We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emil Drishnski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at FDRLST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts into the premium version of our
website as well. Today we're joined by Ethan Brown. He is a writer
and commentator for Young Voices, has a BA and Environmental Analysis and Policy from
Boston University, and is the creator and the host of the Sweaty Penguin and
award winning winning comedy climate program that is presented by pbsw NETS National Climate Initiative
Peril and Promise. You can follow him on Twitter at Ethan Brown. Five
one five one. Ethan, thanks for joining us, Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here. Of course, usually I start just by
asking for a little bit of their background, how they ended up where they
are. One part of that question is already somewhat answered in the bio I
just gave, which is that you actually studied environmental environmental analysis and environmental policy
when you were in college at BEU. But what made you want to go
into this field in particular. Have you're always sort of been fascinated by these
questions of climate and environmentalism. I really wasn't. I think around high school
I started hearing about climate change and it totally freaked me out. I was
scared, but I didn't find it interesting. I was never like an outdoorsy
person growing up. But I was actually going to college for film and television,
and I felt like, as a storyteller, I needed a story to
tell, and this seemed important. So I decided to try to learn and
take some classes on it, and that was ultimately what inspired me to do
a dual degree, adding the environmental analysis and policy. I realized that there
was a lot more to climate change than just these dooming gloom headline. There
were a lot of nuanced to the issues, a lot of solutions that we
could be pursuing, a lot of progress that had already happened. So I
was learning about that. At the same time, I ran us satire publication
The Bunyan for two years. That was a really great experience, and so
sort of taking that comedic interest and combining it with my climate interest, I
felt that comedy could be a tool to help make climate change a little less
overwhelming, a little more fun, bringing new people, and that was the
genesis of the Sweaty Penguin, which I started in early quarantine and has now
become a real thing. Yeah, tell us more about the Sweaty Penguin where
people can find it. Yeah, The Sweaty Penguin, like you said,
is a comedy climate program that I host. It's presented by PBS's National Climate
Initiative, Parallel Promise, and our goal is to make climate change less overwhelming,
less politicized, and more fun. So we go into a variety of
different topics and news stories. We explore how issues affect not just the environment,
but also the economy, health, justice, etc. We spend a
lot of time on solutions, and all of it is sort of through pseudo
Latenight comedy style formats, so you can find it on any podcast platforms,
The Sweaty Penguin dot com at Parallel Promise really really wherever we're there. So
one of the reasons we actually don't cover climate very often on this podcast is
sort of what you mentioned earlier, which is when you get to the level
of professionally studying the climate, it opens up so many different avenues. You
know, you think you're going down one road, and then there are a
million different side roads, and it's just so incredibly complicated. There's a dearth
of unpoliticized or non politicized expert commentary on it, but there's a surplus of
highly politicized punditry and commentary on it. And this was never more on full
display, I think, than the month of July. And you wrote about
this for real clear energy. You had an op ed there that's a climate
change drove July's heat records, But did elnin you? And really this is
in part a piece of media commentary, media criticism. I saw so much
coverage about very very simple about the month of July being the hottest month on
record, and there's a lot more context than nuance that needs to be added
to that conversation. I say this even as a non expert who can look
at charts and make conclusions, simple conclusions based on you. Sometimes, so
Ethan tell us about what you wrote in this op ed and just dive into
a little bit of your perspective as you flushed it out on that piece about
the news coverage on July. I think it was the first time I pitched
an up at headline that was just a fact, but it was I think
important to discuss some of the media coverage. And there have been times where
I thought the media was way more egregious and the way in which they covered
a story than this. But my concern here was climate change. Yes,
has driven what became the hottest month on record in July. Climate change was
most of it, but El Nino was a factor too. El Nino is
a natural process. It takes place in the Pacific Ocean, and it has
to do with trade winds, and we can get into those details more if
you want, but essentially that process has a slight heating effect on the world
and that we just entered an El Nino event this summer, and that sort
of nudged all these records from pretty hot to into the record books. So
when we saw headlines saying climate change run amok, climate change out of control,
like, I don't think that was the quite the right way to frame
it. We know where climate change is, it's not great, but it
wasn't necessarily what nudged these things into the record books. And I just felt
that that distinction was really important. Again, climate change had a much bigger
old than Elnino, but Elino did have a role too, And I think
if people don't understand that, then they just think climate change is even worse
than we thought and we're all doomed, and that isn't entirely accurate. And
you get into that and the piece one will put a pin in that part
of the conversation because it's equally interesting and important. I want to ask how
you, as somebody who studies as professionally, disentangle those variables, that is
to say, the anthropogenic sort of aspect of climate and then all of the
incredibly difficult variables on a monthly, daily, weekly basis El Nino, whatever
was going on, trade winds, as you say, So, as someone
who's working on this issue professionally and you're looking at the hard science disentangling those
variables, I imagine it's difficult. But how do you go about it?
So whether in climate are two different things. Weather refers to on a given
hour or day or week, what's going on with temperature precipitation. Climate refers
to much longer trends, often on the scale of five one hundred years.
What is going on? So the reason I think it's not too difficult to
kind of split apart the climate change in the El Nino conversations. El Nino
is a cycle that on average, i'd say takes around seven years to happen.
There are El Nino events where the Earth gets a little bit hotter,
and there are La Ninia events where the Earth gets a little bit cooler.
It's not a perfect cycle, but there is some regularity to that climate change.
What we talk about as being a big concern that humans have driven via
carbon emissions, that is a much longer time scale. So when we look
at a climate change trendline, we're talking at longer scales than seven years or
in the case of an individual Elnino or La Nina event, more like two
or three years. So in that sense, we can look at a graph
of climate change over the last two hundred three hundred thousand years and we see
patterns. We see that there's been a big spike from the late eighteen hundreds
to today. That is obviously a lot more time than an El Nino La
cycle. But if we looked just from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty three,
that's where the data gets a little more muddy, and so we don't want
to do that per se. We want to look at those trend lines and
analyze those averages when we're considering how extreme climate change has been. And again,
I'm far from an expert in this field, but I'm always very convinced
by the argument from skeptics of the sort of anthropogenic panic. And I don't
mean to lump you into the panic catecorning, because I don't think you fit
there. But who say you know? So if we started taking these temperatures
regularly, or our record keeping goes back to the eighteen seventies, it's essentially
a blink in the eye and the scope of the history of this planet,
of the Earth, the history of humanity on this planet. And I know
that we do have data from I think we use like carbon dating from tree
rings, right, and those sorts of things going back a long time to
determine a picture of what the climate may have been like in different parts of
the world. But how are we this is I'll put this in the form
of a question, how confident can we be or how serious are these these
trends? How can we know that they're serious? If our our record keeping
is essentially just spanning. I mean, I saw some really bad media coverage
that was showing, you know, spikes since the nineteen seventies or something without
adding you know, the sort of relevant perspective time perspective in context there.
So, how can we be confident in the severity of these trends if our
sort of regular, high quality data is going back to you know, eighteen
seventies in the best of cases. Yeah, that's a great question. So,
like you said, we can date climate back very very far through a
variety of means. There's ice cores, there's stuff you can do with stalagmites
and stalactites. There is ocean sediments that we can study. So there's a
lot of ways in which scientists can do that to remarkable accuracy. I have
some colleagues who do paleo climate. I think that what's different about today is
a few things. First off, a lot of the natural variations that we've
seen in history take a lot longer to play out, or if they took
less time, it was because the asteroid hit the earth and killed the dinosaurs,
or there were volcanoes or what have you. What we've seen in the
last fifty to one hundred years or so, we know that solar activity has
been pretty stagnant since the fifties. We know volcanic activity, if anything,
has sort of declined a bit. And we know what the greenhouse effect is.
We know that gases like carbon dioxide and methane are structured in such a
way where when infrared radiation hits it, it will create this wobbling effect that
passes energy and essentially creates a bit of a blanket over the planet. And
we know how much carbon dioxide we as humans have emitted, and we can
do the math and see that that's what's causing the warming that we have today
if we go back and early rice versa too, So like when we take
steps to limit carbon emissions, we can see another sort of way to look
at the data is to reverse what happens then. And I suppose it also
plays into the same confirmation or validation of that type of hypothesis. Yeah,
that's exactly right. So I appreciate the question a lot because it is important
to look at all these different factors, and I think we've been able to
do that, and we've been able to see that it really is human carbon
emissions that are driving today's warming, and it's happening at a faster rate than
we normally see throughout history, and that gives us cause for concern. Folks,
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sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt there. It's just it's it is.
It's one of those things that as a relatively young ish conservative, I
remember they showed me an Inconvenient Truth like twice when I was in high school,
like a public high school. I was watching Inconvenient Truth two different times,
and I've just like since checked out because I don't know what to trust.
I genuinely feel like I can't trust anything. In the effort that would
I would need to put into figuring out what to trust would be, you
know, really difficult for me to even have confidence in it after all of
that. And that's where I want to talk about another thing. This is
sort of where you end the piece in real clear energy, which everyone should
go read. I think about, you know, the great David Sirota who
criticizes the media sort of from the left and says media is doing you know,
if this is really an existential crisis, then it should be blanketing the
airway. It was like, what is Morning Joe doing to draw a very
obvious sort of parallel to what he did and don't look up with Adam McKay.
On the other hand, though media loves to sort of do the if
it bleeds, it leads thing, and that we definitely saw in July a
lot of that with climates so ethan as somebody again who follows this really closely,
where do you sort of or how do you rate media coverage of climate
right now? It depends on the situation and it depends on the outlet.
But I think all in all it hasn't been great. I think I mentioned
in the piece there was an analysis by Media Matters that looked from I believe
June fifteenth to twenty ninth of the coverage of the Texas heat waves on ABC,
CBS, NBC, MSNBCCNN, and Fox and found I believe it was
something like five percent of those stories covered climate, even though there was already
science done at the time that was able to directly attribute some of that extreme
heat to climate. That's a newer thing that climate scientists are able to do.
So things like that certainly concern me. But on the flip side,
there's also a lot of alarmists coverage that I don't think it is very productive
either. I think there was a headline that said, like climate change out
of control with regard to July's heat. Things like that that just aren't really
contextualized, right, it's almost hard to put a word on it. What
I want to see more of is solutions coverage. I think that there is
a lot of progress happening that people don't know about, and there's a lot
of progress we can make that will not just help the environment, but also
help the economy, health, all these important things, And if we can
have more stories about that, that will hopefully engage more people, because,
like you said, watching an Inconvenient Truth or don't look up, you don't
want to think about this ever. Again, I think I had a similar
thing happened myself. So hopefully more coverage that shows the path forward will help
people engage. I remember learning about all of the different I mean this was
just a couple of years after Inconvenient Truth came out and again was being shown
in my public high school biology class and just learning eventually where where he missed
the mark in some really big ways, and again that just eroded any sense
of trust that I had at a fairly young age. I mean, this
is like early Obama years, and I wonder, now, you know,
we've had marian Williamson on here, and Marianne talks about when she meets with
young leftists, a lot of young progressives who tell her they don't want to
have children because of the environment, which polling bears out that that's sort of
an increasingly common thing. Polling bears out that young people are in some cases
terrified. I'm in the concept of like climate anxiety. I have no idea
how real that is, but it seems like something that I don't blame kids
for being frightened of when they're getting the messaging that they're getting from all of
that. So Ethan, what do you see in terms of how these these
messages are affecting young people, especially because I know that you know you're you're
in that space and what you're doing is serves geared in that space specifically,
what do you make of all of What I find fascinating is the reaction you
describe to an inconvenient truth that you had, which was honestly very similar to
how I reacted at first, and the reaction that a lot of young people
have that is termed climate anxiety, to me, are the exact same thing.
It's whether you disengage or whether you go in this super alarmist we're all
doomed nihilism in direction it's maybe not the right reaction to have, it's a
very understandable reaction, and that's where I try to come in and lend some
credibility, try to think about all these issues critically, try to present solutions
inject humor, because I think if we can kind of work at that emotion
of be it fear, be it anxiety, be it distrust, be it
whatever, I think that we can bring more people into the conversation, and
if there's more people in it, then I think we can sue much better
solutions. We have multiple political perspectives, multiple backgrounds, and I think that
ultimately helps everybody. So that's a lot of the work that I try to
do, and I find that we're able to cultivate a very bipartisan audience of
everyone from the climate anxious to the climate skeptical, because it is kind of
that same emotion that we're that we're targeting. The watched Alt on Wall Street
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your podcasts. And one of the reasons I think Michael Schellenberger has really taken
off on the right. And that's not to put Michael on the right.
He wouldn't know he's been on this podcast of a few times, and he
wouldn't identify himself as a conservative by any means, but he's he's become a
really trusted voice in conservative circles and conservative media. And I think part of
that is his optimism. It's it's not just sort of rationalism, but optimism.
And I want to ask you, Ethan if you share that optimism,
and it's totally fine if you don't, because you can't force optimism. If
it's if you're you know, sort of a val evaluation of the numbers isn't
leading you towards an optimistic direction, but the positive thing I think that Schellenberger
conveys to conservative audiences is that it's within our power to control a lot of
this, that there are, you know, steps that we can take,
and that the sort of capacity of human beings to survive and innovate, which
we've seen over and over again in this country, we've seen carbon emissions decrease
in ways that people probably wouldn't have predicted. And I know people will say
there's a long way to go, especially for countries probably like China and India,
but in the United States, in the West, there happened some steps
taken, some reasonable steps taken, probably a lot of very unreasonable ones too,
but some reasonable steps taken, and I think that's part of what has
helped Michael a lot. But Ethan, do you share that sentiment that this
is something within our control. We're already making progress and we can keep doing
we can keep just sort of tackling it day by day. I absolutely share
that optimism, and it's backed up with facts. I think that first off,
the fact that humans did cause this also means we can fix it,
which I think is a good thing. But like you said, looking in
the United States, our carbon emissions have dropped by about sixteen percent since two
thousand and five. They're on track to continue to drop. We've seen the
cost of solar dropped by eighty five percent in the last decade, wind by
fifty five percent, and EV batteries by eighty five percent. Looking globally,
certainly there are a lot of countries that are not doing as well. But
at the same time, we've seen in twenty fourteen, I believe the world
was on track to warm by four degrees celsius based on current policy, technology,
etc. Today we're on track to warm by about two point six Still
not great. That would be a lot of damage, but that can come
down, and that shows a significant amount of progress over the last nine years.
So those things get me really excited. And then looking to the future.
In the latest report from the Inner Governmental Panel on Climate Change, they
did something I thought was pretty cool. They took I believe forty two forty
three climate solutions, just very broad things like solar energy or bicycles or not
like specific policies, and they took the seventeen twenty thirty sustainable Development goals,
so things like and world hunger and poverty, economic innovation, that type of
thing and they impaired climate solution to sustainable development goal and evaluated whether there were
synergies, whether there were tradeoffs, or whether there was a combination. And
of those hundreds of combinations, only twelve were pure tradeoffs, a majority were
synergies, some had a mix, but only twelve were tradeoffs. And so
to me, that signals that we can use climate solutions to solve all these
other issues we care about. People often say why should we do XYZ if
China and India aren't doing it. Well, if we do it, then
we solve these issues here and then we win. So hopefully everyone does it.
But if we do it ourselves, it's not necessarily a sacrifice, assuming
we do it correctly and don't do it with any sort of idiotic policy.
But if we do it smartly and we do it right, we can really
make a positive difference in everything we care about well. And in that case
you can see how market incentives would be incredibly important. Also just the insensives.
In some ways, it's like I don't mean nuclear power, I mean
nuclear weaponry. I's canna say it's In some ways it's like nuclear where you
actually have to it becomes an inevitable wedge or bargaining chip. There's nothing you
can do about it, but it does become a bargaining chip in sort of
international relations. One question I want to ask, then, is is the
movement it's biggest enemy, The sort of environmental movement it's biggest enemy because there
are high profile activists and lawmakers pushing for things like gas stove bands, trying
to shut down the pizza ovens, and near aticity. There are some people,
you know, gluing themselves to the pavement on you know, bad predictions
about the world ending in a matter of a you know, a year or
two, whatever it is they believe, And so it seems to me that's
an incredible distraction, and it has that's exactly the kind of thing that you
know, makes normal people just tune out and say, I have absolutely no
idea to trust, So I can't get behind whatever this is because I'm just
disengaging. As one of my favorite Real Housewives would say, Lisa Barlow,
I'm just I'm just disengaging. So in that sense, is the environmental movement
the sort of far left or fringe of the environmental movement which drives the conversation
about environmentalism in so many cases, and is driving policy in so many other
cases, and does not want to cooperate with the business community, is uncooperative
probably in general. What am I reading into that as somebody on the right
or is there truth behind that? No, I fully agree with that.
I think that there have been a lot of instances where a lot of environmental
groups will do things that lead people to disengage or not like them, and
that leads them to disengage with the whole concept of environmentalism entirely, which is
a shame because when I talk to people, regardless of your political perspective,
everyone wants clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. That's pretty
common. And so yeah, I think the reasons some of that has happened.
I did an episode at one point where we talked about there was a
study that monikered what was called the three point five percent rule, which basically
showed by various social movements over the last century or so that whenever a movement
had three point five percent of the population protesting, it was always a success.
So there are some of these environmental groups that actually have on their website
talking about the three point five percent rule and if we can just get three
point five percent of the people, then we can make change. But none
of these movements in history did that by antagonizing the other ninety six point five
percent of the population. To get three point five percent protesting, you need
a large majority of people caring about your cause, because not a lot of
people choose to express their support by protesting. And furthermore, the study was
actually looking at what they called aximalist campaigns, where it was like overthrowing a
dictator or something, where there was a clear yes, we succeeded or no,
we did not. A climate protest just does not have that. You
can maybe advocate a specific policy, but you can't say, oh, three
point five percent of the population cares about climate, so we fixed it.
That's just not how that works. So I think that's where maybe a portion
of this attitude came from, that, at the very least, how they
communicate it to the public. But yeah, I think it's been unfortunate.
And to me, what I always say is the facts and the science,
if we actually look at it, are absolutely of concern and in favor of
taking action. Anytime someone exaggerates that or sensationalizes it or does things that will
just annoy people. That just turns people off. It leads to distrust,
and I think it's a lot more productive to just lead with the facts,
lead with the science, and from there, I think everyone should have cause
for concern. Yeah, it's it's a distrust. And then I think also
what you're getting in is this like powerlessness or nihilism almost that it's it's very
disempowering if you know these like alarmist things are being bandied about it. It
feels like it just totally neuters the average person's ability to do anything about it.
And that probably goes to why people say, like maybe I don't need
to have children because their lives will be inhabited or they will be inhabiting an
earth that is is perpetually on fire with ocean's just constantly on fire and there's,
uh, you know, natural disasters every other day. Where what's your
advice for people who want to get good climate information, because it's very very
hard to cut through the noise. It's very very hard to and I'm speaking
obviously as somebody, this is personal, and it's very hard to cut through
the noise. It's very hard to trust what you're seeing in headlines. So
what is your recommendation for the best obviously, Sweaty Penguin, how do you
go about finding the best information on it? Yeah, number one, come
over to the Sweaty Penguin. That's what we're all about, and I mean
that seriously. I think that we do a really nice job of cutting through
the dooming gloom and putting together stories and content that give the full nuance of
an issue, think about it as critically as possible, and I hope that
that can be a valuable introduction to anyone who whether you're a climate anxious or
climate skeptical, or climate indifferent, I think we are a great place to
start. How I find news is I have a lot of newsletters that I
subscribe to, and I think there are imperfections with all of them, but
I try to read multiple stories on every issue. I fortunately have had the
opportunity to interview over a hundred experts on these topics, and I did a
degree in environmental analysis and policy, so I can textualize a lot of these
stories through that experience, and that allows me to put together what I think
is better coverage. I know most people don't have that experience when they read
a story. So that's why I've tried to create the Sweaty Penguin, which
I hope can can serve that audience. I want to ask also in the
context this doesn't I mean, a lot of people probably remember Cylindra, but
I'm sensing that we'll probably have, you know, maybe ten little mini cylinders
coming out of the Biden administration, given and maybe that's inevitable given the giant
package, the Inflation Reduction Act, which had a lot of environmental priorities included
in it, and I mean, in some sense was like green new deal
light with the inflation branding. But on that note, how do you go
about this well maintaining market incentives? You know, it's Tesla's something that's really
stress testing this right now. They're having like a harder time selling electric vehicles
than they probably realize, and that would be probably another podcast in and of
itself. But how important is it to go about all of this in a
way that also is creating something that's receptive to demand, Creating products and innovations
that are receptive to demand, which we have seen successful in different cases,
But you know, not just putting that really awful new dishwasher and making that
like the only thing anyone come by, but actually making a better product.
Yeah, I think environmentally sustainable products have to be better products for it to
work, and we're moving faster and faster in a direction where they are.
If we were talking fifteen years ago, I honestly don't know how optimistic I
would have been, because a lot of things like solar and wind and evs
and like it just wasn't there. And now it's come so far to the
point where a lot of these technologies are cheaper than the fossil fuel alternatives.
So I agree. I think if we're talking about a toilet that won't flush
right because it's trying to save the gallon and water, that's a problem.
But if we're talking about a technology that can genuinely beat out their competition,
then I would love to see free market takeover and certainly creating market incentives so
people know what is environmentally sustainable and any externalized costs are internalized. But I
think that type of thing can really work great because ultimately consumers should be empowered,
they should have full information and they should choose whatever products they want.
But we also want to create a system that enables again, if something has
external costs that are hurting the environment, or have human rights violations or something
like that. We want people to know that, we want prices to reflect
that. So absolutely, I think that kind of thing can be effective.
And again, like you said, it comes back to making products that are
not just sustainable but better, right, And then when you throw subsidies at
people, you don't always get better products. And that's sort of a catch
twenty two because if you don't throw the subsidies at people, how do you.
Yeah, it's it's not an easy thing to do, but it's certainly
not helpful to just have a product that sucks, which I think a lot
of people feel like. I was listening to a podcast that was going off
on the incandescent ban, the incandescent light bulb ban under Biden. Not even
like a very political podcast, but it was just something that had struck someone
very deeply. I want to ask how you evaluate it. Seems to me,
again someone who doesn't follow us super closely, but that Republican politicians in
particular have dealt with these questions on a somewhat uneven basis depending on where they
are. So if they're in a state that is confronting the environment in a
way that's totally different from another state. You may see different levels of cooperativeness
with the climate movement. Could you do have any insight and how that's sort
of transpired on a national level, what's happened at the state level when it
comes to Republicans, who maybe have a very skeptical voter base, including many
of us that are that are listening to this and myself included, how they've
kind of handled these questions. Yeah, I hope that it can be talked
about more on both sides. I think the Republicans side in particular. It's
it's been tricky, and I totally get it. I mean, when Al
Gore tried to make himself the poster child for the movement and you want to
counteract that. But at the same time, I know there's also been a
lot of fossil fuel influence and lobbying, and that's all stuff we don't want
to see as much in our politics. So it's a tricky balance. And
what I really hope is that both sides of the party can come to the
table and have these conversations just as loudly as the other one and advance their
policy ideas. I think when a lot of Republicans were opposed to the Inflation
Reduction Act, which I understand both sides of that, I would have loved
to see them say here's our idea and have something a little more substantial than
just shoot down the one that the Democrats did. And I think that can
go vice versa. That said, I think there has been more climate bipartisanship
than people realize. The Fiscal Responsibility Act included permitting reform, which was an
important thing. I hope that permitting reform can continue this summer. The Infrastructure
Bill, which was bipartisan, included climate provisions. Under the Trump administration,
there was I believe the Best Act, Use It Act, Nuclear Energy Leadership
Act, Great American Outdoors Act. All of these incorporated climate, and all
of these were bipartisans So yeah, I think there's opportunities to work together.
But I hope the conversations are a little louder and can reach the public a
little more because when you have both sides contributing ideas, I think that leads
to the best policy. When one side ramps something through it, it can
sometimes miss important perspectives. Yeah, that's a good point. And it's just
overly receptive to one particular base. Last question, Ethan, is there something
where is there a message to skeptical people? Obviously I've done a lot of
this over the course of the podcasts, and you do a lot of it
on a daily basis, But is there a book or something that really you
think changes hearts and minds, A message and argument, a fact sheet,
whatever it is. If people want more information and they want maybe they want
to be persuaded, where would you point people in? What direction would you
point people? Maybe you've done an episode or series, where should people go?
I would point people to the sweaty again and perfect I'm good at the
self plug. But seriously, I think that what's really important is to talk
more about solutions and specifically ways in which different styles of policy can accomplish solutions.
We're just talking about free market environmentalism. That's not something that's talked about
nearly enough on the national stage. Things like that, I think are what
can get people out of their shell. Because if you just hear there's this
problem that's going to end the world and the only way to solve it is
democrat policy, then of course you're going to lose a large chunk of the
population. If we talk about here's what the science says, here's what the
science actually says, and here's what we can do about it. And here
are all the different policy styles that can accomplish these different goals. And here
are the ways that it can not just help the climate, but help the
economy, help your own livelihood, lower taxes, like we can go on.
I think that that's where we can start to bring people in. So
I hope that anyone listening will check out our work. That's kind of what
we try to do. I try to cover things journalistically. I'll insert opinions
when it's kind of critiquing the media or stuff like that. But really what
I want to see is people listen to our stuff, say I like that
idea, love that idea, and then start to have those conversations. If
we can engage more, If people, especially across the ais'll start to engage
more and become more of a respectful and understand where each other are coming from,
that's where I think we can make a lot of progress. There you
go. Well, the op ed we've been talking about in Real Clear Energy
is titled climate Change Drove July's Heat Records, but so did El Nino.
The author, of course, is Ethan Brown. He's a writer and commentary
commentator with young voices. He is also the creator and the host of you
probably heard this a couple of times, The Sweaty Penguin. You can follow
him on Twitter at Ethan Brown. Five five one, Athan. Thank you
so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's a lot of
fun. Of course, you've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio
Hour. I'm Emili Jashnski, culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, the lovers of freedom and anxious for the Fray