NN#10: A Noble Cause

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I think we all know that the energy transition isn’t happening quickly enough yet to meet our climate goals.

What I don’t think is well understood is why it’s still not moving quickly enough, and what we need to do to accelerate it.

In today’s episode of the Nelder Notes podcast, I want to share with you my thoughts on that. I’ve given some version of this talk for several years now, all over the world, starting with the original lecture I delivered at Oxford University in 2023. And sadly, it’s as relevant today—maybe even more so—as it was then.

First, let’s understand what are not the problems.

It’s not a lack of awareness. The message that climate change is real, that it’s caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and that the energy transition is the primary pathway to eliminating them has been heard. It’s understood. Even the policymakers who deny those basic facts for political purposes have heard it, understand it, and in most cases, accept it.

It’s not economics. We no longer need to rely on academic studies, as we did some years ago, to show that the energy transition will ultimately be cheaper than remaining with the fossil-fueled systems on which the world still primarily runs. We now have ample real-world evidence that most solutions of the energy transition—from solar panels and wind turbines to EVs and heat pumps—are able to compete very successfully, unsubsidized, with fossil fuels. Indeed, it is the legacy energy sources—fossil fuels and nuclear—that can’t live without subsidies now. And the gap between renewables and fossil fuels is only expected to increase. This is why I wrote, more than a decade ago, that the energy transition is unstoppable. It was evident then for anyone who cared to look, and it’s bloody obvious now.

It's not for a lack of insight about the other virtues of the energy transition. Policymakers have heard the messages about the potential for “just transitions” to address numerous social problems, to provide more equity for disadvantaged classes, and to stop the ecological damage done by our fossil-fueled energy systems. Certainly there is still plenty of opportunity to make local officials more aware of specific benefits that their communities could enjoy, but broadly, those messages have gotten out.

It's not concerns about reliability. Yes, some anti-transition propagandists have successfully confused some policymakers and citizens by filling their heads with false claims about the reliability risks of so-called “intermittent” resources—which is, by the way, another term loved by and probably invented by the fossil fuel industry to make renewables sound unreliable. They’re actually very reliable and very predictable. Which is why they are more appropriately called variable. Not intermittent.

Today, many major power grids have 20, 30, 40% or more shares of variable renewables on their systems and those systems actually became more reliable as they integrated more renewables. Some systems even have a few days when they meet more than 100% of their demand with variable renewables alone. To date, I am not aware of even one example, anywhere in the world, of a power grid experiencing a blackout simply because it had a high share of variable renewables, although fossil fuel tools have been quick to claim it when blackouts have happened in recent years… in Australia, in Texas, and last year in Spain and Portugal. There was never any evidence for those claims. In fact they were made long before there was any evidence at all! But fossil fuel tools know that if they can put a lie in front of the public before facts are known, it will likely stick with a lot of people. Because the facts always come out slowly, and much later, and never get the kind of media coverage that the quick lies do.

At this point, most policymakers who are not fossil fuel tools, and who genuinely want to know if renewables are reliable, now know that they are. 

And finally: It's not a lack of technologies. Yes, we are still in need of solutions for specific industrial sectors, and things like aviation and maritime shipping. But we now know we can decarbonize around 80%, more or less, of the global energy system using technologies that are proven and available off-the-shelf today, and that’s without some of the more exotic recent technologies like SMRs, hydrogen-based devices, or long-duration storage.

By and large, we already have all the technologies we need. We don’t need to wait for more R&D before moving ahead. The technological watchword now is deploy, deploy, deploy. And to the extent that policymakers are not actively working to accelerate that deployment, the reasons they are not doing so are not that they think we need to wait for novel technologies.

In short, the issues that are not the actual problems impeding the energy transition are the very ones that I think many researchers and activists imagine they are tackling.

So what is the problem? Why are more policymakers not actively working to accelerate the energy transition and end the combustion of fossil fuels, as everyone agrees we must do? And does our work, as energy researchers and advocates, effectively address their recalcitrance?

To the first question, the answer, I’m afraid, is as banal as it can be. The reason why some policymakers are not actively working to accelerate the energy transition and end the combustion of fossil fuels is because it they stand to lose money and power, and because the people in their social circles—the people they know from their country clubs, or neighborhoods, or churches—do too.

Wealth, power, and culture. The same old reasons that have bedeviled any sort of progressive politics for the whole of human history. It’s just the way the world works.

One of my favorite quotes about the actual problem comes from Gus Speth, a longtime lawyer, author, environmental activist and co-founder of the National Resources Defense Council, a major US-based environmental NGO. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and graduated from Yale Law School. He served as a law clerk to a US Supreme Court Justice. He served as chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, under President Jimmy Carter, where he had overall responsibility for developing and coordinating the President's environmental program. He also founded the World Resources Institute, a well-known Washington, D.C.-based environmental think tank. He was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton on natural resources, energy and the environment. He managed the United Nations Development Assistance Plan and also served as chair of the United Nations Sustainable Development Group. And those are just a few highlights of a long and illustrious career in the halls of power. In short—he’s a guy who understands how the world works.

In an interview, he said this: “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we lawyers and scientists don’t know how to do that.”

So here’s where we are with the energy transition today.

The fossil fuel industry has rigged every system in the world in every possible way they can find to rig it. They have their hands on the levers of power everywhere. They influence politicians, media, business, banking, and really, the entire world. They are the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful lobby in the world. They have captured legislators and regulators at every level of our institutions, funded think-tanks to push their ideology for decades, and placed their agents everywhere—from the lowest to the very highest seats in government. As has now been well documented, they’ve spent about sixty years in a deliberate campaign to confuse and distract the public and undermine the energy transition, because it challenges their business. Their money. And their power. They have tens of thousands of very well-paid and highly skilled agents and lobbyists working on their behalf, every day, to corrupt our political, cultural, and social institutions however they can, the world over, to block the energy transition. They literally own essentially the entire right-wing political establishment, not just in the US, but in much of the world, including major European countries, Australia, and African countries rich in mineral resources.

They are ruthless, cutthroat. They have no shame, and they do not believe in fair play.

And what sort of resistance are we, the researchers and advocates trying to advance the energy transition, mobilizing against this mighty foe?

Well, as I put it in my Nelder Notes #9 podcast with Steve McBee, approximately… fuck-all.

We have academic researchers and nonprofits publishing a handful of research papers in journals that only other academics and nonprofits read, plus a few occasional articles in the press, and uh, that’s about it.

It’s like a child picking up a sword for the first time and going up against a battle-hardened battalion of medieval warriors. Asymmetric doesn’t even begin to describe this warfare. It’s absurd. We’re outnumbered and outgunned and outfunded ten thousand to one.

So the answer to my second question--does our work, as energy researchers and advocates, effectively address the recalcitrance of policymakers to advance the energy transition—the answer is a resounding “No.”

We have no lobbyists. No highly-skilled and well-paid communications professionals getting our solutions out there and making sure that policymakers hear them. We get no air time on the political news shows. We get no ads placed on TV and radio telling the public, literally millions of times, how great our solutions are and how much better a post-energy transition world will be for everyone than staying on the current fossil-fueled path. The renewable power industry does not donate hundreds of millions of dollars to politicians to make sure they carry our banner and advance our policies. We do not own entire political parties.

And most importantly of all: We don’t know how to fight. And win. Where they are ruthless, we are ruth-ful. Truthful. And we are all but powerless.

As a result, it is the fossil-fuel incumbency who defines all the debates and frames all the issues and gets all the air time and chooses all the decision-makers.

So here is my challenge to anyone who is working to advance the energy transition: Learn how to fight. And win.

If you are a researcher and you imagine that by getting your latest paper published in a respected journal, or mentioned in the New York Times, you have made a difference and contributed to the energy transition, I have bad news for you: You haven’t. And if you imagine that there is a legion of political staffers and think-tankers out there just waiting to convert your brilliant insights into policy, I have more bad news for you: There isn’t. And if you imagine that policymakers and the media are eagerly watching the journals, just waiting for the opportunity to discover and amplify your insights, that’s right: They aren’t. And if you are a journalist or an activist who worked your tail off to publish a stirring manifesto demonstrating how the energy transition will solve the most important issue facing humanity, guess what: Nobody in power read it.

Most people, including the staffers of elected officials, are just trying to survive another day of their own battles. Like everyone else, they are tired, stressed-out, short on time and attention, running from one urgent demand to the next, and just muddling through, doing their best. They have exactly zero time to go explore the journals and discover your brilliant work and then go fight to turn it into policy.

In short: If we want our work to be policy-relevant and advance the energy transition, we are the ones who have to make it so. No one else is going to do it.

Year after year, we see governments making terrible decisions in favor of the continued use of fossil fuels and nuclear power—which is now the most expensive way to generate electricity, by far—even after innumerable scientists and experts have told them that those are bad ideas. Why does this happen?

The reason, of course, is that our leaders don’t make decisions about how to proceed with our energy systems on the basis of dispassionate, neutral scientific analysis. There is no team of technocrats going, “Right, let’s understand this problem and then come up with the most scientifically sound solutions, and then go build them.”

Literally none of our decisions are made that way.

We wind up with these decisions because our leaders are not listening to experts. They’re listening to their peers, their colleagues, the people they play golf with and go to church with. They’re listening to people who are already in their ears, trying to sell them their ideas. Those people are lobbyists, not analysts.  

It’s all about politics and money. That’s how literally all of our decisions are made. But you wouldn’t know it from watching the activities of the academy or philanthropy or climate think-tanks. They’re not even part of those conversations.

When I delivered this lecture in Oxford, a researcher asked me what she could do to make sure her work, her years of work on her thesis, could influence policy.

I told her to learn to play golf.

Because that’s how the world actually works.  

So here’s what I believe we need to do.

First, just as a general matter, we have to shake off a few bad habits and unhelpful tendencies.

We have to start grappling with the real world, and create clear battle plans for how we are going to make change, specifying the what, who, where, when, and how. Again, I did not say create clear policy papers. I said battle plans.

We have to stop leaving the dirty business of regulation and policy formation to someone else, and start assuming responsibility for it.

We have to deliberately center distributed, customer-owned technologies and “just transition” objectives in our work. They have to lead our solution pathways, not just get bolted on as after-thoughts merely to tick a box.

We have to stop focusing so much on glamorous technologies—especially the ones that aren’t yet commercial, like SMRs—and start working on the critical solutions that have no natural champions in industry or political leadership, but that really make a difference. Like rooftop and community solar, residential batteries, wall cavity insulation, wider sidewalks and protected pavements for pedestrians and bicyclists. And then build that advocacy into our institutional decision-making in an enduring way.

And we have to drop the insistence on scientific neutrality. Remember Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s admonition that “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Our opponents in the fossil-fuel industry absolutely love our commitment to neutrality because they can exploit it mercilessly. They have no such compunctions, so we’re essentially fighting with one hand tied behind our backs just because mentally, we’re living in an alternate universe.

If you want your ideas to be taken up in the real world, they have to be delivered in a way that is clear, concise, simple, forceful, and with unambiguous intent.

Second, we have to learn how to fight. More specifically, we have to learn how to play the games of media promotion and lobbying.

These are skills, and they can be taught. As I mentioned, the fossil fuel industry pays tens of thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of highly skilled people, both directly and indirectly, to spread carefully crafted lies and convert their desires into public perception and policy. We have to get equipped to combat that.

Universities and NGOs should be employing people to work the media, get coverage of their work, and to get their suggestions in front of the appropriate staff of legislators, just as the fossil-fuel industry’s lobbyists do. It’s a ground game, and one that takes sustained effort. Years, even decades, of sustained effort, in support of clearly-defined objectives.

But employing a small army of media and communications professionals isn’t enough. We have to train our researchers and analysts to advocate for their own work. Every single researcher should be formally trained how to do this stuff and be an effective promoter of their own work. But nobody teaches it. I had to figure it out on my own. Training in media promotion and understanding how the world actually works—from regulatory proceedings to policy formulation to land planning and on and on—should be a prerequisite for anyone working in this domain. And they should be required to develop a media campaign to promote their work as part of their standard deliverable requirements. Anything short of that and…well, they might as well not even bother to do the work in the first place. Because it won’t matter.

In addition to serious, thoroughly-planned campaigns, we should develop the capacity to intervene quickly and opportunistically. We should develop massive networks of allies who can identify and even create opportunities to get our ideas into the public domain and into policy. Climate campaigners, yes, but also local consumer advocates, people in local media, local elected officials who might have a say in the next bit of energy infrastructure to get built. They should know who to call when they need an expert witness to show up at a hearing tomorrow. They should know who to call when they need a quote for their article on deadline.

We should also develop connections with people who are well-placed to effectuate the kind of “cultural and spiritual transformation” that Gus Speth believes is needed. That means connecting with faith leaders, artists, athletes, celebrities, and influencers of all stripes.

Third, we need to get bolder. A lot bolder. Many researchers, think-tankers, philanthropies, and even activists go to great lengths to avoid incurring criticism by caveating everything they say, acknowledging the validity of the views of their critics or other people who disagree with them, and couching their views in the most anodyne language. But that’s not how our opponents operate, and it’s no way to make a headline.

Nobody is ever going to write a headline like “Researchers advise caution around investing in fuel cell vehicles for certain vehicle classes and certain kinds of freight movement over the next 15 years according to certain scenario assumptions.” They will, however, be quite willing to write a headline like “Hydrogen for transportation is dead and a dumb idea, researchers say.” It’s also generally a bad idea to even repeat the arguments and framings of your opponents, because doing so can actually reinforce their points. (And if you need to understand why that is, go read George Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. It’s short, you can finish it in a few hours.)

Don’t waste a minute repeating what your opponents say. Just say what you have to say, in the most direct, unambiguous, and forceful way you can muster. You’ll catch some flak, but as the military saying goes, “War is hell; combat’s a bitch.” No war was ever won by people who never exposed themselves to getting shot. And make no mistake: This is a war. And your opponents do not fight fairly. You do no favors, for yourself or the project of energy transition, by playing it safe.

Now, I’ve been on the receiving end of unfettered criticism from industry and the public alike in my roughly two decades of publishing my opinions and research on energy. I’ve been as exposed as one can be, both in the bad old days when people still “read the comments” and throughout the years of Twitter and other social media. I know it’s not fun to come in for criticism, especially from one’s peers. But it’s not lethal. You will survive. Hopefully, you’ll have someone around to teach you some skills for dealing with all that as well. And hopefully, your institution will back you too, instead of withering under the slightest whiff of criticism. And ultimately, as Nietzsche observed, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” What battle does for a soldier is what public criticism does for a messenger: It makes you tougher, sharper, and far more effective. Don’t fear it: Embrace it!

Finally, we need to develop a real ground game, and that means expanding our networks with the explicit intent of disseminating our messages and turning them into policy. Effectively, we need to become lobbyists. We need to identify the people who make the decisions that would turn our ideas into policy, and court relationships not just with them, but with their staff, their media people, and their networks. We should become insiders. Learn to play golf and ingratiate ourselves into the country club set, or at least make a good friend who is. We should get to the point where no political decision ever surprises us because we already knew it was coming. We should be regularly refreshing our connections with the people who matter, making sure that we’re staying on their radar, and that they know what we want, and that they are in some way or another working to make our ideas real. I know, I know. Nobody likes networking. But it’s critically important if you want to actually win. Nobody is looking for you. Nobody is looking for your ideas. If you want to change the world, you have to actually get out there and wear out some shoe leather making it happen.

Most people who have been involved in agitating for action on climate change and the energy transition eventually come to the conclusion that we have all the solutions, and the only thing we really lack is political will. I’ll underline that: political will. We have to become expert in politics—not policy—if we want our expertise in energy to amount to anything.

I’ll say it again: We must come to grips with the way the world actually works. We have to be able to diagram how the decisions that are relevant to our work are actually made, who the specific people are that make them, and when. We should study those people, get to know them, and develop highly deliberate campaigns to influence them. We should also study our enemies, examine their tactics, and develop counter-tactics. And if that all sounds quite distasteful to you and you have no appetite or aptitude for it, then hire someone who does. Frankly, given the opposition we face from the fossil fuel industry, what I’m suggesting here are mere table stakes.

All of this should be standard practice. Because it’s the only way to win. And we should integrate those studies into our most basic curricula, starting with hiring experienced professionals to teach us how to do it. We have to get serious about this or the fossil-fueled incumbency will lead us into climate doom. As the old American sports saw goes, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

Now, if you’re feeling a bit skeptical about all that I have laid out here—perhaps because you haven’t already heard this kind of militant language from other authoritative sources—don’t just take it from me.

Take it from a guy who knows and has grappled with all of this for decades: Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. For the past 40 years, he has worked in American politics, as a US attorney, a state Attorney General, a gubernatorial candidate, and for the past 20 years, as a US Senator.

During the recent New York Climate Week, he put in appearances on Jigar Shah’s podcast and on Steve McBee’s Substack. You can find both of those linked into the show notes. Sen. Whitehouse had some very pointed comments in both interviews that back up what I have just said. So with Steve McBee’s permission, here are a few excerpts from his conversation with Sen. Whitehouse. (The time stamps refer to their conversation, which you can find on Steve’s Substack.)

First, on the fossil fuel industry’s vise-like grip on the levers of power in America, and how from the president on down, they’ve either got everyone under their thumb, or cowering in fear of fighting them.

Sen. Whitehouse: 04:23

Yeah. November could make actually a really big difference. What you have right now is a president who is essentially the tool of the worst elements of the fossil fuel industry and unrepentant about it. And a congress controlled by his party that is completely spineless when it comes to any kind of resistance to him, and even worse, when they look around at the fossil fuel industry, which is their major donor. And, I mean, they've been doing the job of the fossil fuel industry for a decade or more now.

So you have this terrible situation in which there's almost no resistance to the fossil fuel industry's command over government and its agencies. That changes very fast, if the power shift changes in Washington to a Democrat-controlled House and or a Democrat-controlled Senate. And in that context, there's a lot to talk about and to put pressure on. One is dealing with the climate driven insurance crisis that we're seeing, the great climate insurance collapse, a friend of mine calls it. And that's coming at us...

Over the past 20 years or more, we’ve seen how difficult it is to get voters mobilized around climate change. And by the way, I prefer to call it global warming, because that’s what it is. There was nothing wrong with that term, but years ago some climate activists thought they could sidestep the attacks of the fossil fuel industry that used the term like a cudgel, mocking it every time there was a cold winter day, so some apparently thought it was better to switch to “climate change.” (And more recently, for some reason, “global heating.”) But the fundamental problem isn’t just some nondescript change. It’s warming.

But I digress.

What has finally gotten rank and file voters to believe in global warming and get motivated around it is that it’s starting to cost them real money, personally. The climate insurance crisis that Sen. Whitehouse referred to is part of that. Here’s how he explains it:

Sen. Whitehouse: 08:24

The problem is that climate risk makes certain types of properties uninsurable, either because of wildfire risk or because of flood risk. When a property becomes uninsurable, or the insurance becomes unaffordable, then that cascades into a next order of problem, which is that a property that you can't get insurance on or can't affordably get insurance on, you can't get a mortgage on any longer. And if you have a region, a very significant body of the geography of The United States, where you cannot get mortgages any longer, then you get a crash of real estate values.

Yeah. When billionaires are shopping Palm Beach mansions to each other, none of this matters. But the plumber in Orlando who needed a mortgage to afford his home, if he wants to sell it for any kind of reasonable price, needs to find a buyer who can also get a mortgage to buy the home. If that home stopped being mortgageable, its price collapses. So you go from a climate collapse to an insurance collapse to a mortgage collapse to a real estate values collapse, and then into what the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the mortgage giant, not an environmental guy Right.

Said was a coastal property values crash leading to a 2008 style national recession. And he was looking at coastal, but the evil twin is wildfire risk, which creates the exact same cascade. We are into that cascade now.

I think Sen. Whitehouse has the chain of causality absolutely right, and I want to underscore it for emphasis:

·       Wildfires, flooding, severe weather like intense tropical cyclones, and so on have absolutely become more likely due to global warming.

·       Those risks have now made it impossible, or extremely expensive, to insure some properties, because insurance companies live and die by those very probabilities. And more properties become uninsurable as global warming increases year by year.

·       That leads to collapsing real estate markets .

·       Which can lead to a recession.

Sen. Whitehouse goes on to explain that according to a recent poll of one thousand Texans, 92% of them are concerned about the cost of homeowners’ insurance, but more importantly… they understand why it’s happening:

Sen. Whitehouse: 12:01

And 66% of red state oil patch Texans blame this on climate driven extreme weather. That was the language in the poll. Climate driven extreme weather. So there's a there's a huge... This is not just some arcane, you know, propeller head, you've gotta be at the 90th Floor of the insurance, building in order to think about this. In Texas, it's known by everyone. It's in everybody's lived experience, and the association of it with climate change is two thirds of the way there.

So if two-thirds of everyday Texans—a state dominated by oil and gas money and dependent on oil and gas jobs if there ever was one—understand that climate change is what’s making their insurance rates go up, why aren’t more elected officials willing to champion their cause and agitate for the energy transition and make fossil fuel companies pay for the damage they are causing to the entire economy?

Part of the reason is that the clean energy industry has so far declined to fight them.

Senator Whitehouse explains:

Sen. Whitehouse: 18:43

And if all you're doing is maneuvering your talking points so that you are talking about clean energy in a different way, that's not getting you there. You've gotta step into the arena and show yourself to be somebody who's willing to have a fight. And the best way to show yourself to be willing to somebody who has a fight is to go have a fight. And people know what a fight is.

They know you've got an, you know, an adversary in a fight. They know that you're punching at each other. You... It attracts media attention when you're having a fight because there are good guys and bad guys in the fight. And we now have an industry whose villainy is nearly unparalleled in human history.

Their climate denial fraud operation is probably the biggest fraud operation in American history. Their dark money political corruption operation is probably the largest corruption operation in American history, and we don't talk about those two villainous operations. We should spotlight those every single minute and have that fight, put the villains in the story. Imagine telling the story of Little Red Riding Hood and leaving out the wolf. First of all, it's kind of important to the story that there's a wolf.

Steve McBee: 19:58

The wolf is is a really important character.

Sen. Whitehouse: 20:00

Yeah. No kidding. And it makes the story pretty dull if you leave out. Right. It's like a walk through the woods to see granny.

Sen. Whitehouse: 20:07

That's not very exciting. Yeah. Bring in the wolf. And here there is a wolf. And unfortunately, through the Biden administration, they were completely unwilling to discuss villains, wolves, bad guys, anything.

Sen. Whitehouse: 20:20

They tried to nice their way through this, and you can't bring nice to a knife fight when the other person is carving up your guts.

Steve McBee: 20:26

Yeah. I mean, I I think the wolf is at the door. Right? And I think... I hope.

Steve McBee: 20:31

I mean, I think... I believe after the IRA fight and the beating that the clean energy industry took on that, and then the way that the fossil fuel industry or the American Petroleum Institute have been working hand in glove with the administration to do all of these things through executive order to really, really put pressure on the industry. I think none of us should be confused about the fight we're in. Yep. Right?

Steve McBee: 21:01

I mean, these guys, they're gonna do anything. Yep. They'll say anything. Yep. And they'll spend anything in an effort to burn the last possible molecule of brown power that they can get away with.

The reason why so many people have failed to stand up to the fossil fuel industry is, very simply, fear. The industry is powerful, incredibly wealthy, ruthless, and more than willing to—as Steve said—do anything, say anything, and spend anything to keep their income flowing. And sadly, that goes for members of Congress as well.

Steve asked Sen. Whitehouse whether they really understand the damage that global warming is doing.

Steve McBee: 39:50

Do your do your colleagues... When you talk to them about this, do your colleagues... Does that does that resonate with them? Do they do they understand that? Do they not wanna understand it?

Sen. Whitehouse: 40:02

They don't wanna understand it. It's not particularly helpful that the insurance industry is not standing up for itself in the capital. Yeah. I have had CEOs, government affairs chiefs, general counsel of insurance companies say, well, we're not ready to stand up for ourselves yet because if we do, the fossil fuel guys will come after us and they control congress, Republicans in congress so much that they can come after our tax benefits, they can come after a lot of the stuff that the insurance industry lives on. We will be punished if we raise the need to defend our industry from this climate risk.

Sen. Whitehouse: 40:51

Now that gets you to a point, but that point is when it's real survival at issue and or when your fiduciary obligation as an insurance company requires you to step up and take this on because otherwise, you've got Yeah. Shareholder groups that are gonna sue you Yeah. For not being good advocates. So the... Not only is the home insurance problem something very important to a lot of voters in regions where this has now become extremely, extremely virulent, But it also has a very big and very engaged industry behind it.

Sen. Whitehouse: 41:34

And as it cascades into the financial real estate sector, there's even more industry behind it. And so I think there's a strategy in which banks, insurance companies, big real estate trust, the REITs and all

Steve McBee: 41:48

that Yeah.

Sen. Whitehouse: 41:48

Suddenly realize, oh, crap. We've got a real problem here. And they they can create political counter pressure that overcomes the relentless and malevolent pressure on the Republican Party of the fossil fuel industry.

Steve McBee: 42:02

It's interesting, the timidity of the insurance industry against the fossil fuel industry, because it's not like the insurance industry is a 95 pound weakling.

Sen. Whitehouse: 42:12

No. They have a lot of juice. No. Right. No.

Sen. Whitehouse: 42:14

But look at all the big... I mean, here we are in New York for climate week. Look at all the big New York Wall Street titans who caved under pressure from the ESG attack. Yeah. I mean, that was a complete fake put up by the fossil fuel industry.

Sen. Whitehouse: 42:29

It was all about fossil fuel. It had nothing to do with the s or the g in ESG. It was all e environment. And within environment, it wasn't about rivers and clean water. It was all about fossil and climate.

Sen. Whitehouse: 42:41

Yeah. And the whole reason that that had popped up was because this fiduciary horizon has now been hit for so many com... Companies that they have a fiduciary responsibility to address this risk. And if they don't, boom, they own that problem. So the fossil fuel ESG attack pushed them back for a while.

Sen. Whitehouse: 43:00

Real episode in gutlessness, I'm afraid to say. But it can't push them too far because there is that fiduciary wall that they're gonna run up against Yeah. As it becomes increasingly obvious that you have to deal with this risk.

Steve McBee: 43:15

I mean, hard to understand just given what we're seeing already how the fiduciary obligation... Maybe they need better lawyers, but it seems like that that would have kicked in.

Sen. Whitehouse: 43:27

Yeah. Well, they're bumping up against it now.

You might wonder why all these people in power are so timid, so unwilling to fight. Even with the Trump administration openly acting as agents of the fossil fuel industry, promoting the use of fossil fuels and doing everything they can to shut down their clean competitors, in the most blatant and corrupt fashion imaginable, clean energy industry and leftist politicians have shied away from taking them on. But why?  

Sen. Whitehouse explains, by reference to the development of the Inflation Reduction Act:

Sen. Whitehouse: 21:45

I don't... For some reason, the Biden administration really struggled to do that.

Steve McBee: 21:49

Yeah.

Sen. Whitehouse: 21:50

They didn't wanna talk about villains. They didn't wanna say anything unpleasant. They were just... I mean, they saw the climate issue as essentially an element of a jobs program. This was the green jobs part of their jobs thing.

Sen. Whitehouse: 22:03

And that's just not that that wasn't accurate. Yeah. And it denied Democrats the stance of being people who are willing to fight. And that, I think, really, really hurt us. If you do a word cloud on Democrats, what comes up is won't fight, weak.

Sen. Whitehouse: 22:23

So like Yeah. There's there's this collateral benefit of going to have this worthy, merited, honorable fight. It's also good politics. It's also good politics. So get out there and do it.

Sen. Whitehouse: 22:35

And by the way, if we're right that this fossil fuel cascade from climate risk into recession through insurance, mortgage, and real estate crashes is really coming at us, why not wanna be ahead of that and be for sure loud and clear the party that warned and warned and warned that this was coming? Yeah. So when it comes, you have standing

Steve McBee: 23:01

Yep.

Sen. Whitehouse: 23:02

To continue to prosecute your case as opposed to having gone all climate hushy and wobbly and pretended this wasn't a thing, and now you have no credibility either.

Steve McBee: 23:12

Yeah. We're not establishing the record. We're not owning, right Yeah. All of the pregame there for that kind of a of a discussion.

Sen. Whitehouse: 23:19

It is worse to be the creeping burglar than it is to be the sleeping watchman. Mhmm. But there is real blame to the sleeping watchman. Yeah. And that's why in the past, sentries have been shot.

Sen. Whitehouse: 23:35

Yeah. So we cannot understate... We cannot overstate, we cannot underestimate how important going into this fight with some real joy and some real energy is.

Steve McBee: 23:48

You you actually seem like you're having a little bit of fun to me in this fight.

Sen. Whitehouse: 23:52

I am. I am. I mean, what more could you want than a than a filthy adversary and a noble cause?

What more indeed.

I’ll wrap it up there.

My thanks to Steve McBee for letting me excerpt his conversation with Senator Whitehouse. Definitely check the link in the show notes for the rest of that conversation. Then gird yourself for battle and get out there and fight!

The Nelder Notes podcast and newsletter is free today. But if you appreciate them, you can support my work by becoming a Premium subscriber now. If enough listeners do, I will keep them free to all.

Sources 

Steve McBee, “Straight-talk with Senator Whitehouse,” Amped, October 1, 2026.

Jigar Shah, “Senator Whitehouse on Why Democrats Need a Climate Villain,” Energy Empire Podcast, October 5, 2026.

Mirian Vilela, “Gus Speth -- A New Consciousness and the Eight-fold Way towards Sustainability,” Interview with James Gustave Speth, Earth Charter Podcast: Turning Conscience Into Action, Earth Charter International, January 13, 2021.

Elie Wiesel’s Acceptance Speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1986.

George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant, Chelsea Green, September 16, 2014.