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

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Amy Westervelt: 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.

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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.

Jen Schneider: 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.

Greg Trencher: 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.

Amy Westervelt: 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.

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

Amy Westervelt: 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?

Jen Schneider: 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.

Greg Trencher: 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.

Amy Westervelt: 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?

Jen Schneider: 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

Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

Jen Schneider: 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.

Amy Westervelt: 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

Jen Schneider: 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.

Greg Trencher: 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.

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

Greg Trencher: 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

Amy Westervelt: 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.

Jen Schneider: 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

Amy Westervelt: 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.

Greg Trencher: 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

Amy Westervelt: shop down the street

Greg Trencher: 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]

Amy Westervelt: 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?

Jen Schneider: 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.

Amy Westervelt: Greg, did you wanna add something?

Greg Trencher: 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,

Jen Schneider: Yeah,

Greg Trencher: 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.

Jen Schneider: 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.

Amy Westervelt: 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

Jen Schneider: Oh, you'd be surprised.

Amy Westervelt: What's the future

Greg Trencher: do have this in Japan, actually.

Amy Westervelt: Do you?

Greg Trencher: Yeah.

Amy Westervelt: Wow.

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

Amy Westervelt: course. Yeah.

Greg Trencher: 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.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah.

Jen Schneider: 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.

And we will get there. Yeah.

Amy Westervelt: 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.

Jen Schneider: Trust us.

Amy Westervelt: 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?

Jen Schneider: 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.

So. Greg probably has some policy answers, but for me as a rhetorician, I'm always thinking about ways in which that the opposition to polluting industries is turned back on itself so that it kind of takes the moral rug out from under them and allows the industry to say, actually we're the moral ones, or the ones who understand how to fix the [00:26:00] world.

Greg Trencher: Yeah. Great. So this idea of, you know, fossil fuel being critical for, human wellbeing for keeping the lights on for helping countries develop their economies. This pattern has been demonstrated throughout history. I mean, unfortunately, so there's actually a kind of a lot of truth or sort of this corresponds I guess with the development trajectory of a lot of, countries and countries like China until now. So the question is, should we be allowing these countries to continue along this same path, which has been shown to be so, detrimental, to the climate and to also air pollution and human health.

And so what we sort of see is countries that have kind of cleaned up themselves. They sort of paint like, you know, for example, they're exporting of coal. They're doing other countries a favor. And so I remember being in Japan on YouTube, seeing these really cool images of Tokyo. I'm like, oh, wow. I live here.

You know? And then I realized that this is an advertisement from the Australian Minerals Council, which heavily represents coal. They're sort of saying that they're exporting coal to Japan and they're helping the economy in Japan, [00:27:00] and they're also promoting their coal as being cleaner than other sources of coal.

We're talking just about, you know. Black lumps of carbon from the ground. Right. And arguably we can say that one type is a little bit better than another type, but that's more so from not a carbon perspective. It's more so from a sulfur perspective. Because sulfur is actually when it has high sulfur content, this contributes to very high levels of local air pollution, which is very detrimental to human health.

So Australia was sort of arguing that their coal is, you know. Clean cleaner than other competing, I guess, minerals out there. And yeah, sort of arguing that they're helping Japan, an advanced country, keep its running, for example, the bullet train. So, that was quite a surprise to see this happening in the context of two sort of developed countries and energy poverty.

Yeah. This is I guess a concept we hear discuss more so I guess in developed countries settings. So, you know, I guess the United States, Europe, we have, we know that's true. We have people that are clearly in disadvantaged positions and they're affected very strongly by the price of fossil fuels.[00:28:00]

That could be, for example, for their heating, or that could be for their commuting because especially as you know, a lot of people with lower incomes are kind of. They've chosen to purchase houses with low prices, which is usually further away from the work, the, the place of work. And so they have to commit further, which makes them more vulnerable to price increases.

Such as happened about one and a half years ago with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So energy poverty actually occurs in United States, Australia, Japan, Europe. But we see that this is used as an excuse to sort of delay, the transition because there's always a concern that that's mobilized that the energy transition will cost these people more money.

And then we sometimes see this used as an excuse to give fossil fuel subsidies to help suppress fossil fuel prices to help these people sort of, you know, survive, which is of course a very, very important thing. But we shouldn't forget that there is a need to sort of help them use less energy in the first place, and to help bring the structure away from fossil fuels, which creates this problem in the first place towards renewable energy.

Jen Schneider: Well, and not to mention that they often [00:29:00] bear desperate impacts of, you know, pollution. From fossil fuels, so they're less able to sort of fight back against those things. They tend to have higher pollutant levels in the places where they live. They have less access to medical care. So those are the pieces that you don't hear as much about in those energy poverty arguments.

It's a, it's a particular slice of a moral argument that they want you to take away as opposed to a moralistic picture of the complicated issue.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah, the thing that I always ask fossil fuel executives when they make this argument, 'cause they do it over and over again, it's what are you doing to get your coal to poor people? And then they're like, I'm sorry, what? Because they claim that this is gonna solve it, but isn't it the fuel we've been using for the last a hundred years, why is it still a problem?

If that's the fix, you know? And they're like, no, that's a great question. We, we really gotta start working on that more. And we have a foundation and they're gonna start working on [00:30:00] that and it's amazing. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. I wanna know from each of you, what was the most surprising thing that you found in this research or, or in pulling the chapter together?

Maybe it was in other people's research coming in.

Greg Trencher: Maybe I can quickly give a short answer there. This is an area I don't have that much knowledge in, so I'm just, responding to statements we've seen in the peer review literature and from our colleagues, but it seems to be the case that in certain countries in the global south, especially that activists that are sort of trying to drop the expansion of coal extraction or you know, the construction of coal fired power plants or something, it seems to be especially common in call, have found themselves to be targeted by, for example, a local police force by political movements. And they've incurred things such as bullying, arrests, jail sentences. And there seems to also be cases of even terrible things like murders of, renowned activists sort of being [00:31:00] silenced physically forever. And so this concern, it's a human rights issue, but it also creates fear. And I think we can see this in the United States, that the current administration has targeted very prominent, you know, academic institutions trying to make an example out of them, which sort of sends a very strong signal to the weaker players that if you sort of do something similar, you'll be next.

And so this has this sort of bullying tactic seems to exist and it probably hasn't caught too much attention of people

There's been, I think including in the United States, quite a few researchers that have been to Columbia and sort of, you know, have spoken to the affected communities.

And yeah, this is quite a real phenomenon. And for researchers that are in Western sort of context, we're more protected. We're not really exposed to these injustices, you know, firsthand. We probably take less interest in them because we're looking more so I guess at the issues that have a strong coalition with what we observe in our countries.

But there's a few people that sort of, you know, take the trouble to visit these countries and to talk to people and it's quite disturbing, the information that [00:32:00] they bring home.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah. Jen, what about you? What was the most surprising learning, working on this?

Jen Schneider: Maybe a related comment, which is just, I mean, we had an amazing team. I feel like we had Jason Oz on the chapter, for example. He was probably the only scholar really working on maritime climate policy, which is an area I hadn't given much thought to at all.

Amy Westervelt: I hadn't until those news stories this year about the IMO. I was like, I didn't even know this existed. This is fascinating.

Jen Schneider: Exactly. And so, he really helped us understand what was happening there. And then we could see connections to industry. I understand better coal or utilities. There's been so much work done on oil and gas, and I think so much public attention to oil and gas and then probably to coal next after that.

But I think very little attention paid to the role of utilities, for example, been so, so [00:33:00] powerful in a lot of national context in blocking climate policy. And then, yeah, something as. A sector that's as big as you know, shipping across the seas. That's having such a huge impact and it's almost impossible to study.

'cause like how do you get into those closed rooms where they're making a lot of policy and there's so much movement back and forth between government regulatory bodies. The industry, right? So just the opaqueness of a lot of, all of this, I thought was, was pretty fascinating to think about. And yet these are huge contributors to to carbonization and, and something that we would love to study more.

It's just challenging.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Fascinating. Okay, if there's anything else in the chapter that you wanna make sure to draw attention to, now's your chance.

Jen Schneider: Well, I would just go back. You asked me for. An example on corporate ventriloquism, and I would [00:34:00] just the, the most prominent example I can think of was a, an information campaign that came out of a national front group called ace, American Coalition for Clean Coal Energy, something like that. And it was a, it was called The Faces of Coal.

And so it was this website. Do you remember this, Amy?

Amy Westervelt: I had forgotten about it, and then I saw it in your chapter and I was like, oh my God, I remember this. Yes.

Jen Schneider: Yeah. It was the, it was all of these like, you know, hardworking Americans who were quote unquote, the faces of coal and who were meant to represent the community members who were speaking. And on behalf of coal. And it turned out they were all stock images, not, there were no real people, just like there was no real community organization that was speaking for coal.

It was the front group. I'm not saying that c community members don't support the coal industry, of course some do. But to sort of represent itself as speaking for the community, as coming from the [00:35:00] community. I think that's probably the most classic example of, of corporate ventral quiz that we have in in the us.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Greg, what about you?

Greg Trencher: I think a tactic, a tactic I would like to highlight is litigation, I think for people that are kind of living in Asia, just the idea of a, a company suing the government because they didn't like their environmental policy is just shocking.

I think this culturally wouldn't happen unless there's a very, very strong reason. But I think this is just part of life in the United States. But this definitely is a very prominent and visible way that companies are trying to obstruct climate actions. Are there any particular. Incidences of litigation that sort of caught your attention, Jen, in the United States or.

Jen Schneider: Yeah, I'll have to think about a specific example, but Amy, you asked at the top of the interview, you know, has anything really changed in the last six months? And maybe that is something that we really see changing, which is that as the balance of powers erodes under this Trump administration, we're definitely seeing, [00:36:00] seeing an alignment of.

Administrative agencies and court rulings? I think. So we're gonna see a less ability for community groups, for example, to push back on companies acting in ways that they don't like, and I think more likely. The companies being able to use the courts successfully to beat back regulation and going all the way up to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court sort of allowing for deregulation to continue to happen.

So I think, you know, again, we'll history will tell how intense that's going to be and how long lasting, but I suspect that is going to be one of the lasting legacies of, of this particular moment.

Greg Trencher: I guess maybe some people would be interested, like, you know, what we can do about these problems, the solutions, the responses, and, this was really difficult because yeah, unfortunately, when you look at, I guess, academics, we specialize in sort of finding the problems in the world and, criticizing society and saying, here are the problems.

And then people say, okay, what [00:37:00] do we do about this? This is much more difficult. It's not like we say, you know, we found A and B, therefore we have to do C. But it is important, I think that we still try and, you know, formulate, strategies based upon this intelligence that we've sort of assembled here.

So I think one of the most evident things is to sort of, you know, make these opaque processes transparent, less opaque. And there seems to be this recurring pattern across the world of people in powerful positions in industry have enjoy very direct access to politicians and they're able to very heavily influence the not necessarily the political process, but you know, the rulemaking process.

Policies and people that are or other societal actors that are also stakeholders have less resources, therefore have less connections and have less influence in this. So this is actually a problem that is prominent not only in the environmental space, but I guess in many areas. You know, I'm sure it's also a problem like say in medicine and, there must be many other industries where this is a concern.

So [00:38:00] how can we make, these, political activities of companies more visible. And so I guess this leads to something quite radical, which is governments would actually be very actively and transparently communicate who they met and what they spoke about with the public.

For example. This is sort of, I think, an idealistic world, but I think that unless we have something sort of radical like this, it's gonna be very hard to track this political lobbying activities. A lot of it's happening, behind to close doors. And so there have been discussions about this in Europe and I think efforts to make, you know, lobbying more visible, but.

I think especially in context like the United States we're lobbying and sometimes, you know, political donations, sometimes political donations. The very visible, I guess in the case of Tesla and Musk. And sometimes, you know, we can assume there's other very less visible donations happening. This really is, I think, a barrier to moving to society towards these sustainability goals. And I would just like to say another thing that I think is a big challenge here is that there's also a need for government to toughen up, to be able to sort of identify these vested interests and to not be afraid of confronting industry [00:39:00] when it has to make a particular difficult decision.

Like, for example, you know, about the speed of moving away from fossil fuels or the need to promote battery electric vehicles. So, but. Unfortunately in Europe among other countries, there seems to be less and less capacity in government for them to sort of, produce their own intelligence.

They have to rely on industry and. Consultants for like, for example, modeling estimations about, the effect of a certain policy. And so because there's less intellectual capacity in certain domains in, in in the government. That means they have to rely on industry. But this opens the door also to vested interest from industry affecting the environmental policymaking process.

So this is a bit of a concern that, this shift towards, using more of the politic the private sector savvy in the the regulation of society in the organization of the state. This actually is opening the door to allowing vested interests to come in. So it's a potentially self-reinforcing loop here.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah,

Jen Schneider: door pro problem, I think is [00:40:00] really significant.

Amy Westervelt: I was gonna ask you about about that in relation to the solutions piece too, that you mentioned in the. The chapter about how there are some differences between these industries or maybe between groups within the same industry, and that those can be leveraged sometimes to weaken the position.

Have you seen like a good example of that recently? You talked about the case of automotive that the automakers that are better positioned to, to pivot to EVs are better allies maybe.

Greg Trencher: Yeah.

Amy Westervelt: But yeah. I'm curious if you've seen that dynamic in action in an example that you could point to that where, one of the industry groups has turned on the other and it's led to progress.

Greg Trencher: I don't have any specific examples of Yeah, one sort of actor picking a fight with another, but, we definitely see competition. I mean, that's one of the nice things about a democratic society, a capitalist society. These companies, at the end of the day, even though they might collaborate, sometimes, they're still [00:41:00] looking out for themselves.

So whenever they see an opportunity to trip up their opponent, or I guess to, to, you know, create a lead, they do. So, regarding the electric vehicle transition, there are definitely, I think differences like in temperature in terms of like how actively or how rapidly companies are pursuing that transition.

And and so for example, Nissan has been a case of a company that's produced electric vehicles, never at large scale, but they were the world's first mass producer of these vehicles. And so they took a very firm like battery centric stance to electrification, whereas other companies chose like hybrids or hydrogen in the case of Japan.

And then Volkswagen in U Europe, of course they had the diesel gates scandal that sort of pushed them to do something. Clean and good. But they pursued the battery centric pathway. And then, so they used this as an excuse always to criticize the other competing technologies, which was hydrogen fuel cells.

So these companies will sort of compete with each other in that respect. But what we've seen unfortunately is that also companies that have moved rapidly towards batteries, including Volkswagen, around [00:42:00] suffering from like economic repercussions. This is making a lot of people sort of nervous. It's a bit of a.

Almost an inconvenient truth about this energy transition, whereas making electric vehicles is quite expensive and difficult. And these companies actually do incur business model repercussions and that's why, markets like China, which I guess they're very large and there's just a huge demand for vehicles.

And also I guess with they're just able to produce these batteries cheaper and they have a more of a control over the supply chain. They're able to do this in a, in a profitable way, whereas the western car companies haven't been able to do this just yet. So people like us that research about obstruction, I guess we have to be careful not, not falling into the basket of, it's just everything's black or white.

Because a lot of the, sort of, you know, the triggers for a lot of the rhetoric from these companies are genuine concerns that we should be sensitive to. But the thing is, they're weaponized. They're weaponized as a, as a way just to slow the transition. And that's the concern. But maybe in the beginnings there is a bit of, you know, truth to some of these concerns.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. We see that in the anti renewable stuff too, right? Where communities [00:43:00] have valid concerns. And I don't think it helps anyone to pretend that an industrial wind farm is like some bucolic, quaint little thing, you know?

Jen Schneider: It won't be disruptive at all. Won't be noisy.

Amy Westervelt: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.