Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1500 - Barbara Freese
Uploaded: 2020-07-01T19:00:06.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1500 - Barbara Freese' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1500 - Barbara Freese' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-01. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1500 - Barbara Freese

And we're rolling. How are you, Barbara? What's happening?
I'm good, Joe. How are you?
Pleasure to meet you.
Pleasure to meet you.
How did you get started on this, and how did you get interested in the subject?
I got interested in this subject through climate change, climate denial
specifically.
I'm an environmental attorney, and back in the 1990s, I worked for the state of
Minnesota.
And we found ourselves very briefly sort of on the front lines of the
scientific debate over climate change.
And the way that happened was the state had passed a law saying that utilities
regulators should try to estimate the cost to the environment of generating
electricity.
We get most of our power from coal, or we did then.
And so we looked at coal emissions.
We looked at the traditional pollutants that we had regulated for a long time.
And my client was the Pollution Control Agency, so I was familiar with those.
What we also looked at, though, and I wasn't familiar with, was CO2 and its
effect on climate change.
Because while that was a big issue globally, there was already a global treaty
signed to fight climate change.
States had not taken a look at that.
And what happened was we struck a nerve with the coal industry.
And they sent to Minnesota a bunch of witnesses, a bunch of scientists, to
testify that we did not have to worry about climate change, and it wasn't going
to happen.
Or if it did, it would be just a little, and we'd like it.
And that all of those scientists, the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, those scientists that the rest of the world, including the U.S.
government in the treaty signed by George H.W. Bush, the ones that they were
relying on, those scientists were basically biased.
They were biased because they were biased because they were in it for the money
somehow.
They wanted research grants or they had some political agenda.
It was kind of vague.
But it was clear they did not want us worrying about this issue at all.
They told you that it would be just a little and that you would like it?
What do they mean by that?
Well, a couple of things.
One of the arguments, and you will still hear this sometimes, is that CO2 is a
plant fertilizer, which is true, and therefore more CO2 makes the world a
happier place for plants and therefore better for everybody else.
And to the point where one of the coal interests who were parties had put out a
video saying that the earth was deficient in CO2.
And by digging up the coal and burning it, we were correcting that.
Yeah.
So that was one of the arguments.
The other was, you know, it'll be mild.
It'll be warm.
The winters won't be as cold.
And, hey, this is Minnesota.
So, you know, you guys are going to appreciate those warmer winters.
So, yeah, there was a lot of crazy stuff that hasn't gone away.
In fact, in many ways it's gotten a lot worse.
But there were certainly enough to leave me shocked.
Was that the first time you were ever aware that corporations do send in people
to try to defuse arguments or pollute the waters?
I don't think I was quite that naive, but I'd certainly never seen anything
like this.
I mean, these were people under oath, you know.
And they were saying things that were pretty extreme and many of which would
just get a lot more extreme.
And they were scientists.
The many – yes.
The ones I cross-examined were mainly the scientists.
They also sent in some other witnesses as well.
So they didn't actually work, you know, in a coal company.
They were hired by the coal industry to come in and testify.
And these scientists, presumably, they were paid to do this.
Yes.
So is that – I mean, how do you track that?
Like if you have scientists and they come in and they say things that you know
are not accurate or deceptive, how do you find out what their motivation is?
Did you ask them if they've been paid?
We were able to put some things in the record regarding how much money they had
gotten from different fossil fuel interests over the years.
So we definitely did point to that, argue about that.
We didn't realize some of the witnesses had a much deeper history than we
understood in science denial.
One of the witnesses was a pretty prominent scientist named Frederick Seitz who
has since died.
But what we didn't know – what I didn't know when I cross-examined him – I
mean, this was a shoestring operation – was that he had spent a lot of time
actually consulting for the tobacco industry.
So that would have been nice to bring up.
We had talked about just before the podcast the film Merchants of Doubt, and
that's how it kind of got into your work.
Right.
That film touches on that, how people who worked for the tobacco industry
eventually went to work to deny the man-made climate change.
Right.
Well, in his case, he had actually been a physicist who was very involved in
the Cold War weapons program.
So he kind of came at it from that direction.
And it wasn't until really he had retired from his sort of main scientific and
academic work that he was brought in to work for the tobacco industry.
But what happened was this handful of scientists profiled in that movie and in
the book by the same name, they would also then work with these nonprofit
groups, these free market groups that were strongly opposed to regulation of
industries.
And those same groups then would address lots of different issues from tobacco
to ozone and now to climate change and really a lot of other scientific issues
as well for industries facing regulation.
God, someone should do a psychological profile of those people, particularly
the tobacco people, because there's like such a direct correlation between
tobacco and cancer.
The climate change thing, it's almost like, boy, it's so hard to track because
it's so far in advance.
And if you say the climate change isn't real, what deaths are caused?
Is it directly attributable to that?
Like, how do you, you know what I'm saying?
But like cancer and cigarettes, it's like, here's a person, they smoke
cigarettes, they have cancer.
You said it didn't come from cigarettes.
What does that feel like to you to be that person that actively tries to, well,
they're essentially lying.
They're lying for money.
They're lying.
Let me just back up one second and then talk about that.
Just because I want to make it clear that while the link between smoking and
cancer may seem entirely obvious, there's enough of a delay that opens up the
opportunity for denial.
The link between putting greenhouse gases in the air and dramatic climate
change, that's actually as well established as the links between smoking and
cancer.
It's just that it is a more complicated process.
And there's potentially more of a delay.
And it depends in large part on what humans do along the way.
So it does get kind of complicated.
As far as psychologically profiling the tobacco companies, I mean, or the
tobacco executives, I won't presume to suggest this book does that.
But I do write a lot about what these folks were saying, not just to the public,
but to, you know, internally.
We've got some internal documents and certain things that may have been public
utterances, but were clearly just sort of part of their internal rationalization.
And, for example, I start the book with a quote from the head of Philip Morris,
who says, who knows what you would do if you didn't smoke?
Maybe you'd beat your wife.
Maybe you'd drive cars fast.
And, you know, that's part of how I think the tobacco industry approached this.
They would imagine this sort of counterfactual where, you know, a world without
tobacco, without cigarettes.
And then they would imagine what that would be like.
And, of course, they'd always imagine it was much, much, much worse than
smoking.
Right.
Yeah, I read that part.
And also that the man in question wound up quitting cigarettes.
Right.
Yeah.
He had to quit fairly quickly.
He started wife beating and speeding and what did he do?
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah, that was the question.
And we never really did find that out.
It's such a strange way to live your life, to be deceptive in a way that you
know is going to – I mean, there's – I don't know how many people have
gotten cancer from cigarettes, but it's probably millions.
Well, and it isn't just cancer.
It's heart disease, et cetera.
So millions – I mean, I've seen an estimate that in the 20th century, smoking
killed – I want to make sure I get this right.
I think it was 100 million people, more than maybe both wars, world wars put
together.
It's 7 million a year, I think, is the global death toll.
In the U.S., it's 480,000 a year.
Directly attributable.
Right.
They trace it to directly attributable.
Now, you know, these are extreme examples.
Tobacco is the most famous and extreme example.
And I talk about a lot of other examples.
But I think it's actually, you know, a fairly common thing for people to go
pretty far down the road of denial when they are working in an industry.
And this is sort of the process I try to explore a little bit in the book.
They're working in an industry.
They're confronted with some accusation that they have caused harm.
They check their gut.
And their gut says, no, we didn't intend to cause harm.
We don't feel guilty.
And so their mind starts to come up with reasons why it must be wrong.
And their tribal instincts, which are never more than just a millimeter below
the surface for pretty much any of us, but certainly in this case, get
triggered.
So they immediately think, well, these people accusing me must have an ulterior
motive.
They must be – they want money.
They want power.
They want attention.
They've got some sinister political objective.
And then the other part of that tribal dynamic is they start thinking about
themselves and their truly lofty mission, which isn't just to sell a product
but something else.
It's to protect freedom.
Or if you're a slave trader, it's to rescue the Africans from terrible lives in
Africa and bring them to the comfortable plantations.
That was actually an argument?
Oh, yeah.
The slave trade had a complete rescue narrative.
I'm talking about the British slave trade here because that was the first
really intense campaign of industrial denial I could find.
The British dominated the slave trade in the 1700s, and they faced a very
powerful abolition movement at the end of that century, which was really going
to the public and saying, look at how brutal this is.
They had witnesses, they had the torture devices, they had all kinds of
evidence.
And the British were really responding because they – even though they
dominated the slave trade, you know, they had this notion of themselves as
civilized and promoting freedom and being very humane.
So this was starting to really affect the industry.
So the traders and the planters got together.
They formed a slave lobby.
They had a very organized campaign in response.
There was a slave lobby.
There was a very powerful slave lobby.
I mean, the thing about the slave trade was you had people invested in it from
the royal family down to the local bakers to many members of parliament.
I mean, it was a widely accepted, fully legitimate industry.
So the abolitionists really had their work cut out for them.
And they had all this evidence.
The industry comes back, and they knew they couldn't just say, oh, it's not so
brutal.
They actually came back with this complete counter-narrative, which was we are
rescuing these people, that the Africans are eager to be purchased.
They actually try to market themselves as how fit they are for work.
They enjoy that crossing across the Atlantic.
There is singing, dancing, games of chants.
And when they get to the plantations, it is incredibly comfortable.
They get comfy little houses.
It's like a cradle-to-grave welfare state.
They don't have to worry.
If they get sick, we take care of them.
We feed them.
And they're doing way better than those poor peasants back there in Britain or
those poor miners or those people working in the new factories.
So that was par