that he was going to bring the coal industry back, that it would come roaring back. That was part of the sort of make America great again promise. The coal industry was facing such serious economic headwinds that that just wasn't going to be possible.

So I think you can [00:05:00] see new investments in things like the coal industry or movements away from electric cars, sort of in terms of the rhetoric. Will industry, you know, sort of spin on a dime and match that? It certainly takes, its cues from those political winds that are blowing. But I think it takes a lot longer for us to see actual infrastructure change in the long term because those, those systems are really big and complicated.

 Yeah, so has anything changed over the last six months? I would say that probably no, especially like, I think if we're thinking about like, the direction of decarbonization or let's, let's say less vest interest or something like this.

So to give you an example in the automobile industry. Over the, probably past two or so years, around the world, we're seeing a lot of car makers making quite ambitious targets to increase the production and the sales of the, of EVs. So, you know, companies like the BM Group the Daimler Group.

In Japan we had like our [00:06:00] big companies, Toyota, Honda, making these pledges. And what we've seen actually is a bit of a scaling back of these pledges. And, the scaling back seems to be happening for a, a few reasons, but one, I think there's a lot of concern about the, how ferocious China is as, a competitor to these western car companies.

And so now we've sort of seen probably over the last year we've seen, shift towards protect protectionism. So sort of, um, these companies actually now lobbying the governments asking for like, you know, trade tariffs to protect them. And, this is something that was, I guess you could almost call like a dirty rule that, the, the western countries were criticizing China for doing this 10 years ago to protect their EV industry.

And now we're sort of borrowing this, tactic to protect our, incumbent. Industries that are still focused on internal combustion engines. So this is one particular example that just shows you that, even some of the progress that we thought was occurring is kind of encountering some pretty stiff turbulence right now.

And then I think another, characteristic of all these industries [00:07:00] is what we call path dependency. We also have this very similar term called lock-in. And basically these industries are reflecting, these structures and the structures are political. They're also consist of infrastructure, capital, workers, people, technologies, especially in the case of, you know, internal combustion engines and aviation like.

Engines and, planes. And so these change very slowly and this, there's a lot of linkages, across these very complex systems. And so, yeah, we would never expect these to sort of change radically in sort of six months. That sort of, I think flies in the face of theory of path dependency. And locking what sort of, we expect rapid change to come from these people coming from the outside.

So Tesla has been very symbolic of this, and now we have BYD from China that's sort of encompassing this, characterizing this ability to change very rapidly. But these are kind of traditional industries where we would never really expect rapid change to come.

 That makes sense. Can I have you guys each, and maybe divvy this up, but I, I wanna have you walk through and [00:08:00] give some concrete examples of some of the rhetorical tactics in action. So, starting with, well, climate denial. Is an easy one, but are you, like, where are you still seeing people use kind of old school climate denial as a tactic?

 Yeah, I think that was one of maybe the most interesting things that came out of working on this chapter was that I think there was a belief for a while, maybe for a minute, after the first Trump administration that maybe climate denial was going away, right? That maybe there was a sense that, okay, you know, the bad George W. Bush years when climate denial was in its heyday are over and there's large public consensus now, and we're seeing all of the these major weather events and things. So people on the ground are starting to believe in climate change and denial doesn't make sense anymore. I think we learned pretty quickly that that was not true and that climate denial would exist [00:09:00] alongside all of these other strategies which say, okay, climate change is happening.

And so there's this cognitive dissonance that was happening where, okay, on the one hand we're gonna deny climate change or deny that it's as severe a scientist say. And on the other hand, okay, if it is happening, well then we can certainly, you know, innovate our way out of it. So I think that was an interesting piece that sort of emerged from the chapter around climate denial. I will say, you know, it's just really complicated with the social media landscape too, to say

 any sort of trend has gone away because I, I think we have a very conspiratorial culture in a lot of pockets of the web and, and climate denial certainly it continues to thrive in those pockets.

 It's weird to see some of the really old versions coming back. I keep seeing, I've seen a total resurgence of the, like CO2 is good for plants. One, I'm just like, no, they never

 Or the, or the, [00:10:00] the deep state is now, you know, messing with our weather to cause these major storms and that's what's happening, you know, so, so there's a really interesting. I think evolution of those early climate denial arguments we saw.

 So, yeah, denial. What we see here is, so we have this idea of like denying the physical science, you know, so we can say that CO2 is actually good for the planet or it's not coming from, humans. But another tactic that's also tackling the science is to question the solutions.

And so electric vehicles have been, you know, widely sort of, promoted by governments by stakeholders and across the world. And so we see certain companies actually saying well, in the context of Japan, Japan, we have large automakers saying that EVs are actually not as good for the planet as other solutions.

And so. There's a, there's quite a lot of science, but showing us that EVs are superior to other drive trains, especially gasoline vehicles. And so we, it's interesting that these solutions are now being sort of tackled by these companies. From [00:11:00] a so-called like research specific perspective, they'll, they'll cite their own studies or they'll show, show their own graphs saying that, look, if you look at it from this perspective, the CO2 benefits are actually superior for, in the case of Japan's hybrid vehicles.

Hybrid vehicles only have limited decarbonization potential according to, for example, the IPCC. Whereas the major car companies over here have very systematically denied the environmental benefits of electric vehicles to justify their further emphasis on hybrids as a decarbonization pathway.

 That's fascinating. Do you think that's tied into Japan's anti renewables bent a little bit too?

 Yeah, so the renewables, situation, I guess, is a bit complex in Japan. I, I, I would say that now Japan is not really anti renewables about maybe. Between 10 to five years ago, there was definitely a lot of I think pushback from the major industry associations, which we do cover in our chapter.

And they were sort of saying very strongly that [00:12:00] Japan should not move to too quickly towards renewables because this would have economic repercussions. Electricity will become too expensive. This will push industry away. So all this and fearmongering we see is used by all these industries to sort of persuade governments.

Not to move too quickly, but to answer your question specifically, Japan today is making reasonable efforts to move towards renewables. And we are actually one of the world leaders in solar. So we've made very rapid progress in solar, but we're a laggard in wind. And wind is I think one of these very important indicators of the energy transition.

So we've got a lot of work to do there. I think like the United States, the United States has a lot of onshore wind, but they don't have much offshore winds, which is another

 And they're probably not gonna get anytime soon.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What about corporate ventriloquism? Is there a specific example you can share of that, that will help people kind of go, oh, yeah. Okay. I see that all the time.

 Yeah, so corporate ventriloquism is this idea that [00:13:00] these industry groups, which is like a collection of different companies and you know, front groups, they come together, they have a particular set of interests. And corporate ventriloquism is the idea that they can throw their voice through these organizations that they create that seem like they're grassroots.

So a grassroots organization you know, like Communities for Coal, something like that. And you go to the website for Communities for Coal, and it looks as if this is something that people in towns that rely on the coal industry have created because they love coal so much. And so we see a lot of images with flags and with picnics and children and people in military uniforms.

And the idea there is that there's a flattening between the community itself and the corporations that are benefiting from coal extraction. [00:14:00] So it makes it seem as if, wow, if the industry dies, or if this company dies, or if this company is regulated, our community too is going to die. And so it kind of creates this one-to-one relationship between the individual in the community and the company.

And that is used to create this really anti-regulatory sentiment. I think

 Okay. I wanted to ask you guys both about these these three narratives too. The apocalyptic consequences for industry, technological optimism, and fossil fuel solutionism, and the right to develop and to energy poverty. And like just picking one, if there's like a. I don't know, a story you've come across that really illustrates it or like an ad you've seen that illustrates it.

 Yeah, so very quickly I think Fearmongering has become very prominent. Regarding government EV promotion policies. So we see across Europe, across Japan, across I guess the United States as well. There's lots of [00:15:00] concerns being voiced from automobile companies that the shift to.

Electric vehicles is going to cause widespread unemployment. And Toyota in Japan has used some very strong language, language. They've described things such as business model collapse. And I think that they're probably being quite honest there because it is. The shift to EVs, especially at the scale of like, say a hundred percent, eventually away from in away from the dominating technologies today, which is the internal combustion engine or hybrid variations.

It's a completely different value chain. It's a completely different, you know, production line. And so it is actually the collapse of the current business model. And then so. The, the question is, can they do it and can they do this in a way, or that's, you know, kind of minimize the, the damage. But this brings us to the the concerns for workers and employment and we see that this is constantly cited as an excuse not to move too fast.

So I think fear mongering is sort of, kind of, often links to this idea of, [00:16:00] painting this kind of impression for the public that the company is not, not opposing the direction of travel. They're not opposing the transition per se, but they're sort of arguing for a bit more time, you know, a bit more assistance.

But we know that this is like a delay tactic. So this is quite common. And, I can't think of the actual number, but in Japan, a huge amount of people were estimated to be working in the automobile industry. I think it was 5 million. It just sounds like really, really huge and I think you to, to get that number, you have to take people working in the insurance sector that are probably selling insurance to like, you know, homes and the boats

 coffee shop that's, you know, it's next to the service stage. You'd have to bring everyone into this like so-called automobile industry. But they've used this number of, I, I'm quite sure it's 5 million consistently over several years and featured that on national television in newspaper advers advertisements.

And so basically the message to the government was if you sort of push us too quickly towards batteries, then these 5 million people are economically at risk.[00:17:00]

 Yeah, it's such a convincing argument because they are just saying like, we just wanna go slow and steady. We'll change, but in this very sensible way, it's hard to argue against. Okay. You mentioned workers and, I wanna ask you both about unions.

'cause they show up in a, like every part of this. And especially around, how to bring unions on board, which you also talk about, but yeah. I'm curious, what, what are some of the the key ways that unions are getting involved in obstruction and then what are some ways that you've seen them, you know, be sort of like turned into allies?

 Again, I'll speak primarily to the United States context, but I think it's been fascinating to watch unions kind of position themselves politically in relation to coal in particular, but also the railroads in that, I suppose the sort of the. Assumption, the partisan assumption might be that unions tend to be pro-democratic or pro liberal, [00:18:00] right?

That they're going to vote in favor of sort of workers' interests. And we've seen that, that has not always been. The case with the, with the coal industry in particular. So a lot of those unions have seen a threat to the industry from climate regulation or laws as a threat to their livelihoods. And so there's been a, an interesting pushback or an alignment.

In, in the United States context, particularly with the Trump administration and their sort of proco policies or their proco approach. I think where that shifts at times is when it really comes down to the material realities of. You know, conditions for workers and whether or not they're having the protections they need and getting the jobs they need.

We know that automation in the coal industry has led to a huge decline in the number of jobs that one can get in that industry. And so I think, you know, it's going to be very context specific, but those are the [00:19:00] complications that I think workers and, and the unions that represent them are having to navigate.

 That's actually kind of a blind spot in my knowledge, but lots of researchers focus on this, so we worked with a very large team of authors here and I kind of feel that, you know, we're getting a lot of the credit for their hard work with.

Basically just had the pleasure of just accepting these intellectual treats, you know, and just,

 Assembling them like in this particular way and polishing them and we did receive a lot of material that's like far too large to fit in, however many pages we were given to work with.

But unions were cited by many of them. And one of the messages we did see was that unions a lot of the time they are an obstructive force, but sometimes they're kind of being persuaded and because their main concern is jobs. And so when they sort of see legitimate strategies, let's say to create jobs, then they actually do come on board and we see that.

I think Germany's probably a great case where the unions have always understood [00:20:00] that the coal industry sort of, it's in decline because of, you know, climate change and because of these other economic forces, even renewables, you know, forgetting about climate change becoming cheaper and more competitive in many context. And so they're concerned about their long-term vitality.

And so this idea of the government sort of injecting large amounts of funds into these communities to provide these new jobs or retraining and things, this actually is interesting for, some of the, the people in these unions. So unions have actually changed positions and supported green transition packages based upon the evidence that we received.

 And I would just say going, going back to the path dependency point that Greg made earlier, a lot of these unions have been in these industry groups for a long time. So they've been coordinating with, and part of those front groups that are doing the corporate ventriloquism thing. And so I think, you know, you're locked into these relationships or.

These coordinated activities, it's pretty tough to peel off unless there are real incentives for doing that.

 That's interesting. [00:21:00] I wanna ask you about the technological optimism and fossil fuel solutionism because this is the one place where I feel like it might be quite different from industry to industry.

Like I think it's hard for coal to, to be like techno optimism, but maybe I'm

 So I think one of the solutions that a lot of people are familiar with is carbon capture and storage. CCS.

 What's happened recently is that all across Asia countries like say Vietnam and Indonesia especially, but also countries like India China as well, we have these very young coal fired power plants.

And so if these countries were to be serious about transitioning towards renewables, we are gonna have to write these off before the end of their economic lives. So we're gonna end up with, this so-called stranded asset. And not only that. Well, these countries are actually under a lot of stress to supply the power for their very rapidly growing populations and economies.

So it's actually not [00:22:00] easy for them to shut down, say, a coal fired power plant, which produces a massive amount of power and replace that with solar panels. This is a very, very difficult challenge, and so they have a very strong interest in sort of maintaining these assets while decarbonizing, and that's open to the. To these discussions about so-called, ammonia co firing,

been promoted very heavily by Japan, but also also by South Korea, and I guess possibly by some Chinese companies too. But this is an approach basically that's involves producing ammonia, which is it's basically an energy carrier.

So we can obtain this from either dirty sources such as fossil fuels or from clean sources, such as, renewables and it's very similar to hydrogen. So basically we bring this to a certain country and then in the case of ammonia, we can burn this and we can actually replace a portion of that coal.

So we could, for example, replace 10 or 20%. And then the idea is to move progressively up towards replacing coal altogether. Just having the same power station in the future, but burning ammonia. And this is like the [00:23:00] sort of solution that's been promised to you know, stakeholders, to the public, to politicians.

And there's a lot of money being injected in this now. So this is definitely an unproven technology. And, Bloomberg, new Energy Finance, have looked at the economics of this and just said, this doesn't make sense. Green Ammonia is, is great, but we should be using this for shipping or for other industries, not in an industry where we have other cheaper solutions, such as renewables.

But ammonia co-firing is being used very pro. In Asia, but especially pushed by Japanese companies across countries with young assets.

 Kind of a shell game, right? It's like, okay, we're not clean right now. We're not, you know, in alignment with climate goals right now, but if you invest in us and allow us to grow in 10 years. We will, we will be. Right. So it's always just 10. It's like nuclear fusion. It's always just 10 years away.

 same with hydrogen carbon capture all of these technologies. They're like, well, if you just build it, then it'll make it cheap enough for everyone that [00:24:00] it'll, it'll all work out in the end somehow.

 Amazing. Okay, so then on the right to develop and energy poverty, I mean, I see this one all the time from every polluting industry.

But yeah, I'm curious for like, some of the specific ways that it shows up in these industries. And then also what is your standard response against that? Because I feel like it maybe shows up the most with coal even more than other fossil fuels. Coal's the one that's like, oh, but we need it for cheap energy.

So yeah, how does it show up and what's the response?

 I mean, I really think it's sort of a. Co-opting of, of liberal discourse and then using that discourse against climate advocates. So, you know, I think a lot of environmental justice folks or climate change advocates would say that they really care about things like [00:25:00] poverty and inequity. They care about the ways in which the global south has not been allowed to develop at the same rate or has been taken advantage of by the Global North. And so you have industry saying, oh, you care about energy poverty. Well guess what? A good way to get a lot of folks in the global south out of energy poverty is to allow them to burn coal really quickly. Or guess what? You have folks in Europe who are experiencing transportation poverty, and the best way to alleviate that is to make sure that they have access to automobiles.

Transcription

The coal, utilities, and transportation (primarily rail and automotive) industries have all mounted efforts to stop governments from regulating emissions or transitioning to cleaner energy. In this episode we look at how those efforts took shape around the world, and what tactics these industries used to block progress. Jen Schneider, at Boise State University and Gregory Trencher, at Kyoto University, join us to walk through the peer-reviewed research on these efforts. 

Climate Obstruction

S14, Ep6 | How the Coal, Transportation, and Utilities Industries Obstruct Climate Policy

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

A true-crime podcast about climate change.

S14, Ep6 | How the Coal, Transportation, and Utilities Industries Obstruct Climate Policy

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