The right-wing groups behind renewable energy misinformation

Independent journalist Michael Thomas did a deep dive into the
methods and misinformation used by right-wing groups to rally
community opposition to renewable energy projects. In this
episode, he discusses what he found and how climate advocates can
fight back.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


It's easy to find stories in the media these days about
communities blocking solar, wind, and other clean energy
projects. This has prompted an enormous amount of discourse about
NIMBYs and the challenges of permitting projects. What's often
left out of the discourse — and almost always left out of those
stories — is how such community groups receive organizational
help and money from billionaire-funded right-wingers.


Across the country and the internet, there are hundreds of
conservative think tanks, groups, and individuals working to stir
up community opposition to renewable energy with misinformation
and lies. With virtually no public scrutiny, they have secured
state-level policies restricting renewable energy siting in
dozens of states.


Independent journalist Michael Thomas set about to learn more
about these right-wing groups. He joined anti-renewable-energy
Facebook groups, combed through the tax filings of various
right-wing think tanks, and tried to trace funding sources. He
published the results in his own newsletter, Distilled.


I'm excited to talk to him about what he found: the groups
involved, the tactics they use, the policies they've helped pass,
and the best way to fight back.


All right then, with no further ado, Michael Thomas. Welcome to
Volts. Thank you so much for coming.


Michael Thomas


Thanks for having me. I've been a longtime reader and I'm a fan
of the Volts podcast. So really happy to be here.


David Roberts


So for some reason you decided to jump in and immerse yourself in
the world of anti-renewable-energy people and organizations and
communications online. Before we jump into the specifics, what
led you to this? Did you get sort of pulled in bit by bit or did
you decide to do a project on this at some point?


Michael Thomas


Yeah, it was honestly not that intentional. I was reading a lot
of stories over the summer about NIMBY opposition to local solar
and wind projects and was following a lot of the discourse and
debate over the permitting reform bill. And one story caught my
attention that was about a group of residents on the east coast
that were trying to block an offshore wind farm and a substation
that was going to be put on land to bring the power to land. And
it appeared to be just a normal resident group, kind of the
classic NIMBY arguments that they were worried about property
values or didn't like the site of the wind farm.


And then I read this subtle, just one line mention of a think
tank that I had heard of, the Caesar Rodney Institute, and this
is a part of a much larger group of think tanks that have been
funded for years by fossil fuel companies and far-right
billionaires. So I started looking into it and discovered that
they were very involved in the effort and giving some of these
resident groups money to fund lawsuits and support. And so I
started to report on that story, and it kind of got me deep into
the world of climate misinformation and clean energy
misinformation, and I just really became curious about what was
going on and if there was a bigger story here, and ended up
working on a series of stories over the last month and a half.
And I learned a lot in the process.


David Roberts


Yeah, this is a theme I'll return to later, but it really in some
sense should not come as a surprise to anyone that this network
of anti-renewable energy, "citizen groups" across the country is
being funded and coordinated by right-wing operators. Like, of
course it is — you know, the Tea Party was — like, we've just
learned that over and over again. But it just seems like the
pro-renewable energy forces, the pro-climate forces, just kind of
sleep on that and just kind of don't pay attention to it, just
kind of let it run in the background.


So it's a little insane that it's not a bigger point of
discussion among green types. So I'm glad you did this and I'm
glad we're talking about it. So one of the things you did, God
bless you, is wade into Facebook and join a bunch of anti-wind
and solar groups — Good Lord — so tell us what messages about
renewable energy are they emphasizing in these groups? Like, what
are the consistent themes?


Michael Thomas


Yeah, so I clearly know how to have a good time by joining all of
these groups and sifting through the posts. So as context, I was
doing this reporting on local opposition and learning about some
of these think tanks. And I learned in that research that a lot
of these resident groups are organizing on Facebook groups and
pages. And that makes sense if you look at the demographics of
these groups, they tend to be a lot of boomers and a lot of
people who are very active on Facebook. And so I joined a few of
them at first.


And then in the groups there are often reshares of posts and
other groups. And so by joining three or four, I quickly started
to see that there were way more of these groups than I had
initially expected. And in total I ended up finding about 40
groups. I joined all of them and just started scrolling through
and looking at the posts and taking screenshots and taking notes
and trying to understand how do the people that are in these
groups communicate about clean energy? What are the common
narratives? Because there are usually between 500 and 2,000
people in these groups, so we're talking about tens of thousands
of people in very small communities that are receiving this
messaging.


So it's I think, really important...


David Roberts


And of course, you know, just to point out the obvious, these are
probably the hard core and they take those messages and spread
them word of mouth to many, many thousands more, right?


Michael Thomas


Totally.


David Roberts


It's a much larger audience than just the members.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, it's also — I think — really important to note that these
tend to be the most civically engaged people. So on TikTok, a
video might go viral about how great solar panels are, but if the
people watching that video don't show up to the county commission
meeting, then it doesn't really matter necessarily. Or it does
matter, but it's not as effective. So these are a lot of people
who are retired or who are very engaged in their communities. And
so what starts on Facebook quickly bleeds into town halls and
county commission meetings. And often the discourse is really
intense and really emotionally charged.


But to answer your question of what sort of themes and messages I
saw, there was a range of posts. Some of them were misleading
claims about clean energy. Like, an example that I saw a lot of
was that solar panels and wind turbines are made using rare earth
materials and they're made in China, and China uses a lot of
coal. And so the implication is that clean energy is not actually
that clean and it's not good for the environment, which, of
course, the status quo energy system we have today that relies on
fossil fuels, is terrible for the environment, kills millions of
people a year, and is wreaking havoc on our environment.


And these are solutions that are orders of magnitude better, but
certainly not perfect. So they're sort of driving a wedge in some
of that. And another similar one is that wind turbines kill
birds. Of course, famous argument against wind. So you'll see
memes like if this was a bird that had been killed by oil spill,
this image would be all over the front page news. And that one
spread like wildfire. Like that thing had tens of thousands of
shares.


David Roberts


Oh, yes, you get the hypocrisy of the mainstream media in there
too. You you're hitting all the buttons.


Michael Thomas


Exactly. And then another that starts to get us into the — from
misleading to just lies — is that the wind turbines or solar
panels are going to destroy property values. So we're talking
about 25%, 50% declines in your property value. And this is, of
course, famously shared by Donald Trump in a, I think, RNC
meeting a couple of years ago where he says wind turbines cause
cancer and if you live near them — BANG — 50% drop in your
property values. So...


David Roberts


Let's just pause to note that Donald Trump is just perfectly
squarely in the demographic to be receiving these messages.


Michael Thomas


Totally. And interestingly, he's been against wind energy for
years. I mean, his goes back to like, 2012.


David Roberts


It's a golf course, right?


Michael Thomas


I think in Scotland there was a golf course that they were going
to set up wind turbines near, and so he's been spreading this
misinformation longer than most people. So that was a really
common one — the property value argument. Of course, again,
numerous studies have shown that there's either minimal or no
impact on property values when clean energy projects go into a
community. But there is one London School of Economics study,
which is a big name, very reputable source, that found that it
dropped by I think it's something like 8% or 10% that gets shared
a lot in these communities and by some of these influential
anti-clean-energy thought leaders.


And important to look at that study and the actual details of it,
because if you do, it found that there were only three homes that
they looked at. So we're talking about a sample size of three.
And again, if you look at much larger sample sizes, there is no
evidence that it really hurts property values. And then the last
two that I'll share, kind of archetypes of posts I saw, one was
the "wind turbine on fire" post.


David Roberts


Yes, I love... They love those "wind turbine on fire" pictures. I
see those all the time, even on Twitter.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, and I was really surprised to see these at first. I
actually hadn't ever seen an image of a wind turbine on fire or a
video. But when I'm scrolling through these groups, they're like
every ten posts or something. And I started to think like, oh my
God, this stuff is dangerous. Like, if a wind turbine caught fire
and it falls down, you can see where it would scare you. So I
looked into the data to see how common this was, and of course, I
found that the Department of Energy has done a study on this.


They found that I think in 2017, there were something like 50,000
wind turbines in the country, and only 40 of them had a safety
incident like this. So it's an incredibly rare event that is made
to seem very common and therefore really scary to imagine a
project like that going up in your community. And then the last
one that I'll share, this is kind of a famous anti-wind piece of
misinformation, was posts about wind turbine syndrome. This is
something that I had never heard of before, and I'm clearly in
different communities. And so this is based on a 2006 study that
found that there were a number of people living near wind farms
that would develop headaches and nausea.


And this study spread like crazy. And there have been something
like 20 or 25 peer-reviewed studies on this since then, and none
of them have been able to replicate the same findings. None of
them have found any association between wind turbines and
negative health effects.


David Roberts


I feel like I remember one out of England where they had like,
wind turbine syndrome, and then they did like, a community
comparison in another community. They went in early and paid
residents, they basically paid residents, like, a small
percentage of the profits of the wind farm, you know, to buy them
in. And there was no wind turbine syndrome at all in the second
community.


Michael Thomas


Interesting.


David Roberts


Weirdly. A little money can ward off of that particular syndrome,
it seems.


Michael Thomas


So one interesting thing that I found in some of this research on
wind turbine syndrome is that there's one exception that I found
where people do start to develop negative health effects, and
that's if they've already read information about wind turbine
syndrome or about the negative health effects. And so it's
actually really sad because a lot of people are posting this
stuff and they're reaching a lot of communities that may or may
not end up with wind turbines. And there's a great story in
BuzzFeed a year or two back that was written by Joseph Bernstein,
and he interviewed a lot of people. And in the end, he kind of
concludes the story, saying that as he started to talk to more
people and he was sleeping in his hotel near the wind farm, he
suddenly started to hear it, and he suddenly started to be driven
crazy.


It's unfortunate because I think a lot of people will probably
have that placebo or start to be affected by those — in their
community.


David Roberts


That is so darkly hilarious. So let's talk a little bit about how
these groups organize. I mean, it's not like these random groups
of misinformed and irritable boomers know instinctively how to
organize, how to communicate, how to get results, how to block
things at the state level. So how's — Let's talk a little bit
about the people who are helping them. And you did a piece
specifically about this guy named John Droz Jr. Tell us a little
bit about him. He's helping these groups organize. What is he
kind of telling them? What sort of advice is he giving to these
groups?


Like, presumably he's on the lookout for these groups and in
communication with all these groups. What's his message to them?


Michael Thomas


Yeah, so John Droz is certainly one of the most interesting
people I've ever reported on. I learned about him as I was wading
into the misinformation in some of these communities. I started
to see a lot of posts to this guy's website, and I went and
looked at the site, and it just has tons of resources on how to
block a wind project or a solar project in your community. And
they're incredibly effective tools. All, of course, styled in
bright red fonts and, like, Comic Sans font and PDFs, but just
like, packed with dense, probably really great information if
you're trying to kill a project.


But stylistically, certainly interesting. So some backstory on
John Droz. In 2011, he was a retired real estate investor, spent
most of his career buying and flipping real estate in North
Carolina. And that year, he learned about this bill that was
going through the state legislature, debating what to do about
sea level rise that was coming and how to adapt to that as a
state. So Droz, who has no background in climate science or
climate adaptation or anything related, creates 125 slide
PowerPoint titled "Our Sea Level Policy: From Science or
Lobbyists?". And he goes through and basically debunks NOAA.


And all of these US agencies, science and all these peer-reviewed
studies saying none of this is true and the sea level here isn't
going to rise and climate change isn't happening and kind of puts
in all of the classic climate denial in this thing. And he was
incredibly effective at getting the ear of the Republican
legislators. So he met with tons of them, gave this presentation
to them and was even quoted in the Washington Post in an article.
Somehow the Washington Post fact checking team didn't catch this.
But there was a story that ran where he cited as a local
physicist and as an opponent to this bill.


David Roberts


Kind of what you call a lay physicist maybe.


Michael Thomas


Exactly. So North Carolina eventually decides to vote against
this bill. They don't take those climate adaptation measures. And
this gets the attention of American Tradition Institute — ATI,
which is a climate-denial think tank that became well known when
they attacked some climate scientists like Michael Mann and
spread a bunch of lies about him. And so ATI brings John Droz on
as a senior fellow. And in 2012 they organized this now infamous
anti-wind-energy meeting in DC with really a Who's Who of climate
deniers and and a group of local residents around the country who
are trying to block projects.


And there was a leaked memo from this meeting that I think is
worth quoting from. Do you mind if I share a few minutes from
this to give you a sense of what it has? So it leads: "The
minimum national campaign goal is to constructively influence
national and state wind-energy policies." Then they go on: "The
goal is to cause subversion in the message of industry so that it
effectively becomes so bad no one wants to admit in public that
they are for it." — and they're talking about wind energy — "much
like wind has done to coal by turning green to black and clean to
dirty." Ultimate goal: Change policy direction based on the
message.


David Roberts


How many dozens of sort of vaguely progressive campaigns have you
seen that are out there just raising awareness, you know, with —
the left loves to raise awareness — and this guy on the right is
like screw awareness. We want to change policy! We are after
policy changes!


Michael Thomas


Totally, and they were incredibly effective at this. So this is
back in 2012 and Droz understood long before terms like Fake News
or Alternative Facts became really popular. He knew that if you
provided people with an alternative story or an alternative set
of facts, some small percentage of the population is going to
believe it. So rather than debate the little policy details and
kind of get lost in the weeds and maybe make a large number of
people mildly opposed to clean energy, they spread this
misinformation that gets a very small number of people incredibly
passionate and incredibly emotionally charged and believing lies
about clean energy.


Things like: Wind energy is bad for the environment. That's an
example of "turning clean to dirty", which is what he wanted to
do.


David Roberts


Famously, Karl Rove's strategy, right? He's like, you find your
opponent's virtues, what they're selling as their virtues, and go
straight at them, right?


Michael Thomas


Totally.


David Roberts


You go straight at the merits and so you go after sustainability
and you go after, you know, good for the economy and good for the
environment.


Michael Thomas


Absolutely. So he ended up teaching all of these activists that
were at the meeting and then in the ten years since then, he's
taught thousands of people some of these tactics. And as I was
going through all of his materials on his site and looking
through old documents, I kind of started to write down John
Droz's Rules for anti-wind opposition. And one of them that
really stood out to me was this belief of his that in order to
win, you have to have aggressive demands and stick to them. So
it's all about holding your line and saying, we don't want a
single wind turbine in our community. It's not about taking
concessions like...


David Roberts


Wait, not preemptively conceding things, not going in saying:
We're reasonable, we want to find a reasonable middle. Wow,
interesting, interesting, interesting...


Michael Thomas


So they basically just say, we don't want a single project or a
single turbine to go up. And this is part of what creates such a
toxic discourse in local communities because there's no attempt
at compromise, which is, I think, a really important thing for
local communities when they're debating these things. And instead
they aim for either outright bans of wind energy through these
local ordinances or setback requirements that require a wind
turbine to be cited something like 2000ft from a home or like
2000ft away from one another. And when you play this out, wind
companies just can't create a project in a community like that.
So it's an effective ban — but different language.


David Roberts


I was aware of this happening, but it's kind of amazing. So the
Biden administration has these huge goals for offshore wind and
has made a bunch of big announcements and started various
processes. And since they have made announcements, they have been
sued in every state on the coast. So just so listeners are aware
of the scope of this thing, like, there are these anti-wind
groups seated in every state where there's wind. So one of the
things you wrote about in that story is none of the local media
stories about these groups — you know, so like, they propose an
offshore wind farm and some sort of like "earnest residence for
good things" group starts.


And the local media inevitably treats these as spontaneous
democratic uprisings of citizens. And it's not that hard — you
don't have to dig that hard — to find out that they're all
getting funding from the same sort of network. So, A: Do you have
any diagnosis of what the hell is wrong with local media? Why
won't they tell the story and then B: Tell us a little bit about
the State Policy Network, the SPN, on the right and it's sort of
network of funding.


Michael Thomas


Sure. So the State Policy Network and the group of think tanks
that are members of this are really the core of the fossil fuel
funded opposition and a lot of the things that we talked about
earlier. So there's a group of, I think it's something like 50
think tanks. They're all set up as 501c3 nonprofits and they're
in states across the country. And if anyone's read Jane Mayer's
amazing book on this topic — Dark Money — about the Koch brothers
efforts to try to prevent climate policy from passing in the
country, you'll know that a lot of fossil fuel billionaires were
involved in setting up these nonprofits.


So a lot of the think tanks in the State Policy Network were
either co-founded with the Koch brothers or given initial seed
funding by the Koch brothers, who run — I'm sure all of your
listeners know — Koch Industries, one of the biggest fossil fuel
companies in the country. And since then, the Koch brothers
continue to fund a lot of these nonprofits. But so do dozens or
hundreds of billionaires that are in other extractive and dirty
industries around the country and don't want to see climate
policy pass. So the State Policy Network is the organizer of all
of this so that they can take learnings from one state and pass
those through to the rest of the states.


So most recently, a group of bills that I saw that passed through
the State Policy Network was some of the preemption bans on local
governments that wanted to ban natural gas in buildings. So it's
no coincidence that all of those preemption bans had similar, or
in some cases the exact same language. It's a combination of the
State Policy Network and then ALEC, the American Legislative... —
I'm going to butcher the acronym — but there's basically the
State Policy Network doing the 501c3 kind of research and then
ALEC writes the policy and gives it to legislators to pass. So
that's some background on state policy.


David Roberts


That's worth just emphasizing briefly. It's not just that these
groups get sort of standardized scripts and directions for how to
oppose things. There's a whole network of right wing groups that
has these sort of model bills, model legislation, model for every
level of government, so that these groups don't have to
investigate policy or write their own policy, right? They just
take the template and change a few keywords. So it makes things
very easy. It's very easy for these groups. Every step is worked
out for them. PS.: It's the American Legislative Exchange Council
that is incredibly difficult to remember.


Michael Thomas


Yes, thank you.


David Roberts


Probably on purpose, right? I mean, it's meant to be bland and
forgettable.


Michael Thomas


Yeah. Jane Mayer read this article where she did some reporting
on the State Policy Network. And there was an internal meeting
between these think tanks where the head of State Policy Network
described their strategy and their model, like "The Ikea of
Conservative Policy" where you just, like, grab all your parts
and pieces and assemble them...


David Roberts


Exactly!


Michael Thomas


...yourself and then pass the bill.


David Roberts


All you need is the Allen wrench and everything else is there for
you.


Michael Thomas


She's also described that kind of ecosystem as — like an assembly
line where groups fund colleges first and universities that do
research on something like climate policy or climate science. So
the Koch brothers are giving millions and millions of dollars to
universities and then the think tanks take the ideas from those
universities and they turn them into policy ideas. And then ALEC
and legislators that have been given money by these billionaires,
they craft the actual policy and the legal language and then they
fund the politicians who end up voting for those and it becomes
an assembly line of conservative and anti-climate policy.


David Roberts


It's like a vertically integrated Ikea that owned its own supply
chain and like its own customers, you know what I mean? It's like
a full ecosystem. And so this seems notable, right? So why
doesn't the media note it? I mean, it's a little insane. It seems
like the first thing you'd do if you ran across one of these
citizen groups, is be like, I wonder where this came from. Who's
funding these people? But they don't even seem to ask.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, and it's important because the State Policy Network think
tanks are setting up campaigns and are giving legal support to
these groups. So they're very much intertwined and it's very much
an effort by the fossil fuel industry through these nonprofits to
block this policy. Just to give an example, one of the groups I'm
currently writing a story on, Caesar Rodney Institute, they sent
out 35,000 mailers in 2018 to residents all along the coast that
were going to see one of these wind projects. And they sent them
all of the misinformation that I mentioned earlier that I saw in
these Facebook groups and then also a call for financial support.


And they ended up raising $50,000 from these residents. They got
700 residents to join the group that they set up that had a very
local grassroot name to it. It's like, Save Our Coast. And so now
this group can in some ways legitimately say that we have 700
residents from the community who don't want this project to exist
when they've really manufactured that opposition using money from
fossil fuel companies to do it. So, of course, Caesar Rodney
Institute got an award from the State Policy Network for this. It
was one of the best communications campaigns of 2020.


David Roberts


And it is too. I hate it. You hate to say anything positive about
this, but this is all brilliant. I mean, it's all so well done.
Well done evil.


Michael Thomas


It's incredibly effective. And so to your question of why the
local media in these communities aren't covering this, I think
this is a part of the larger story of the collapse of local news
in America. So there's a part of this that is the story of these
hedge funds, or what are known as Vulture Funds, who go and buy
up local papers and gut them, fire all the journalists. And
suddenly a newsroom that used to have 20 people has two people,
and they just graduated from college. So that's not going to
produce the best reporting. And then you also have a media
environment that is encouraging really quick stories, getting
stuff out every single day and not doing deep reporting.


So it's just hard to catch this when you get a press release. You
turn that press release into an article and hit publish two hours
later and that's the environment we're in.


David Roberts


Well, it seems like a concerted — I mean, I'll return to this
later. I don't want to get into it now. — But it seems like a
concerted effort to push this information so that local
journalists had access to it could be done, say, by a clever
billionaire on the left. But before we get to that, one of the
twists of messaging lately is something you call Woke Washing.
Let's just touch on that briefly. This is from something that the
Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is one of these right wing
think tanks in the State Policy Network. Another incredibly
forgettable name, but it's one of the campaigns they're running.
Tell us a little bit about what Woke Washing means.


Michael Thomas


Yes. So Emily Atkin — Heated, another Substack publication — and
I ran a story recently about the Texas Public Policy Foundation,
or TPPF, and one of the things that we looked at was how they're
using environmental laws to block offshore wind projects. And a
couple of the laws they're using are NEPA and the Endangered
Species Act. And it's worth noting that TPPF in the Trump years
was basically attacking these same laws, saying that they're
preventing the country from building the energy that it needs and
they're destroying the economy.


David Roberts


The right has been attacking those laws since the sixties and
seventies when they were passed, right?


Michael Thomas


Yeah. So TPPF took a pretty dramatic turn when Biden got in
office and has suddenly become one of the biggest advocates for
the Endangered Species Act and NEPA. And most recently, they
funded a group of local fishermen on the East Coast who wanted to
sue the Biden administration over their offshore wind leases. And
in the lawsuit, they didn't make a lot of commercial claims. It
wasn't necessarily about the fishing. It was really all about how
these wind farms were going to further endanger the North
Atlantic right whale, which is an endangered whale — of course an
endangered species and needs to be protected.


But there's a whole process that a lot of environmental groups
like NRDC and Conservation Law Foundation have signed off on and
signed an agreement with the developers of these projects. And
there are a lot of measures taken to make sure that the
construction of these projects don't further endanger those
whales, but TPPF is suing the Biden administration using these
laws and really just trying to slow these projects down. So the
term Woke Washing came up when we interviewed a disinformation
expert, and she used this term to describe when far right groups
use the language of justice to basically fight for injustice and
against environmental law.


So you're using the language of the environmental movement to
prevent its goals.


David Roberts


God, it's effective too, because some of these concerns are not
baseless. Like you say, if you're going to protect the right
whale, you do need to take measures. So if any of these groups
cared about constructively engaging — The concerns are plausible
enough that I can see how they work quite well.


Michael Thomas


Yeah.


David Roberts


It's very devious.


Michael Thomas


It's also another example of where these groups are pushing for
the far extreme solution and not compromise. So in these
lawsuits, the end of them says that the plaintiff's request or
the plaintiff's claim is that they want all projects that are
associated with this new streamlined offshore lease program that
was started in the Obama years. They want all of those projects
to be stopped entirely. So that's every single offshore wind
project in America, and we're talking about tens of gigawatts of
power. And so they're not asking for what the environmental
groups asked for when they were trying to protect the right
whale, which is just some mitigation efforts and some changes to
how they were going to construct the farm. They're trying to kill
every single project in America.


David Roberts


Organizing these groups — these citizen groups on Facebook — is
of course not the only way of reaching people on Facebook.
There's also just Facebook ads. So in that respect, let's talk
about PragerU, Prager University — it makes me laugh to say the
word university associated with this, but nonetheless that's what
it's called. Tell us about Prager and PragerU and the sort of
revelation that one of their co-founders have and how they sort
of implemented that in practice.


Michael Thomas


So PragerU is a nonprofit media company that was started by
Dennis Prager, who was a conservative radio host, still is, but
has been doing this for about 30 years. And when I was in these
local opposition groups on Facebook, I noticed a lot of their
videos popping up and so I wanted to dig in and learn more about
PragerU. I watched a lot of YouTube and have for many years, and
so I was already a little bit aware of the channel because...


David Roberts


They're everywhere.


Michael Thomas


Yeah.


David Roberts


It's everywhere.


Michael Thomas


Anyone who spends time on YouTube will say that.


David Roberts


They come up on my feed. My son sees them fly by all the time.
They're ubiquitous.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, they target eleven and twelve year old. You see these
stories, parents around of like, what is this group doing sending
my son these ads of PragerU? So I looked at their YouTube channel
and tried to find all the videos that were related to climate and
energy, ended up finding about 20 of them. And the titles of
these videos kind of give away the message like, it's so simple.
One of them is: "Fossil fuels: Greener than you think". The whole
message of this video, which is delivered by Alex Epstein, who
wrote a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, is that
fossil fuels are clean, they're good for the environment, and
that everything you've heard from environmentalists is wrong.


And other videos include claims that clean energy is really bad
for the environment. These are delivered by people like Michael
Shellenberger and Bjørn Lomborg, and they're again making
misleading claims based on real problems like wind turbines kill
endangered birds, or clean energy projects are built using
materials that create environmental harm.


David Roberts


One of the interesting things you mentioned in the story is that
they were sort of big into the straight up climate-denial
business, but then Facebook and Google passed policies saying you
can't do the straight up climate-denial anymore. And that sort of
created a pivot. Talk about that a little bit.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, so after many years of creating videos with claims like,
there's no evidence that CO2 causes climate change, which is of
course not true, Facebook and Google changed their policies not
to limit their videos. So their videos are still on these
platforms, but they limited the ability for them to use ads to
promote them. So I looked at Facebook's ad transparency tool and
I looked through PragerU Form 990 IRS documents, and I found that
they were spending tens of millions of dollars per year promoting
videos on Facebook and Google.


David Roberts


Wild.


Michael Thomas


That's in part how they were able to reach 100 million people
with these videos about climate change, fossil fuels being good,
clean energy being bad. And I also looked into where they got the
money because PragerU is a nonprofit and trying to figure out,
like, is there any connection here between fossil fuel companies?
And sure enough, what I found was that in 2013, PragerU received
a $6.25 million grant commitment from the Wilks brothers in Texas
who started FracTech, a fracking company, and they gave them a
huge amount of funding to make their videos. It's worth, just for
reference, pointing out that PragerU at the time was bringing in
about $400,000 a year.


So this is a huge amount of money for them at the time. And as a
part of this, two members of the Wilks family joined the board.
And then shortly afterwards, they started making these videos
about climate change and clean energy and fossil fuels. And the
members of the family were still on the board while they were
making them.


David Roberts


Yeah, but then to get back to the policy, the anti-denialism
policy, they sort of have pivoted. And this seems like — it's
hard not to see the whole right as a school of fish sometimes —
but it seems like they've all kind of pivoted away from the hard
denialism toward the kind of Shellenberger-style, Lomborg-style
"green energy isn't green" message.


Michael Thomas


Yeah. And PragerU has definitely started to do this and they are
basically able to get around the new policies by Google and
Facebook that have limited their ability to spread those pure
climate denial videos and are now promoting the videos that say
that clean energy isn't good for the environment, which, of
course, is going to be almost impossible for these tech companies
to regulate. Because what's the difference between a legitimate
NPR story about a problem that we really need to figure out and
need to solve around the environmental impact of some of this
mining for rare-earth materials and the impact it's having on
local communities? What's the difference between that and
PragerU's video pointing it out but turning a little bit of spin
and maybe putting some misleading claims in it?


David Roberts


Yeah, it's one thing to police outright falsehoods, but you
really cannot police good faith, right? There is no algorithm for
separating good faith from bad faith claims in these videos. So
there's no real way to systematically — it seems to me, I mean,
maybe you've thought of something else — but it seems to me like
there's just no systematic way to stop this stuff or block it or
even flag it. There's no real mechanism to do anything about it
directly. Am I wrong about that?


Michael Thomas


No, I think this is just a really hard problem to solve. I think
that there's definitely ways to prevent some of it or there's
better solutions out there between some of these tech companies.
Like the last couple of weeks has shown us with Twitter that
there's a lot of different approaches that tech companies can
take before being legally required to do something. Facebook and
Google have said that they're going to flag climate
misinformation. They aren't doing a great job — have a lot of
room for improvement. They've said that they won't let people
spend to promote climate denial in their videos.


But then now you have Twitter and Elon Musk just unleashing a
free-for-all of what he says is free speech but in a lot of cases
is hateful rhetoric and in the case of climate change, just
misinformation and lies and unsurprisingly, people like Jordan
Peterson have come back and are posting a lot of stuff about
climate change with claims like CO2 is good for the environment
and climate change isn't happening. And so I think there's
definitely a lot that these tech companies can do and Twitter is
evidence that what they do has a real impact and can limit some
of the spread of these ideas. But another thing that I ran across
in some of my research — that some tech companies have started to
experiment with — is this idea of pre-bunking where you basically
expose people to facts about climate change before they click a
link that has known misinformation on it.


David Roberts


Yeah.


Michael Thomas


And this comes out of some research out of Yale, I believe, and
the impact of that in some studies seems to be good, but
definitely not perfect and doesn't change people's opinions in a
big way. So it's definitely not a panacea.


David Roberts


We here on the left come to this dilemma again and again, which
is you don't just want to be thinking about how to suppress other
people's speech. That's an uncomfortable kind of place for us to
be. That's not you know, you're constantly sort of dancing up
against ethical quandaries and people who make those videos, what
are you going to argue with them about whether it's good faith or
bad faith. They can say it's good faith and — you know what I
mean — so there's no — it seems like the root of trying to
suppress their speech is fraught.


I mean, A: ethically fraught, and B: on a practical level just
doesn't seem to be very possible. But then, of course, you read
all these studies about misinformation which tell you that once
this kind of information is in someone's head, it is almost
impossible to root it out. No matter how many good facts you
throw in the wake of bad facts, it's almost impossible to change
people's minds. And you read all these studies that, say, being
exposed to these talking points again and again, even in the
context of seeing them debunked, lodges them in your freaking
head.


So you end up — even if you see a thing debunked again and again
— the talking point sticks in your head and you end up sort of
like believing it. So it's this horns of a dilemma that the left
is on again and again, which is misinformation seems to work, but
there doesn't seem to be any reliable way to stop or suppress it.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, there's a famous study on this that I'm sure you're
referring to, which is around some ads that Listerine ran in the
70s where they internally knew that Listerine wouldn't do this,
but they ran these ads that said that by using Listerine
mouthwash, you could prevent the common cold. Or if you got a
cold, it was a really good remedy. And they sold tons of
listerine this way. They ran all these TV ads with moms telling
their kids, come on over, need your listerine. So the FTC caught
them and sued them and ended up making them, as a part of the
lawsuit, run ads that basically said, sorry, we were wrong and
correct the claim. This is definitely a different time of...


David Roberts


Imagine!


Michael Thomas


...communications and regulation, but even after running this
multimillion dollar campaign to sort of correct the record,
people, when they were surveyed, still believed that Listerine
would prevent or was a good remedy for the common cold. And it
was something like 80% of people still believed that Listerine
had these effects. So this is a famous study in misinformation
science and it just speaks to how difficult it is to change
people's minds once that information has hit them.


David Roberts


Yeah, so I guess here's where I kind of come around on this. If
we think that trying to get tech platforms to uniformly impose
standards of accuracy on all the trillions of bytes of
information that pass through them seems kind of impossible, and
changing people's minds after they've already seen this stuff is
very difficult. It just kind of seems like the only solution
you're left with is do the opposite, right? Get good information
into people's hands. So here's my question to you, and there's no
good answer to this question, so I don't expect you to have one.


But on the right, okay, you've got these billionaires. They
funnel tons and tons of money and establish this broad network of
think tanks, which then go on to share lessons about how to
oppose these things they don't like, which they funnel down to
local groups, which are more or less kind of disguised as
spontaneous citizen groups. And you got other people on the
right, got Prager alone spending like $20 million in the last
four or five years on Facebook ads so that they become — they get
their message out ubiquitously on Facebook. So, as we've
discussed, there's this entire coherent ecosystem of right wing —
and this is of course — all of this is just clean energy entering
this ecosystem.


But this ecosystem goes way back. They've been building this
forever. They've been using it against all the things they don't
like. This is just sort of like clean energy getting absorbed
into that Borg. So my question is, what is the analog on the left
among people who support renewable energy? Is anybody — are there
any billionaires? Where are the billionaires? Is there a network
of think tanks that I'm not aware of? Are there astroturf groups,
pro renewable energy astroturf groups? Is there someone spending
$20 million on pro-renewable energy Facebook ads? Is any of this
mirrored on the left?


Michael Thomas


So I think one of the good things that the climate movement has
going for it is that the facts are on the movement side and the
science.


David Roberts


It's such a tiny weapon, Michael. That's the least effective
weapon in the whole war.


Michael Thomas


I mentioned it, though, because I think that there's a lot of
free media, if you will, that comes by reporters and
documentaries and all this stuff that has really brought climate
change into the public's awareness in the last ten years. I think
that is largely a result of media going back, of course, to The
Inconvenient Truth and some of the advocacy of Al Gore. But now
Netflix has all of these documentaries. Whenever I talk to my
friends who are not in this world, they'll tell me that they
learned about clean energy and climate change from a Netflix
documentary.


But to me — to more directly answer your question, like more
overt attempts to change minds or to influence advocacy. There's
a YouTube channel that I've been watching for the last year
that's become pretty popular called Climate Town and it's a John
Oliver, Steven Colbert style of humor all focused on climate
change and clean energy and the fossil fuel industry's attempts
to block clean energy. Rollie Williams started this channel and
had a career in stand up comedy and decided to use his skills to
fight the good fight. And his videos have hundreds of thousands,
sometimes millions of views spreading messages like my first time
when he made a video about the negative health impacts of gas
stoves and talking about alternatives like induction cooktops.


So that's one channel. He's recently partnered with nonprofit
Climate Changemakers that does climate advocacy and trains people
on how to be effective advocates in their local community and
also in federal politics.


David Roberts


I was going to say like the missing piece — what would happen on
the right is, if a promising YouTuber emerged and got hundreds of
thousands of clicks for spreading their message, they would be
descended on by a swarm of people, giving them money and setting
them up so that they could do it on a bigger level forever and
never have to worry about money again. They would be immediately
absorbed into the right wing money train.


Michael Thomas


Right? Yeah.


David Roberts


Where's the analog for that? That's what's missing. It's not, you
don't have tons of creative, interesting young people out doing
cool things. Where is the infrastructure of money and
organization that finds them, elevates them, supports them,
connects them with one another?


Michael Thomas


Yeah.


David Roberts


Where is that, Michael? I don't know why I'm demanding this with
you.


Michael Thomas


Well, I will also just make a shameless plug and say that I am
launching a YouTube channel in the coming weeks and am planning
to produce Vox style explainers to kind of speak to your alma
mater. I think their YouTube channel is amazing and reaches
millions of people.


David Roberts


It's fantastic.


Michael Thomas


And what I'm planning to do is turn some of these investigations
that I've done on PragerU for example — is going to be the first
video — and try to get them in front of large audiences and put
in a lot of production value to it. So I'm hoping to be able to
sort of counter some of those messages.


David Roberts


Well, let's talk in a year and see if any left wing billionaires
have gotten in touch with you. After you do that for a while, I'd
be very curious.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, another effort that I think is really valuable and again to
talk about your alma mater Vox. I was recently reading some
stories in their column Future Perfect about the future of
plant-based diets and really talking about the environmental and
other ethical harms that are caused by the meat and dairy
industry. And I noticed as I was reading that that project has
been supported by donors and so I know that Vox doesn't take any
money and then let those donors...


David Roberts


Including some uncomfortable donors...


Michael Thomas


Oh, interesting.


David Roberts


Future Perfect got a lot of money from Sam Bankman-Fried. That's
a whole different subject.


Michael Thomas


Oh no, really?


David Roberts


Just goes to make my point, like even when we try to do the "left
wing billionaire funds — good messages things", it somehow still
turns into a dumpster fire. We need better billionaires, I think.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, or no billionaires might be the best solution.


David Roberts


Billionaires working toward a world where there are no
billionaires.


Michael Thomas


Yeah, but yeah, I think — to just get to your point, I don't
think that environmental groups have figured this out. And I
think that the right is so much more effective at getting people
emotionally charged. And I think evidence of this is if you look
at some of the local communities where these fights are happening
over clean energy, even though there's so much information out
there on the benefits of clean energy and the problem of climate
change. In the example I saw most recently of a community in
Michigan, last week, this community polled at like 55% of people
support clean energy in their community.


But someone sent me an image of the township meeting where they
were voting on it, and there was hundreds of people packed in an
auditorium and this Person told me...


David Roberts


Were they old and white, Michael?


Michael Thomas


They were all old and white, and only three of those hundreds of
people were there to support the clean energy project. So I think
that speaks to how much emotion plays in this. Like if you hear
about how clean energy has some benefits and it might provide
some tax base for your school — it's like you might feel like you
support it, but you're not going to feel as emotionally charged
as if you see a picture of a wind turbine on fire or think that
it's going to cause your kids cancer. And unfortunately, that's
what the right is doing.


David Roberts


I've said this so many times on this podcast, might as well say
it again, intensity wins in politics. This is a point you're sort
of making again and again. Like a large group of mildly
supportive people is useless in the face of a small group of
intensely motivated people because intensely motivated people
make noise and politicians hear noise. Politicians cannot
distinguish large groups from small groups. All they hear is
noise. And if you make a lot of noise, you win. And this is
something I talked with David Fenton, the left PR guy on a pod a
while back, and this is something he told me again and again.


Like in the green groups, there are millions, hundreds of
millions of dollars floating around through these groups and they
produce endless sort of studies and white papers and reports and
do sort of behind the scenes policy work, but they just don't
spend on propaganda — to use the charged term for it. They don't
go out and spend $20 million buying Facebook ads. And the point
he made is like, it's not that expensive to buy a bunch of ads on
Facebook to buy an ad in the New York Times or Wall Street
Journal to buy ads to carpet the sort of metro stations in DC
where policymakers are walking around. It doesn't cost that much
and they have a bunch of money.


They just are not habituated to act that way. And so I hope that,
among other things, your work here sort of showing how this
ecosystem works and showing how well it works, will just, like,
knock someone's head together who's funding these left groups and
cause them to get in the business of communicating and trying to
change the public's mind instead of just putting out facts like
you say, like good reports, like spreadsheets on the tax impacts
and just hoping people take those facts and translate them
themselves into emotion. You've got to give people the emotion.
You've got to do some communicating and propagandizing and we're
doing none and they're doing an amazing amount coordinated across
the entire country.


Michael Thomas


Can I ask a question of you and see what are your thoughts on an
effective version of this on the left that I've seen that's very
controversial?


David Roberts


Oh, sure.


Michael Thomas


So I haven't made up my mind on this debate. But something that
has been hotly debated in the climate community over the last
year is a lot of the rhetoric around the world is ending; climate
change is going to wreak havoc on the planet; your kids lives are
going to be terrible because of climate change. These like kind
of over the top types of rhetoric. I listened to Adam McKay on
your podcast — he came on a couple of times — and the second time
when he was talking about Build Back Better, I was just struck by
how he was kind of taking this extreme stance of climate change
and at the time I was thinking Build Back — or the Inflation
Reduction Act rather — was a great bill.


But after this conversation I'm wondering if that rhetoric is
needed and if the sort of emotionally charged language is maybe
more effective than some of the debates around permitting reform
around the policy and all that. But I guess just to ask the
question, do you think that some of that rhetoric and the
exaggeration maybe of how bad climate change will be, is
effective?


David Roberts


I, like you, am ambivalent about it. I think my take is it's a
little bit like one hand clapping. I think fear does motivate
people. I think the idea that fear doesn't motivate people is
just ludicrous. Like fear motivates people to do all sorts of
things. But you need — I mean this is — the problem is on both
the right and the left, it's just much easier to oppose things
and it's just much easier to gin up emotion in opposition to
things. This is one of the reasons that the climate activist
movement sort of seems drawn inexorably to fighting pipelines and
fighting things and fighting wells and all these things because
you can get people in the streets for that.


That's why the Keystone Pipeline, despite its sort of irrelevance
in the grand carbon picture, sparked a whole giant march and a
whole giant movement because people are fired up by opposing
things. And the riddle to me, which I do not know the answer to,
is how, if you're a PragerU or if you're a left wing billionaire,
how to spark passion and real fire in favor of things. In favor
of building things, right? Because we got to pivot now to
building things. You know this we've been talking about this
online. The whole movement needs to pivot to building a shitload
of stuff like we got to build faster and more than we've ever
built in our lives.


And so how do you create passionate fired up support such that
people will go to these meetings and yell and scream in support
of building things? And I just hate to end this podcast on a note
of bafflement but I really don't know. Do you have any ideas?


Michael Thomas


Like you, I am not overly optimistic on some of this but I think
there's probably enough cynicism or pessimism out there. So maybe
just to end on some inspiring note, I think the most recent
abundance movement or supply side progressivism that some of the
folks like Derek Thompson at the Atlantic and Ezra Klein at New
York Times now are talking about is really important. I think
that the left has probably become too skeptical of technology and
in some cases for really great reasons. But I think that we need
to start talking about a really beautiful and amazing future that
we can build.


And we need to continue to focus on how much harm there will be
from climate change and how bad it could be. Because I do think
fear motivates. But we also need to give people that picture of
the future. That's inspiring. And I think some nonprofits that
are starting to do this in terms of communications and policy or
groups like Rewiring America and other groups that are talking
about how the clean energy transition represents one of the most
amazing opportunities to really build this beautiful, clean
future that could raise incomes for people and make all of our
lives a lot better.


And I don't think that we talk about the benefits of that or
paint that picture for people. Because if we built this sort of
clean energy utopia that I think is in a lot of our optimistic
vision, we would be talking about ideally not sitting in traffic
for nearly as many hours as we do if we built great public
transit. Like if you've ever been to countries like Japan or the
Netherlands, you know that there's this other model that we can
have and it's incredible. Like sitting on a train reading a book
instead of sitting in traffic sucking up nitrogen dioxide
emissions is pretty incredible.


And to be able to save millions of lives by reducing fossil fuel
pollution and to hopefully use the clean energy transition as a
way to shift power and give it to the people who don't have power
and who have been marginalized. I think that represents this
incredible utopia that we probably don't talk about it enough and
I think that that can be motivating and can get some people to
act. So I won't put my own but in there — that sort of naive
optimism.


David Roberts


I'm struggling to contain my own but there. So we'll leave it
there in a happy place. If there are any liberal billionaires out
there listening, that's a good place to channel your money. If
not there somewhere else. Please do something. Please witness
this network of moneyed groups and intellectual launderers and
quasi local groups that have mobilized against you and do
something.


Michael Thomas


Absolutely. And maybe just to make one more call to action that I
think everyone can do — to share a really quick story. Over the
holidays, I decided I was finally going to talk about climate
change more with my family and talk about some political topics.


David Roberts


I hope you read all the articles "How to Talk to Your Family
about Climate Change". There's about 5000 of those out there.


Michael Thomas


I did. And I was honestly a little skeptical of some of this, but
had been hearing this from people like Dr. Katherine Hayhoe and
the importance of talking about climate change. And so I brought
this up and also the importance of plant based diets and how bad
the conditions for that turkey that we ate were and how it was in
a terrible environment, which was a little bit uncomfortable as
the turkey was sitting there — to maybe just paint a picture of
my Thanksgiving. But my brother pulled me aside the next day and
he's much more conservative and hunts a lot and does not talk to
people about climate change often so very different politics than
me.


But he was really pushing back and asking me some questions and I
was answering and not really holding back and talking about
climate change. And he called me a couple of days later and he
said, hey, so I was looking into getting a new car and I was
planning on just getting this truck. But after our conversation I
got really excited about electric vehicles and so I'm getting an
EV and he sends me a text a couple of days later with a picture
of this new car. And then I saw him another couple of days later
and he says, after our conversation, I was just thinking a lot
about the importance of eating less meat.


And so I decided I'm going to start eating less meat and I'm
going to start talking to my friends about it because they don't
really hear about this stuff as much. And I think it's important.
And of course, I'm like sobbing happy tears at this point, but it
was this really beautiful moment and I think that's something
that we can all do, even if we don't have a billion dollars. We
can just talk about the stuff and talk about the benefits of
climate action and clean energy with our friends and our family.


David Roberts


Yeah. Each one teach one. Thank you, Michael, for diving into
this squalid area and wading through bad YouTube videos to bring
us all this information. And thanks for coming on.


Michael Thomas


Thanks so much for having me. It was a really fun conversation.


David Roberts


Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad free,
powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value
conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts
subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can
continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next
time.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other
subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
www.volts.wtf/subscribe