Hello friend,

Before we dive into the war on bugs, we want you to know that:

We’re doing our next live Climate Town Town Hall on November 4th in Brooklyn!

That’s right, we’ll be bringing our niche brand of climate comedy to the Bell House in Brooklyn on Tuesday, November 4th at 7:30PM and you can buy your tickets right here. If you come to this show:

• You will see a live version of our next episode before it comes out in mid-November. These live episodes are typically done only one time, and this show is no exception. Writing a full show and then doing it only one time could be considered stupid, almost no one else in comedy does this for a reason. This is why people tour. But it does make our shows a once in a lifetime event.

• You will have access to Climate Town shirts that you can only get at live shows. Also, if you previously bought a Climate Town shirt at a live show, this is the only place you can take advantage of our A Lot of Questions Asked return policy.

• There will be a public comments period.

And one more time, here’s where you can buy tickets. Thank you.

As always, our unsubscribe button is higher up than an old man’s slacks, let’s scroll:

We love you, lawn

That’s right our latest video covers the #1 irrigated crop in the US:

Lawns.

And if there’s one defining event in the explosive growth of the crew-cut monocultures of grass surrounding millions of homes in America, it’s World War II. Or really the end of World War II.

It went about like this:

1. Soldiers coming home from the war were offered very cheap home loans as part of the GI bill. Add that to a general desire for mostly white people to find somewhere that’s not a city, but also not out in the middle of nowhere and also has 1,000% more golf, and you get the modern suburbs. But these houses were built so fast, with people moving in right away, that developers found the best options to cover the development scars quickly was a fat slab of juicy grass.

2. But to get that grass perfectly green, you can’t just let it do its thing. You need to pump it full of nitrogen fertilizer. Which would’ve been a problem, except that we just spent a ton of money building up our bomb-making facilities for the war. And one of the main ingredients of bombs? Nitrogen. So we just took that explosion nitrogen and flipped it on over to EXPLOSIVE GREEN GROWTH FOR YOU AND YOUR LOVED ONES.

3. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and you can’t fight a war without using cutting edge technology to murder your opponents. And some of our brightest scientists were tasked with finding new chemicals that could do away with whatever was bothering us. Some were focused on killing people, but others would destroy crops so enemy troops would starve or just eliminate bugs that were spreading disease. But then the war came to a close just as we were wrapping our heads around these new murder chemicals (and how to make them in bulk). So we figured why let these weapons go to waste: we should at least see if this new killing could help us back home. And it turns out lawns were a great testing ground.

From the late 1940s on, your lawn was no longer just an extension of your beautiful and peaceful garden. No friend, you were now in a fight for your life, a fight for what’s good and right, a fight for your lawn.

But luckily for you, there’s one thing you’d never had to worry about again:

Bugs.

That’s right, you’d never have to deal with another ant or fly or mosquito, thanks to quite possibly the most effective WWII chemical revelation.

DDT is good for me-e-e!

For over 60 years after it was first synthesized, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was considered a relatively useless chemical. But then in the late 1930s, a Swiss dye company called J.R. Geigy decided to switch its focus to agriculture and pharmaceuticals (part of Geigy would go on to form the modern pharma giant Novartis). And with that switch, a young researcher named Paul Müller was reassigned from tanning agents to the wide world of insecticides.

At that time, many of the most effective insecticides were based around arsenic, like Paris Green. They were wonderful killers of insects, but unfortunately they were also fantastic at taking down people and animals too. It’s arsenic. It’s not good for you. So when they sprayed Paris Green, they also had to tell people to wash and cook their food, so they wouldn’t die from the arsenic. Also some of them had lead. Not great.

Müller spent years trialing hundreds of potential insecticides on flies, before stumbling upon one that was completely different. Müller wrote that DDT:

…showed a strong insecticidal contact action such as I had to date never observed in any substance. My fly cage was so toxic after a short period that even after very thorough cleaning of the cage, untreated flies, on touching the walls, fell to the floor. I could carry on my trials only after dismantling the cage, having it thoroughly cleaned and after that leaving it for about one month in the open air.

But it wasn’t just flies. They sprayed DDT on potatoes in Switzerland and knocked back the Colorado potato beetle, preventing a potential famine. And they’d also used it on infestations of lice with wonderful, deadly success. Yeah, it could kill bugs. But best of all, while insects died swift deaths, DDT didn’t affect people and animals the same way.

But this was also the middle of World War II. And with Switzerland maintaining neutrality, Geigy offered the immense potential of DDT to both sides: Germany, as well as the U.S. and Britain. And guess which side embraced the exciting new poison. (Answer: “ɐɔᴉɹǝɯ∀”)

When typhus started to spread (transmitted by lice) in war-torn Naples, the U.S. Army dusted over ONE MILLION people in the brand new miracle chemical. Mosquitos were spreading malaria in the Pacific? Hit that with a blanket of DDT. In case after case, the offending bug was decimated while the people remained completely not dead. And within a couple years, the war was over and DDT was hailed as a national hero, one of the great saviors of the great war.

So when DDT was unleashed on the public back home:

The USA went f*cking nuts for it.

The goal: complete eradication of unwanted bugs. The plan: soak the world in DDT.

You should spray DDT on your lawn and in the creek and in your bushes. And don’t stop outside, blast down your living room, put it under your couch cushions, powder down the dog, and drop a few pumps on the baby while you’re at it. Can’t get it inside your wallpaper? No problem, there’s now DDT-laced children’s wallpaper.

Here’s a promo from 1946 for paintable DDT that claims “this new insect destroyer contains a lot of DDT, not just a little, its DDT content is even higher than government specifications”:

According to one DDT-obsessed collector:

Some of the instructions on the labels are just a riot. There’s one can of 5 percent DDT and the instructions say to spray the average men’s suit for two and a half minutes with a slow back and forth motion. In other words, you’re just saturating the thing with DDT.

It also took hold with farmers, and soon they were hosing down cattle before milking them:

There are even stories of advocates eating DDT to show how safe it is, including a U.S. representative for Geigy who apparently ate a chunk of DDT crystal the size of a walnut to prove to the U.S. Surgeon General that it was safe. The Surgeon General then told him:

If you are alive tomorrow, you will be getting a big order from us.

And to be clear, there were definite upsides to the widespread DDT use. By 1951, the U.S. had eliminated malaria from the country, which is one of the most devastating diseases in human history. That abrupt turnaround would have been hard to imagine not long before (there were 100,000 malaria cases in the U.S. in 1935).

DDT was so revered, that Paul Müller even won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 (the next year, they gave the Physiology or Medicine Nobel to this completely terrifying man who popularized lobotomies). And so it was settled that DDT is a miraculous chemical that erases insects while leaving humans and animals completely unharmed.

But actually there was a problem with all that:

DDT does harm humans and animals.

Almost immediately after widespread use began, some people started to worry about the side effects of DDT use. Part of DDT’s incredible effectiveness seemed to come from its ability to destroy the nervous system of insects – they’d absorb DDT through their skin then die from spasms or paralysis.

And while people and animals didn’t have the same immediate reaction at low doses, a lot of people and animals were now aggressively exposed to high concentrations of DDT every day.

According to the great book How to Sell a Poison by Elena Conis, a mysterious virus started to spread through cattle and people in the U.S. in the late 1940s, with a mix of symptoms that couldn’t be easily explained. But when a Manhattan physician named Morton Biskind started to suspect DDT exposure, he found a surprising overlap with DDT toxicity described in medical journals:

A lab worker who soaked his hands in DDT-acetone solution suffered heavy, aching limbs; weakness; and involuntary muscular tremors for weeks. The man didn’t fully recover for a year … A forty-six-year-old farmhand who chewed on tobacco on which DDT had spilled developed nausea, vomiting, anxiety, stiffness, and a sore throat. A one-year-old vomited, tremored, and died after drinking an ounce of 5 percent DDT in kerosene.

And just to say it one more time, Elena Conis wrote a fantastic book on DDT that just came out a few years ago. We highly recommend it, and we pulled from it a lot for this newsletter.

But despite growing worries, we kept blasting DDT all over the country through the 1950s. And as we did, evidence of problems continued to grow. It turns out DDT concentrates in fat, which means that milk, butter, and other dairy products would carry DDT above legal limits to consumers – this also meant that mothers could pass DDT onto babies through breastmilk. And DDT would also accumulate in fatty organs and body fat, releasing in higher concentration when that fat is burned.

After more than a decade of rising public concern from many (mostly ignored) people, a marine biologist and writer named Rachel Carson turned her attention to the cause, and released the book that many credit with launching the modern environmental movement:

Silent Spring.

Carson detailed the brutal consequences of soaking our country in DDT solution, in a book that took her 4 years to write, while simultaneously battling breast cancer.

But if you know large chemical companies, you know that they really didn’t care for that information getting publicized.

As expected, the reaction from the chemical companies was swift and severe. One industry spokesperson dismissed Carson’s claims as “absurd.” Others accused her of being a hysterical woman, a communist and a radical. The president of the company that made DDT said Carson wrote “not as a scientist, but as a fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.”

And while Silent Spring changed the public’s perception of pesticide safety, it took a full decade for the U.S. to act – in 1972, the newly formed EPA:

Banned DDT use in the U.S.

And while that was a significant victory for the environmental movement, the decision came late enough that the most vocal defenders seemed to have already backed away:

• DDT use in the U.S. had already dropped off sharply, falling from 79 million pounds in 1959 to around 12 million pounds in 1970.

• There were also major concerns that liberally dusting our country with DDT had given rise to DDT-resistant mosquitos and other insects - and since DDT hangs around in the environment for so long, those resistant bugs had no competition to stop their spread.

• DDT was essentially public domain, so the market had been flooded decades before – after Silent Spring came out and public sentiment shifted, many of the companies decided their days of DDT profit were over and stopped making it. By 1972, there was a single company making all our DDT (down from six when Silent Spring came out).

The EPA ban also allows DDT to be used for cases where there was no clear alternative – and it could be used for a malaria outbreak or other public health crisis.

And the battle over DDT mostly quieted down for a couple decades, until a surprise uprising from a completely uninvolved party:

The tobacco industry.

Had tobacco companies started producing DDT? Or maybe they wanted to spray it on tobacco crop? Perhaps the children might enjoy a puff off this new mentholated DDT cigarette?

Sorry, dear reader, but no to all three of those. Three fake questions. Ah yes we knew they were fake from the beginning and yet we let you believe. But we’re done with the misdirection now, because the tobacco industry started championing DDT for a much simpler, much more insidious reason:

Get more people to doubt science.

And let’s give it back to the wonderful Elena Conis, this time in an interview in Civil Eats:

Fast-forward to the late 1990s, when the tobacco industry started fundraising for a campaign to bring back DDT. It was a communications campaign to convince the public that DDT should never have been banned in the first place because millions of people, particularly children, were dying around the world due to malaria and DDT was a tool to fight it. Big Tobacco didn’t actually care about DDT. The industry was trying to protect the [global] market for cigarettes by undermining public support for federal regulations and for the idea that western nations should be dictating global health policy. This wasn’t a simple story of the tobacco industry being the bad guy. Conservative think tanks had approached the industry with this idea because they wanted to promote a right-wing ideology and knew the tobacco industry would fund it.

A wave of op-eds and articles flowed from tobacco industry-funded sources like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), focused on the potential malaria outbreaks that could’ve been prevented by continued, widespread DDT use.

And here’s a final quote to bring us on back home:

That these assertions are easily disproved is beside the point. The purpose of the campaign was not to rehabilitate DDT, which actually is only banned in the US. The goal was to undermine confidence in government regulation in general by convincing people that regulation of DDT was disastrous. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have shown in their book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, corporations have used methods developed to counter the science of smoking and health to spread doubt about science and regulation in connection with DDT, acid rain, ozone depletion, and global warming.

Official Rollie (no prize)

If you’re reading this AND November 4th, 2025 is still in the future AND you live in New York City … congratulations, that means there’s still time to vote for mayor (Nov. 4th is Election Day).

For this edition, you can become an Official Rollie (no prize) by sending us proof that you voted in the NYC mayoral election. It could be a photo, it could be something else – it’s probably an emailed photo, but we don’t want to limit you.

And for those of you who don’t live in NYC: we don’t know exactly which election is happening near you (if any), but you’re welcome to also send evidence of you voting between now and November 4th for consideration. We will review each submission carefully. There is no prize.

As for last edition, here are your Official Rollie (no prize) recipients, who valiantly displayed their knowledge of snooker:

• Jay Speights

• Marten [Redacted]

And an honorable mention for Amanda Thoren, who was wrong, but for the right reasons.

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that’s the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it’s a big world out there.

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Matt Nelsen and Rollie Williams

Hello friend!

Here at Climate Town we almost never make our own graphs. We try to leave that to the professionals like scientists, academics, and the lovely graphics team at The New York Times, arguably the best part of that newspaper.

But these are not normal times. And so we have officially generated one simple and quite striking (beautiful even?) graph:

Gorgeous (exactly what we wanted).

But before we dive into our enchanting creation, please remember that you are free to go at any time. This is an opt-in only experience, and we’ve absolutely bolted that unsubscribe button to the top of this newsletter (higher than any local garden center would dare), in case you need an escape.

For the rest of you:

A Cooling Period

After we made our video about Landman and Taylor Sheridan’s oil propaganda blast-off on The Joe Rogan Experience, we got exactly what we deserved:

An algorithm full of clips of Joe Rogan!

And that led us to our latest video: once more into the Rogan-verse, now with Mel Gibson. But this time, they’re not just talking, they have a graph to bring up from this Washington Post article:

Apparently, the Smithsonian wanted to run an exhibit about some very old animals and the climate they lived in. But then they realized they didn’t have the climate data they needed, so a group of climate scientists spent years extrapolating climate data for this graph, covering the past 485 MILLION years of global average temperatures.

And if you see that graph at the top of the Washington Post article and it’s interesting to you, you could:

1. Read the rest of the article. Maybe even the original study.

2. Never read the article or the study, only look at the graph, come up with your own interpretation, and then talk about that all the time.

Do you think Joe Rogan went with option #1 or #2?

Again, we made a whole video about this, you can watch it right here. But we did want to use this time to quickly talk about something that’s often assumed in our videos, but never directly addressed:

Why are we concerned about climate change?

If you scroll about halfway down the article (congratulations for selecting Option #1), you hit a nice graphic that focuses on a particular section of Earth’s history, a mass extinction event around 250 million years ago, which is known simply as:

“The Great Dying”.

An accurately named event if ever there was one. Over the course of about 50,000 years, global average temperatures rose about 10 degrees Celsius, and that apparently led to 90% of all species on Earth going extinct. Or maybe you prefer this article that says this period “wiped out 96% of life on Earth”.

Which is f*cking crazy.

And what’s even crazier is that we made our own graph and now we can talk about it more:

This graph has only two lines, but don’t let the simplicity fool you, it’s still very powerful and well made. It’s elegant.

• The first line (reboot Smurf blue) is a linear representation of this former mass extinction. If we followed that rate of change for 500 years, the temperature on Earth would increase around 0.1C.

• The second line (cherry, fire red) is our current average rate of temperature increase since 1850. This has given us a 1.4C increase over less than 200 years.

Based off these two lines, our human-induced climate change is happening FORTY times faster than maybe the most destructive climate-based extinction event in the history of our planet.

F*******ck.

And we might be underestimating our current rate of climate change here too.

Marking the temperature change from 1850 means including decades before the invention of the automobile or flight or commercial coal power plants. We’re currently blasting out more CO2 than ever – more than double what we emitted in the late 1970s.

So it’s not shocking to hear that some scientists believe we’re now entering our sixth mass extinction event. Another well-named and depressing event.

Again, we’re not making a habit of creating our own graphs. They usually require a lot of tedious calculations and trend lines and labels – it’s really a job for someone more artistic than we are. In this case, however, we wanted to visualize just how much more drastic our current temperature trend is than THE GREAT DYING trend, and the best way to do that was a nice, simple graph.

And that’s really what this Washington Post article is all about: as we study the previous climates of Earth, we’re learning that Earth is susceptible to climate change. It’s been hotter on Earth tens of millions of years ago, which shows there’s nothing preventing global average temperatures from rising and falling, even if that normally happens over millions of years, not hundreds. If the graph was a dead flat line, then maybe Rogan and the other skeptics would have a point: who gives a sh*t, the temperature on Earth hasn’t changed in 485 million years, no matter how much CO2 is hanging around.

But Joe Rogan could already know all of this if he just:

Read the article.

Because there are quotes like this one, from one of the authors of the study Rogan constantly references, Dr. Jessica Tierney:

“Carbon dioxide is really that master dial. That’s an important message … in terms of understanding why emissions from fossil fuels are a problem today.”

Or maybe we can just wrap this part up with a quote from the lead author of the study, Dr. Emily Judd (from her interview for The Climate Brink, a great Substack run by two climate scientists, Andrew Dessler and Zeke Hausfather):

“I’ve seen quite a bit of misinformation crop up surrounding our paper – particularly the claim that we (humans) have nothing to worry about, with respect to climate change, since the Earth has been warmer for much of the last half-billion years. I cannot stress enough how reductive and problematic this viewpoint is.”

“I cannot stress how reductive and problematic this viewpoint is.”

Wow we probably could’ve skipped 98% of our video and just dropped that line.

But now maybe some good news from a graph?

Here at Climate Town, we read a lot of articles and studies and books. A lot of it is bleak and concerning. People ask us how work is going and then ask us to stop talking about it. But every once in a while, we read something that actually gives us hope.

And for a blink of hope today, here’s a graph from this Carbon Brief piece, referencing this IEA 2025 mid-year electricity update:

That’s right:

Within the next couple years, renewable energy is on track to become the top power source (by electricity generation) in the world.

But wait there’s more:

Low-emission sources – renewables and nuclear – are expected to meet all global demand growth out to 2027.

And with renewables and nuclear combined, we’re very close to getting half of all global electricity from low-emission sources.

Solar PV is set to become the second largest low-emissions source of electricity generation in the world by 2027, after hydropower. Renewables, collectively, will surpass coal-fired generation in 2025 and coal’s share will decline below 33% for the first time in the last 100 years. Nuclear generation will reach a new record high in 2025, driven by a recovery in output in France and Japan, and new reactors entering operation in China, India and Korea, among other countries. Nuclear energy will continue to set a new record every year thereafter. The share of low emissions sources is forecast to increase from 41% in 2024 to 47% in 2027.

Good news!

But, as with a lot of climate change, there’s also some less good news.

Even though people mix and match the terms energy and electricity, there are actually three main categories of energy: one is electricity, but we also have transportation and heating. This full scope includes gas for cars, oil for heating, coal for industrial use, etc. So while our electricity production decarbonizes percentage-wise, that’s only around 21% of global final energy consumption, according to the IEA.

If we look at total primary energy consumption in 2024 (primary energy measures energy totals before conversion, like coal before it’s burned), we get a different, much higher emissions mix, dominated by fossil fuels – brought to you by the good folks at Our World in Data, including the wonderfully informative Substack writer Hannah Ritchie:

It’s this graph that’s the primary concern for carbon emissions and the climate change they bring. Fossil fuels are the #1 driver of human-caused climate change, so reducing our consumption is the best way to avert a crisis driven by an EXTREMELY fast increase in global temperatures.

And if we’re making good progress on lowering electricity emissions, we need to find a way to work on the other two categories. That’s why we’re trying to electrify as much as we can. Instead of exploding natural gas in your house for cooking an omelette, maybe that pan could be heated by an induction stove powered by electricity.

We could also just reduce the energy input we need. Right now a lot of Americans blow up gasoline to go to the grocery store, but maybe we could design our cities so we could walk or bike? And that idea’s not a conspiracy theory, even though it became one to Joe Rogan. We just think it’s nice to walk somewhere without having to hike through drainage ditches to cross 12-lane highways all the time.

And we should remember:

We are making progress.

Renewables are far and away the top choice for meeting additional electricity demand in the short term, while natural gas turbines are backed up and new nuclear is mostly years away – that’s not even necessarily an emissions/climate choice, that’s just practical supply and demand, especially in China, where they’re adding electricity demand so fast that they accounted for more than half (54%) of all added electricity demand in the entire world last year.

And if we continue our global move to electrify, we really do have a chance at drastically reducing demand for fossil fuels.

Official Rollie (no prize)

Before Climate Town, Rollie had a previous life as one of the foremost YouTube billiards comedians in the world. A prestigious honor.

And so for this Official Rollie (no prize), you must send us the name of the greatest snooker player in the history of the game (without looking it up first). There’s really one name that should come up here, like Wayne Gretzky and hockey or The Terrible Tire and fine dining – if it’s not that one obvious name, you also have to provide an argument for why your pick is actually the greatest. If you select the correct name but provide an argument, your lack of confidence will render your correct selection incorrect. We don’t make the rules, that’s just the way it is.

And to be clear:

This has nothing to do with climate change. And there is no prize.

As for last edition, here are your Official Rollie (no prize) recipients:

• Scott Hoppe

• Korina Johnson

• Emily Kennedy

• Eddie Lehwald

• Alisa L.

• Frank Manna

• Rebecca Vincent

• Xamimus

• Hermanth [Redacted]

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Matt Nelsen and Rollie Williams

UNSUBSCRIBE

Hello friend!

We’re back with another newsletter and also some good news: we’re doing another live Climate Town Town Hall show at one of the best comedy venues in the country, the Bell House in Brooklyn. But the bad news? The show was last week, so if you wanted to go, that’s too bad, you missed it. It was a great show, hopefully we’ll catch you at the next one (photo by the very talented Noah Eberhart).

We’re furiously cranking away on the edit for our next episode, which should be out by the end of next week. So let’s get right into it.

And as always, if you’re desperate to click something, the unsubscribe button is higher in the scroll than any local garden center would dare dream of. They’d rather burn the tomato starts to the ground than put the unsubscribe button as high up as we did.

For everyone else sticking around:

The War on the War on Traffic

For the past few months, drivers entering the lower part of Manhattan have been charged a congestion relief zone toll of $9 ($2.25 off-peak) once a day, to come and go as they please. It’s generally referred to as congestion pricing and here’s how advocates thought it would work:

1. A relatively small toll (cheaper than round trip on most tolled bridges and tunnels in NYC) will deter drivers who have other ways of getting to Manhattan.

2. With less traffic on the road, the cars that do enter the congestion pricing zone will be able to move faster, shortening travel times.

3. And also with less cars on the road, buses will move faster, there will be fewer accidents, cyclists won’t have to worry about being squished, etc.

And it’s going to be hard to believe because the same exact thing happened in London, an extremely similar city, but so far:

Congestion pricing in NYC is off to a great start.

Don’t believe us? That’s fine, here’s a helpful chart from the New York Times, good lord they really have some of the best graphics people in all of print media:

We also made a whole video about this, you can watch it and see what you think for yourself. But since we shot that video in mid-March, there’s been a new development.

While on the campaign trail, Trump vowed to end congestion pricing if elected, and about a month into New York implementing the traffic program, the Trump-led U.S. government decided that was a promise the Donald would keep. Technically this is the same U.S. government that had already signed off on congestion pricing months earlier, after years of discussion.

So the new U.S. Secretary of Transportation and former Real World Boston cast member Sean Duffy sent this letter to NY Governor Kathy Hochul, telling her that they’re pulling federal approval for congestion pricing. And even though the letter was pretty long and sounded mostly official, a good number of legal experts said it didn’t make much sense. Unfortunately for Duffy, some of those lawyers were ON HIS OWN LEGAL TEAM.

That’s right, imagine the absolute worst move you could make at your job. Okay, keep that in your head as you’re reading this: A few weeks after we released our video, a letter from federal lawyers defending the U.S. DOT was accidentally filed in court, making it public. And the first section is simply entitled The Court Is Unlikely To Uphold FHWA’s Stated Rationale for Terminating the CBDTP Agreement. It’s a lot of legalese, but imagine butt-dialing someone you were actively trash-talking, and you’re in the right ballpark.

But unfortunately, if you try and ask Sean Duffy about something that’s not going well for him, you might get this powerful evasive maneuver:

I’ll be specific on things that I want to talk about.

But despite its early success and advocate support, congestion pricing in NYC didn’t just come from a pure desire to enact totally reasonable urban planning policy. In 2017, the late Governor* Andrew Cuomo dug up the Bloomberg-era congestion pricing proposal as a way to fund the MTA (the same MTA Cuomo had diverted money away from in his first 6 years as governor).

*Note: by “late Governor”, we do not mean that he’s not alive anymore. Andrew Cuomo is still alive. But Andrew Cuomo did pass away politically in 2021 after back-to-back massive scandals. But then, somehow, he has been politically resuscitated and he’s, somehow, running for NYC mayor, despite trying to be seen as little as humanly possible.

But years before congestion pricing launched, there was another way to help save the largest mass transit system in the world:

Get someone who’s actually good at running the subway.

But there was about to be a problem with that: Cuomo didn’t seem to like it very much when someone else succeeded.

But first, a word from our sponsor:

If you already watched our congestion pricing episode and you’re looking for more videos about a potential future that isn’t completely dominated by cars, allow us to suggest Great Cities from the powerhouse urbanist creator City Beautiful. The series takes six deep looks at actually well-designed cities from around the world, including Paris, Cairo, and even Central Park from right here in NYC.

You can find that series and SO much more over on Nebula, an independent, ad-free streaming platform that’s completely creator-owned.

They also have early releases from our good friends at Not Just Bikes, The Urbanist Agenda, the list goes on. Hey, lemme see that list for a second … yep, just what I thought: we’re even on there. That’s right, we post ad-free versions of each Climate Town episode on Nebula before they premiere on YouTube. Which also means that we are part owners of Nebula, trust us, it’s true.

So if all that sounds good to you, you’re going to want to check out Nebula. And if you click this link right here or that same link but it’s here now, you can get access to Nebula (or gift it) for just THREE DOLLARS A MONTH. That’s 40% off the normal price, which also includes guest passes you can give away for free. That’s truly so cheap, a Toyota Corolla costs hundreds of dollars a month to lease and then you still have to drive it yourself. Try Nebula instead. Thank you.

Train Daddy vs. Sexual Harassment Cuomo

The year was 2017 and the subways were such d***g sh*****t that everyone called it the Summer of Hell.

And after an exhaustive search for hope, New York state officials believed they’d found the man who could finally turn things around:

Andy Byford.

A very British man in his early 50s at the time, Andy Byford loves trains. We don’t want to say he loves trains more than anything else, we don’t know that much about him personally. But he definitely f*cking loves trains and is also very good at them.

• Byford got his start as a graduate trainee (good start already) for the London Underground in his early 20s, then he worked his way up through the ranks of the Underground and regional train systems in Britain over the next couple decades.

• After a stint in Sydney, Byford was hired to turn around the struggling Toronto subway system in 2012. And after 5 years as Toronto Transit Commission CEO, they received the award for Outstanding Transit System of the Year from the American Public Transportation Association, which Toronto hadn’t won in over 30 years.

• Andy’s also the third Byford generation in a row to work for London transport, after his father and grandfather.

So it was this transit-obsessed Andy Byford who was hired as the president of New York City Transit Authority, taking over the operations of 50,000 employees and a seriously struggling subway system.

The crowd goes wild and screams: how seriously struggling was it?

Well, in early 2018, the New York Times put out a series of very well researched pieces detailing the subway issues - and instead of just parroting their work, here are three quotes and a nice chart:

New York’s subway now has the worst on-time performance of any major rapid transit system in the world, according to data collected from the 20 biggest. Just 65 percent of weekday trains reach their destinations on time, the lowest rate since the transit crisis of the 1970s, when graffiti-covered cars regularly broke down.

For years, officials had only partly funded signal repairs and replacements. Much of the subway’s signaling equipment was decades beyond its life span. Just a few months before Ms. Muteba’s ill-fated commute, the M.T.A. had cut signal funding by $500 million to support projects favored by Mr. Cuomo. Internal M.T.A. records show that on the morning of July 17, at least 124 delays were caused by signal issues on the 2, 4, E, F, G, J and M lines.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said David L. Gunn, a former transit system president who helped drag the subways out of the 1970s crisis only to see the system deteriorate again. “I actually lose sleep over it. I get so mad when I see what’s happening.”

After just a few months, the Byford-led NYCTA developed and released his opus, the 75-page Fast Forward: The Plan to Modernize New York City Transit.

And while Fast Forward was a massive plan requiring billions of dollars to complete, Byford also led more targeted initiatives, like focusing on accessibility at stations and launching the Save Safe Seconds program, which focused on signal improvements to get trains running faster and more efficiently.

The subway system last month had an on-time rate of 84 percent … up from 58 percent in 2018.

When there was a series of assaults on conductors, Byford rode the trains himself to show solidarity:

Byford became a beloved figure across the city, which you would have thought was almost impossible for the head of NYC Transit just a couple years after the Summer of Hell. A writer in Brooklyn even made these absolutely terrifying stickers, which debuted the nickname that would go on to define Byford’s time in NYC:

Train Daddy.

But in the midst of all of this success and praise, Andy Byford seemed to forget one critical aspect of his new job:

He needed to make Andrew Cuomo happy and feel good and not feel threatened.

According to Byford himself (in an interview from 2024), he made two fatal errors that were instrumental in his downfall: he got good publicity. Twice.

“One of the mistakes I have to say was not really of my own making. I was asked - I didn't ask to do this - I was asked by the comms team, because we were really trying to promote what we were doing to improve service, I was asked to do two things: one, would I accept being profiled by the New Yorker magazine and so you okay I'll do that. I didn't know how big a deal that was and I was followed around by a fabulous journalist for maybe a month and then this quite extensive profile was written of me.”

That New Yorker piece, written by William Finnegan, is in fact fabulous. Imagine if Paddington got hit by a train, but instead of hurting that little bear, it’s like the spider in Spider-Man and the train infects Paddington with a deep, unassailable connection to anything on rails. Maybe that’s more like the basketball in Space Jam. Either one really. In any case, that’s how Byford comes off in this piece. You should really read the whole thing.

And then there’s the second mistake AKA the big one:

“The other big deal - and I didn't realize this at all - was I was asked to go on 60 Minutes.”

BIG MISTAKE ANDY. THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ANDREW.

“It turns out the governor had always wanted to be on 60 Minutes and I think, couldn't believe, and was very annoyed by this upstart, this newbie, this person not even from here who's suddenly garnering all this attention.”

Here’s a two minute clip of the 60 Minutes piece that apparently personally devastated Cuomo, including reference to the completely crazy plans from Cuomo and former NYC mayor Bill De Blasio to implement congestion pricing and also tax very rich people more. You simply can’t do both!

Even though both features on Byford were very nice and quite normal, the popularity damage was done. As Byford’s second year was swinging along, things started to turn behind the scenes. Or, as one sick and likely twisted local news anchor put it:

To use a transit analogy, Andy Byford fled the MTA because he felt like he had been tied to the tracks while a train driven by Andrew Cuomo cut his legs off.

The two men didn’t speak for months at a time. They fought over an abrupt Cuomo-led reversal in the high profile plan to shut down the L train for repairs. Cuomo and his aides started cutting Byford out of decision making where they could, before they officially restructured his role at the NYCTA, reducing his oversight of the division. Once again from the Byford himself:

I had to make my own mind up, as a person with very strong principles. Can I accept a situation where I'm in a safety critical role and people are being given direction on operational matters behind my back?

So in October 2019, after less than two years on the job, Andy Byford submitted his resignation. Then apparently the chairman of the MTA and the president of the Partnership for NYC begged Byford to have lunch with them at the oldest bar in NYC, so they could beg him to stay. This very old restaurant serves steak “on a hot lava stone”, which does not sound very good. But perhaps Andy Byford got the Jumbo Pretzel, because he agreed to stay.

Until just a few months later, in January 2020. When Andy Byford resigned once again. But this time for good. Hot rock steak.

The Byford-Cuomo estrangement was highly unusual. Governors have always held considerable power over the M.T.A., but until the last four years, they had so little to do with transit leaders that a feud between them was no more likely than a couple who had never met announcing their divorce.

On Byford’s final day, a huge crowd of people gathered in the lobby of the NYCT building to send him off. He had no choice but to speak to the crowd for a bit, then finished with this:

Train Daddy has left the building.

From there, Byford went to lunch with Pete Tomlin, the lauded engineer he had picked to run the resignaling program, which Byford intended to oversee during the 5-10 years he planned to work in NYC. Tomlin resigned the day after Byford.

“When was the last time an average New Yorker on the street knew the name of the head of a transit agency?” It really was an unusual blow.

A year and a half later, Cuomo would also resign. And we do want to acknowledge that there are at least two sides to this coda. Cuomo had this to say: “in my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone.” But then the Department of Justice took a few years to investigate and had this to say:

At the conclusion of the investigation, the United States found that former Governor Cuomo subjected at least thirteen female employees of New York State, including Executive Chamber employees, to a sexually hostile work environment.

The United States also found that Cuomo’s senior staff were aware of his conduct and retaliated against four of the women he harassed.

And it is hard to know if Cuomo was saying that he never sexually harassed the thirteen female employees, or if he was actually saying that his senior staff never retaliated against four of the women. Or maybe he’s talking about some other lines he also never crossed. One thing’s for sure, he is definitely somehow running for mayor of New York City right now.

Did I always do everything right in my years of government service? Of course not. Would I do some things differently knowing what I know now? Certainly. Did I make mistakes, some painfully? Definitely and I believe I learned from them and that I am a better person for it.

As for Byford, he’s once again right where he should be: back in the U.S. and in charge of expanding high speed rail for Amtrak. This man loves trains.

Official Rollie (no prize)

For this installment of Official Rollie (no prize), we want to keep things simple.

You have one (1) week (week) from the release of this newsletter to take a photo from inside a train and send it to us.

1. You are not required to be in the photo yourself, although that could be nice.

2. The train does not need to be actively moving at the time of the photo.

3. It must be a photo, not a video, we don’t like videos and we won’t watch it, we don’t even watch our own videos.

As for last edition’s Official Rollie (no prize), we tasked you all with finding a copy of the movie Sling Blade. We thought this would be difficult, because it’s not readily available on streaming services in the U.S. But it was actually pretty easy for a lot of you. Fortunately for us, there is no prize.

Here are your honorable, tech-savvy Official Rollie (no prize) recipients:

• Michael Anderson

• Gilbert Dowding

• Matt Hummel

• Juan Ignacio Serra

• Inigo Montoya

• Loren Naegle

• Jay Speights

• Kyle Van Klompenburg

• Hermanth [Redacted]

• Justin [Redacted]

• X X [Redacted]

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Matt Nelsen and Rollie Williams

Hello friend!

Here we are, a couple months into the latest Trump presidency, where a bunch of the most self-destructive people in the country bring that imploding talent to the federal government. One bright spot might be Stephen Miller, who seems to have spent a good amount of time locked in a room with some “younger aides”, stuffing public documents in a binder and trying to convince everyone it’s the new age of transparency. But without getting into all of the brutal insanity at once, for most of this newsletter, we’re going to focus on this:

Do U.S. oil companies care more about drilling or profits?

But first:

We made Climate Town hats.

We’ve wanted to make hats for a while now. BUT it turns out most hats are made with a lot of plastic (the mayonnaise of fossil fuels) – especially the front bill, which is just a big hunk of plastic right up front. But then, after a good, long search with our partners Ethix Merch, we found Rustek. They make 100% plastic-free hats, featuring their completely trademarked Corkflex brim (a layer of bamboo, covered in cork). To make sure we liked them, we wore the sample hats non-stop for months. So we can confidently say: we think they’re very good hats.

Then we got Jeff Lopilato from Planet People Studio to make a design featuring the Official Climate Town Eagle and now we have Climate Town hats. We already sold out the first run, but you can pre-order from the next run of hats here (looking like delivery in mid-April). There’s black and there’s brown and there are no other colors. Thank you.

One more time: here’s the link to buy the hats.

And, as always, if your email’s full, you can find the unsubscribe button higher in the scroll than any local garden center would dream of.

For the rest of you:

You Might Be the Ponytail Guy

If you haven’t seen it yet, our latest episode focuses on a single scene in the new show Landman. And in this single scene, Billy Bob Thornton (The “Landman”) devastates a young lady-lawyer from some city by telling her how bad wind turbines actually are for the environment.

Now, normally, we wouldn’t take the time to debunk a misguided monologue from a flawed character in a TV show. Dexter made some good points, but he also loved murder. Tony Soprano was similar. Walter White too. In fact, a lot of TV guys make some good points, but also seem to love murder. We here at Climate Town don’t love murder, but we also accept that TV writers love to pretend about killing. And we generally let them be.

But in this case, a lot of people took this fictional rant as a listing of honest, tough facts. Or as one writer for a right-wing news site put it:

Every left-winger should have their eyes held open and be forced to watch this on repeat until it sinks in.

And, unfortunately, we did just that. And it did sink in. And most of the information is just old oil and gas propaganda that’s been circulating for decades. For example *Billy Bob voice*:

Do you have any idea how much diesel they had to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul this shit out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f*cking thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it.

This is basically a baked-out stoner thought that probably seems really smart at the time, but is actually ridiculously normal, bordering on straight-up stupid. YES, PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY THOUGHT OF THIS. AND THEY’VE ALREADY STUDIED THIS. FOR YEARS.

They’re called Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) and there’s a ton of them. The research trick here is that the specific question of carbon emission payback/offset time isn’t necessarily important to these studies. They’re looking to account for the total emissions over the lifetime of the wind turbine. And they deliver that number (among a bunch of other data).

But then, if you want to figure out the time it takes to offset those emissions, you need to figure out the emissions that the wind turbine would prevent/displace. This study from 2019 does that extra step for a potential wind turbine in Northwestern Europe and finds that:

The carbon emissions offset period is around 6 months.

And this is just one of the many old school oil industry talking points jammed into the 3-minute Billy Bob anti-wind run. And he probably would’ve gone on for another hour or two, but he had to spring to action to save the otherwise brilliant lady lawyer from a rattlesnake.

And a quick side note: this woman had never heard of a rattlesnake before this run in? If you have heard of one snake: it’s a rattlesnake. And even if you hadn’t heard of one before but had to describe it, you’d probably land on rattlesnake. It’s a snake. That rattles. Help!

But where did this disinformation come from?

When we first started digging into this, we thought we found the answer pretty fast: Landman is co-created and executive produced by Christian Wallace. This particular Christian Wallace is a former Permian Basin roughneck, who wrote about Permian Basin oil and gas for Texas Monthly. And he created the podcast Boomtown, which inspired Landman.

But then we listened to Boomtown. And it’s really good.

But if it wasn’t Boomtown, where did it come from?

Well, friend, to answer that, you’ll have to watch our full YouTube episode.

[Dividend], Baby, [Dividend]

Despite all the talk of finally giving oil and gas companies a fighting chance in the U.S. – here are a couple things to things to think about:

• In 2024, the U.S. produced more oil than any country EVER. Wanna know the second most productive year in history? It was the U.S. in 2023.

• Oil companies don’t seem to want to drill any more than they already are.

But it’s supposed to be drill, baby, drill and unlock that energy potential and slurp up that hot chocolate for cars!

But apparently there’s something oil companies love even more than oil itself:

The money you make from expensive oil.

If you watch a video of an oil and gas executive talking for more than 30 seconds, there’s a good chance you’ll hear this:

Capital discipline.

For the first decade or so of the fracking boom, everyone went hog wild drilling the sh*t out of oil and gas they thought they could never (profitably) get their hands on. But this new stuff wasn’t the good ole blast-out-of-the-ground rock juice they were used to. Here’s a very good explanation of fracking vs. conventional from Boomtown (again, this is a good podcast, we know it’s confusing because of Landman):

Just imagine going to a kid’s birthday party, but instead of a piñata, that kid’s dad dumped a bunch of sugar in some concrete and repaved the driveway. Then he tells the kids that there’s plenty of candy for everyone, but they’re gonna need a fun-sized jackhammer. That’s fracking.

It’s difficult, it’s expensive, the wells deplete very, very fast, and it’s how we now get the majority of oil from the Permian Basin:

The Permian Basin, a vast expanse of oil pump jacks and mesquite shrubs that stretches from West Texas into eastern New Mexico, supplies roughly 6.4 million barrels a day of crude, or nearly half of all U.S. production.

But as the fracking boom has matured, oil companies have remembered that they (and their shareholders) really like massive profits. Which brings us back to:

Capital discipline.

The idea is pretty simple. If oil companies spend less on extracting oil, they can:

1. Lower their overall costs.

2. Focus on the highest profit margin oil extraction, instead of just maximizing production.

3. Get a higher price for that higher margin oil, since supply is more constrained.

And this brings us back to the graph we put as a data-driven teaser at the top of this section, from the IEA’s World Energy Investment 2024:

Over the last decade or so, there has been a radical shift in how large upstream oil and gas companies allocate their net income:

Note: if you don’t already know, upstream oil and gas refers to the part of the business that explores for and extracts oil and gas.

Based on a review of the 30 largest upstream oil and gas companies, buybacks rose to historic highs in 2023, accounting for 20% of cash flow from operations and payouts from dividends rose to around 30%. For a second consecutive year, less than 50% of cash flow was allocated to capital expenditures.

So while they were reinvesting more than 75% of this cash flow into capital expenditure in 2015 and 2016, that balance has shifted to the shareholders:

Large upstream companies spend more on dividends and share buybacks than they do on reinvestment in oil and gas.

Which is f*cking awesome!!

There is truly no better feeling than being a customer of a large, public corporation when they announce a major share buyback plan. Early May last year, cherry blossoms still blooming in NYC, and suddenly an unexpected roar of joy rolls across Central Park: Apple is doing more share buybacks. The largest in their history. It’s all been worth it. This is why we buy cell phones.

Wanna know why life before 1982 sucked ass? That’s because stock buybacks used to be mostly illegal, since they were considered market manipulation that doesn’t benefit society. But then in Reagan’s first term, the SEC opened up buybacks and life was good.

“Serving customers, creating innovative new products, employing workers, taking care of the environment … are NOT the objectives of firms,” Itzhak Ben-David, professor of finance at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business and a buyback proponent, wrote in an email response to questions from Reuters. “These are components in the process that have the goal of maximizing shareholders’ value.”

But even with the euphoria of dividends and stock repurchases, there is a downside:

The extreme profits have to come from somewhere.

Let’s look at Chevron as an example. In 2023, they earned $196.9 billion from sales and other revenues. And for their shareholders:

We returned a record $26.3 billion to stockholders in 2023 through dividends of $11.3 billion and share repurchases of $14.9 billion.

Which means that 13% of all the money they pull in, goes right back out the door to anyone who owns the stock. Not bad! In fact, that’s pretty staggering, considering that just $15.8 billion went into capital expenditures.

So if we take their word for it (for a corporation, spending money is considered talking), Chevron was 66% more interested in profit than they were in new oil and gas infrastructure.

But again, there might be a pretty simple answer for this:

Earnings of the company depend mostly on the profitability of its upstream business segment. The most significant factor affecting the results of operations for the upstream segment is the price of crude oil, which is determined in global markets outside of the company’s control.

When it comes to the Permian Basin specifically, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth gave this passionate speech about a year ago on Bloomberg:

What we've done now in the Permian is we've grown to a point where we'll hold our CapEx as guided at about $5 billion this year and see continued growth this year and next year. And as we get to next year, at a million barrels a day, we'll start to talk about holding a plateau, which allows us to actually invest even less capital in order to do that. So we're very committed to, you know, capital discipline through the cycle.

So it’s not shocking to learn that, less than a month after Trump declared a “national energy emergency,” we get this from the second largest U.S. oil and gas company:

Chevron announced that they plan to lay off 15% to 20% of their global workforce by the end of 2026.

Which means thousands of Chevron workers are set to be laid off before we’re even halfway through Trump’s latest term.

And that’s not to say oil companies hate Trump. They seem happy to have as many profit-friendly options at their disposal as possible. But just like Chevron, here’s the head of Exxon’s upstream division back in November:

We're not going to see anybody in 'drill, baby, drill' mode.

A radical change (in production) is unlikely because the vast majority, if not everybody, is focused on the economics of what they're doing.

So what the f*ck is Trump talking about?

This is truly a great question – and one we don’t have an answer for. The biggest oil news coming out of this new administration is that Trump turned to pressuring OPEC+ to increase oil production. And, at least for now, they agreed to start ramping production up.

In a surprise move that sent crude tumbling, the group led by Saudi Arabia and Russia will go ahead with the increase of 138,000 barrels a day in April, according to a statement posted on the group’s website. It will be the first in a series of monthly hikes to revive production halted for more than two years, which will gradually restore a total of 2.2 million barrels a day by 2026.

But then you remember that the U.S. has been producing around 13 million barrels of oil per day on its own. And OPEC+ produces around 35 million barrels a day combined.

But after running face first into a wall of profit obsession with U.S. producers, even a vague promise of the international oil cartel maybe adding potentially up to 6% more oil looks like a win.

And hopefully all this helps the next time someone’s uncle grabs you by the tricep and starts ranting about how Trump is unleashing AMERICAN ENERGY. Even though he seems to consider himself the god of the free market, there is always a higher power:

Profit.

Official Rollie (no prize)

Now, normally, we wouldn’t give a prize out for this section. And we won’t be changing that. There is no prize.

But for this edition of the Official Rollie (no prize) you must successfully find a digital copy of the 1996 thriller/drama Sling Blade written, directed by, and starring the very same Billy Bob Thorton that talked sh*t about wind turbines in Landman.

We can hear you thinking to yourself right now:

How hard could it possibly be to find a copy of Sling Blade? I mean it’s a movie from the 90s, this will take me 5 minutes, 10 tops.

To that we say, good luck. A series of contractual problems have made this movie a veritable Internet Houdini. But Rollie himself was able to navigate the dark waters of a few big corporations controlling all our access to movies. So this is the challenge.

If you are able to find a copy of Sling Blade, you must provide photographic proof to be declared an Official Rollie (no prize). This can be a screenshot or pic of your TV or pic of you watching the movie. And ideally you will have stopped the movie at 01:01:01 for the photo, but that’s up to you.

Now, technically you can win simply by finding the copy, but we strongly encourage you to watch it if you find it, because it’s weirdly great.

As for last edition, here are your Official Rollie (no prize) recipients:

• John Shulters

• Ben Vost

• Christian [Redacted]

• Hermanth [Redacted]

• Julius [Redacted]

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams & Matt Nelsen

Edited by: Rollie Williams & Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Hello friend!

The days are getting shorter, night is near, we don’t have much time, let’s get right to it:

When you return something, it doesn’t just go back to the shelf.

It goes:

Other places.

Like the landfill or a massive incinerator designed to burn trash for electricity or maybe the back of a store where it sits for months before going on a few different trucks to eventually get to the landfill or the trash fire.

And good lord we made an entire episode about all the issues with returns, released just in time for The Holidays. More on that in about a hundred words. But first:

This is an extra special episode, because it marks our first collaboration with internet historian and YouTube sensation Danny Gonzalez. And Danny was nice enough to:

1. Let us come near him and his house to film a portion of our episode.

2. Make his own, much more emotionally-taxing video on his channel about what happens to returns. And if you don’t already know, his channel’s a downright fun place full of other great videos like this one about tech products that shouldn’t exist (that’s the title, not us saying that, but we do think he’s right).

And as always, if you’re running out of pre-purchased emails, you can find the unsubscribe button higher in the scroll than any local garden center or tech trends newsletter would dare.

For the rest of you:

Free & Easy

As we continue our for-profit, corporate-approved societal decay, there are fewer and fewer “good deals” out there for consumers. Sure, you still have the big three:

1. Walking (on approved public pathways)

2. Costco

3. Looking around (Don’t push it, though)

But if you dare need to buy something from a publicly-traded company (not Costco), you can pretty much rest assured you’ll be getting the bare minimum for the highest price, as part of that corporation’s ethical duty to maximize shareholder value.

But there is one modern shopping feature that somehow slipped through the board room cracks:

Free returns.

To get your refund, you used to have to go to THE STORE and go toe-to-toe with Nintendo-trained return hawks (preserved here by intrepid YouTuber Randy Cornetta):

But that was before THE INTERNET.

Now you don’t have to go anywhere NEAR the store and you can return stuff any time in the next 30 days or 90 days or one year or whenever you want. You can send whatever you just bought back to the shelves and get 100% of your money back, no questions asked.

Seems too good to be true? Well, you’re an idiot. Because it is true!

• Buyer’s remorse? Not anymore, pal. Back it goes. And feel free to repeat as needed.

• Don’t know what size or color pants you want? Order them all, then return the 19 pairs you don’t like. This is very common and is known in the returns world as “bracketing.”

• But then why even buy clothes? Order whatever you want, wear it, and then return it. This is also very common (known as “wardrobing”).

And it’s these kinds of bullet points that lead to over 20% of everything we buy online getting returned. When you add in brick and mortar retail, Americans are projected to return almost ONE TRILLION DOLLARS worth of items in 2024 alone.

But the retail industry largely sees this as a necessary tradeoff, as described here by Amanda Mull, who’s done a ton of good reporting on this for The Atlantic:

Free returns are what encourage people to tolerate bad product listings, misleading stock images, poor quality control, and the days-long wait for something they might have once run out to pick up in less than an hour. Remove the no-fee keystone, and the entire facade of convenience might fall. No one likes having to manage their own miniature nonprofit reverse-logistics business out of their home in order to send back all the stuff they bought that didn’t live up to their expectations. You’d probably like it even less if you were routinely paying for the privilege. Right now e-commerce giants seem to be betting that they’ve killed off enough brick-and-mortar competition that you’ll have to do it anyway.

But what does it mean to return something?

If you read the intro, you probably already know that your return probably isn’t just going back to the shelf.

No, in this case, “return” diverges slightly from its literal definition. Picture a version of The Return of the King, where Aragorn tells everyone he’s taking his rightful place as King of Gondor, but then just goes and dies in a pile of old orcs instead. Or Return of the Jedi where Luke fakes everyone out and burns in a big incinerator to power that new Death Star. Or the 1993 Bridget Fonda action thriller Point of No Return except there really was a return. Actually scratch that last one.

Because when you shove that Pro-Ject A1 record player back in its box and send it off to a better life, it’s probably not going back to where you bought it. Instead it probably goes on a few truck rides, before arriving at:

The returns center.

A massive warehouse where all your returns go to get inspected, graded, and sorted. Think of a warehouse. Now make it bigger. You think that’s big? Try this:

Now that’s a returns center.

And a quick disclaimer before we launch ahead – companies don’t really like to talk about what happens to their returns. They’re shy! They’re embarrassed! Don’t ask! And that means the information we have access to on returns can be pretty thin. But we’ll do our best.

Inside that big rectangle there’s a legion of highly trained analysts. It’s tempting to think of them like old timey telephone switchboard operators diligently returning packages to the respective stores, but that’s not quite what they’re up to. Their job is to spend as little time as possible sorting the returns into five categories:

1. One-way trip to the landfill. Yeah, let’s rip the bandaid off now, probably between 10% and 25% of returns are sent to live at a farm upstate if you know what I’m saying. To avoid having to say they sent the returns to a landfill, sometimes companies will burn them for “energy recovery”. Again, the numbers are pretty hazy here, but it’s definitely billions and billions of dollars worth of stuff getting very much destroyed. But while this seems like a cost-saving, easy solution, it STILL involves handling and trucking the returns to the dump and also the most beloved profession at the elementary school: the garbageman. So this option can actually be pretty expensive.

2. Donate it. Amazon does a ton of this through a nonprofit called Good 360, which also handles that losing team Super Bowl merch everyone’s always talking about. But unfortunately even donations have a hard time keeping themselves out of trouble (landfill), so there’s a good chance a lot of this is still #1 with some extra (also polluting) steps.

3. Back to the shelf. This seems to be relatively rare, but if the item is in perfect condition and the seller wants to spend the time and money to restock it, your return can go back on the shelf as new. But so much needs to go right here, and there are often more than enough new, never-before-sold versions of that same product just itching to get their chance to shine (or be sold and then sent to the dump).

4. Resell it but for cheaper. Something like a laptop or big screen television whose resale value overwhelms the cost of taking it back can sometimes be repackaged and sold as an open box deal. If an item isn’t working properly and the fix is fairly minor, it can get fixed and resold as “refurbished” or “used.” These slightly discounted categories offer a way for higher value, but less than perfectly new items to get resold.

5. Liquidation. Your returned item goes on a thrilling adventure from one massive warehouse to a different massive warehouse, where it is sold for pennies on the dollar to a liquidator. That liquidator will then try to find anyone willing to roll the dice on a completely random assortment of stuff. It’s kinda like that show Storage Wars, without the potential of finding a safe full of money or someone’s Grandma Agnes’s pearl collection. No, Liquidation Wars™ would only have access to other people’s returns, retailer overstock, or anything a big company decided wasn’t worth the warehouse space. Liquidators do great work trying to find homes for would-be-trash, but as we said in the episode, they’re a bandaid on the head wound that is free returns.

And of course, all of these options come with a ton of:

Moving that sh*t around.

“In the reverse logistics world, returns go through 3-4 times as many touch points as forward goods.”

And that actually makes sense. Amazon and fast, free shipping have forced retailers to become incredibly good at getting your purchase to you ridiculously fast.

And while those expectations can be difficult for some companies, the forward journey for your future return is typically way simpler: the company has the item you bought, they send it to you through a delivery service (or ship it themselves, if they’re Amazon), then you have the item. Happy!

But the reverse journey is way more complicated and varied, with millions of packages launched back at sellers from all directions: boxes picked up at customer’s houses, boxes dropped off at delivery service locations, random returns taken back to a retail store where they get piled up in the back until there’s enough to justify shipping them to a returns center (this is known as Buy Online, Return In Store, or BORIS, which is partially intended to get you to buy stuff in the brick and mortar while you’re there to send back the thing you don’t want).

And baby, it’s not just a couple of returns. Brace yourself for some carefully selected statistics organized by three elegant, sultry bullet points:

• UPS alone ships almost THREE MILLIONS returns every day in the weeks following the holiday season in the U.S.

• In 2024, nearly 39% of online shoppers returned a purchase ONCE a MONTH.

• In the past 5 years, returns have doubled. Growth!

All of that adds up to cost around 20% to 30% of the original retail value of an item, just to complete one of these returns journeys. And with constantly degrading quality and suppressed costs of production for a lot of stuff we buy, there’s a decent chance your return costs a company more than it did to make the item in the first place. Brutal!

But there’s a TWIST that didn’t really make it into our video. Because there’s a sixth return option that’s quietly becoming more common, because it actually makes the most sense for a lot of big retailers:

You Just Keep It.

It’s called the “returnless return” and it’s sweeping the nation.

You want to return something? Don’t! Keep it and give it away or throw it in your trash or whatever you want.

Companies such as Amazon, Walmart and Target have decided some items are not worth the cost or hassle of getting back. Think a $20 T-shirt that might cost $30 in shipping and handling to recover. There are also single-use items, such as a package of plastic straws, that might be difficult to resell or medicines that could be unsafe to market again.

And to be fair, companies have been doing this for years now, with everyone following Amazon’s lead yet again. But it seems to be really going wild recently, because it actually makes terrible, terrible sense.

Let’s do some very simple and very general math:

Start with the projected $890 billion dollars of returned retail value in 2024. Then take a somewhat conservative 21% of that for returns expenses (from a Pitney Bowes report that says returns cost 21% of the retail value). That gives you: $187 billion dollars.

But this isn’t a Harvard Business School study, so we’ll take that down a notch and throw a nice maybe in the front:

Returns most likely cost U.S. retailers more than $100 billion dollars every year.

JUST TO TAKE THE RETURNS BACK AND DO SOMETHING WITH THEM. EVEN IF THEY JUST THROW THEM IN THE TRASH.

And good lord that kind of wasteful spending just doesn’t square with the corporate ethical duty to maximize profits, with the vast majority of retailers telling McKinsey & Company that “returns are a concern for profitability.”

So what if you cut out the majority returns altogether? Why that’s so crazy it just might work (make more profit).

But then there’s this nagging thought:

What will customers do if companies tell them the item they just bought is suddenly worthless?

Now, buying something and then returning it for no good reason is considered returns fraud. But this is also the free market, baby! And if you just bought a blender for $50, then almost immediately get told: it’s actually worthless, you can have your money back and keep the blender for free, who cares. Well, that’s f*cking confusing.

You might wonder if there’s a way to skip the whole dance and get right to the free blender, if that’s where we’re going anyway. But stop right there!

That would be bad for profits. Get it now?

And so we’ve officially reached the next, much more stupid and depressing, phase of corporate return policies.

An industry survey found that over half of companies now offer don’t-return returns. But they don’t want to just turn them loose on the masses, so they keep them as a hidden “perk,” hoping to identify customers who won’t take advantage of this overconsumption, profit-driven anomaly. And what a glorious “perk” it is.

One woman interviewed for this Reuters piece said she was offered a returnless return for a $300 portable AC that showed up broken. But rather than give her a chance to fix it or donate it, Amazon would only give her a refund after she proved she had cut the power cord, basically guaranteeing that return would go to the trash, just not at Amazon’s expense.

Or there’s a guy who got a king-sized comforter from Target he didn’t even order:

He called Target, which apologized for the mix up, and told him to keep it. They said, “It would be overly burdensome for us to take it back.”

But again, in the face of the high costs of returns and the often unethically low costs of production, this all makes some kind of sick sense.

It really seems like most things for sale now are basically low quality pre-trash, and no one wants them back. And if that’s the Valhalla the free market has been leading us too, maybe it’s not that cool of a place.

Official Rollie (no prize)

If you’ve never heard Jeff Bezos laugh, we are so deeply happy to be the ones to show you what it looks like. You absolutely can “hear him coming a mile away.”

It’s truly crazy, and by all accounts he’s always laughed like that. We thought it may have been an Elizabeth-Holmes-low-voice after market add-on, but apparently he’s been laughing like an absolute lunatic since the jump.

So for this edition’s Official Rollie (no prize), we ask that you scour the Internet and find what you think is the greatest laugh in existence. And then send us a link to it. We’re counting on you.

And as for the Officials Rollie (no prize) from last edition, here they are:

• Alex Campos

• Jack Johnson

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Laura Conte

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Matt Nelsen and Rollie Williams

Hello friend!

It’s an election year in the U.S. yet again, and who are we to avoid getting sucked in?

But since a ton of other folks are already writing about the 2024 election non-stop, we made the radical decision to cover a U.S. election, but make it the 2000 election instead. One of the all time classics: Bush vs. Gore.

Nobody saw this coming.

As always, you’ll find the unsubscribe button higher in the scroll than any local garden center would dare – use that button if you must. For the rest of you sticking around:

How to Steal an Election

That’s right, on this installment of Climate Town, we take you all the way back to the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, when Al Gore not only won the popular vote, but also got more votes in the deciding state of Florida. But then:

Why have you never heard of President Al Gore?

Well, friend, a few things went very wrong in Florida (for Gore):

• Despite not having all the numbers, the mainstream media declared Bush the President on election night, immediately casting Gore as a sore loser and giving rise to one of the most devastating protest signs of all time. 

• A bad graphic design choice in Palm Beach County caused thousands of elderly Jewish democrats to accidentally vote for the far right antisemitic candidate. Whoopsie!

• Older voting machines that required voters to punch a hole (or chad) out of a ballot malfunctioned and caused incorrect counts.

• The Florida Secretary of State in charge of maintaining election integrity was also the co-chair of George Bush’s Florida presidential campaign.

• The governor of the state was George Bush’s little brother JEB! Bush.

• Speaking of Governor JEB!, Florida had just erroneously purged thousands of people from their voter rolls, and as chance would have it, the purged voters were disproportionately Democratic.

• Al Gore believed in the legal system and asked his supporters not to take to the streets to protest an election being stolen. This left plenty of room on those streets for Republicans to protest <checks notes> vote counting.

• A young Roger Stone and other Republican operatives successfully stopped the recount of Miami-Dade by sending a gaggle of paid Republican staffers to the counting room to protest. 

• After the Florida Supreme Court ordered the entire state of Florida to do a hand recount, the Supreme Court of the United States (which had 5 Republican-appointed justices and 4 Democratic-appointed justices) took the case and denied the recount, handing Bush the presidency.

And that’s how we got 4 years (followed by 4 more) of President George (Regular) W. Bush.

But what about this election that’s happening very soon?

Now we’re on track, Jackson. First off:

VOTE. 

But maybe even more importantly: 

Make sure you’re registered to vote.

According to this piece from Pew Research Center, around 63% of the voting-age population actually voted in the 2020 U.S. election. But of registered voters, NINETY FOUR PERCENT (94.1%, for you numberheads) voted. Which means, if you were registered, you were extremely likely to vote in 2020.

If you need to register (or double check that you’re registered), here’s a handy link from our friends at Climate Changemakers.

But then you might be wondering:

Who should I vote for?

And in the U.S. that pretty much comes down to two choices: the Republican or the Democrat?

And in case you haven’t heard, the Republican this year is Donald Trump and the Democrat is Kamala Harris. We have to put this information here to make sure you know, but if this is the first time you’re hearing of either or both of these people, let us know in the comments. We may want to talk to you.

And of those two choices, we have decided to endorse:

Kamala Harris.

That’s right, the folks who make videos under the name Climate Town, who spend a huge chunk of their lives advocating for action to avoid catastrophic climate change, have decided to endorse the Democratic candidate for U.S. President.

And if you’re wondering why we went with Harris/Walz, a lot of it comes down to the lines on this chart from Energy Innovation:

Three potential lines of U.S. emission, all pretty different:

1. Current policies (boring gray line) – basically the IRA until it runs out and then we do nothing.

2. Project 2025 (orange? dark yellow?) – more on this line in a bit (cliffhanger).

3. Continued Climate Leadership (beautiful blue line) – what it looks like if we actually get to net zero by 2050.

And if you ask us, that blue net zero by 2050 line is the one we want.

Now, to be clear, there are no guarantees that a Harris/Walz administration will hit that target. If they win the election, we’ll be right back in the battle for true climate action. Because iIf you look at the Biden/Harris administration:

• They passed the approximately $400 billion Inflation Reduction Act, guided by Senator Joe Manchin, who shepherded the legislation into its final, more-fossil-fuel-friendly form.

• And while the IRA is definitely a climate win overall, if you compare it to the plan Kamala ran on in 2019 ($10 trillion spending, carbon neutral power by 2030, etc.), the IRA shows up as a rounding error, depriving us of roughly $10 trillion worth of better climate action.

• Under this administration, the U.S. not only produces more crude oil than any other time in our history, but also more than any other country. Ever.

• And this is not climate-related exactly, but the Biden administration continues to directly support the genocide in Gaza – billions in weapons to aid the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, with 60% of buildings now damaged or destroyed.

But again, we basically have two choices for U.S. President here.

And we feel confident that a vote for Kamala gives a significantly better chance of desperately needed climate action and leadership. Which brings us back to our cliffhanger:

Project 2025.

There’s been a lot written about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, especially their 900-page Mandate for Leadership. And if you want to read that long-as-hell, ultra- conservative wishlist PDF, here’s the link. But if you’d rather read a couple good pieces about it:

• Drilled: Everything You Need to Know About Project 2025's Plan for the EPA (by Amy Westervelt)

• HEATED: Why are Republicans so obsessed with refrigerators? (By Arielle Samuelson and Emily Atkin)

But this is not the first time the Heritage Foundation has put out a Mandate for Leadership. It’s not even the second. Or the third. Had enough? It’s the ninth.

And, as with a lot of things we cover, we’ve been here before:

Again, Let’s Make America Great Again, Again

It’s the early 1970s, and something was amiss in the Grand Old Party: the Republicans seemed to be losing their edge. 

Nixon, a Republican President, established the Environmental Protection Agency on December 2, 1970. Then there’s the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and campaign finance reform and more.

And worst of all – a lot of this stuff seemed to be pretty popular with average Americans.

But this could be the end of life as business-minded conservatives knew it. What if the EPA forced automakers to make cars way less polluting?

These fears and more were distilled by Lewis Powell, less than six months before he’d leave the executive committee of tobacco giant Phillip Morris to join the Supreme Court, in a document that came to be known as:

The Powell Memo.

Or maybe you’d rather call it by its title: Attack on American Free Enterprise System.

The 34-page memo generally comes down to this: life, as businesses know it, is under siege, and they must fight back for their own survival. They need to spread pro-business ideals through college campuses, television, books, politics, courts, and more. Corporations need to be heard, just like people. Oh and Powell had one person in particular he really didn’t like:

Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who — thanks largely to the media — has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.

To be clear, a lot of that Nader hate probably came from Nader’s 1965 Unsafe at Any Speed, which criticized car companies for making profitable death traps that killed thousands of Americans a year, while resisting safety features like seat belts. And that book is credited with helping create the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. And Nader did it all while wearing the same dozen pairs of clearance Army shoes for 25 years. The man’s an antagonistic menace! 

Or as Robert A. Lutz, a former executive at BMW, Ford, Chrysler, and GM, put it:

I don’t like Ralph Nader and I didn’t like the book, but there was definitely a role for government in automotive safety.

Now, there’s some debate over how influential the Powell Memo really was in the rise of the modern Conservative movement. But we listened to a new podcast called Master Plan as we were researching for this newsletter (which you should listen to, if you want to learn more), and it seems fair to say that doc got around.

And one of the people who apparently took a good hard look at the Powell Memo was:

Joseph Coors, from the third generation of the Coors Brewing Company family.

These three things about Joseph Coors are true:

• He was president of Coors during a strike in 1977. But rather than settle the strike, they replaced the workers and got rid of the union. During that period, Coors also required potential employees to take lie detector tests, until they caved to public pressure and stopped the practice in 1986.

• His own brother once described him as “a little bit right of Attila the Hun” (at least according to Wikipedia).

• He’s from the town where Rollie grew up: beautiful Golden, Colorado.

And with his very conservative and very rich reputation, Joseph Coors was approached by young, congressional staffers Ed Feulner and Paul M. Weyrich with a radical new idea:

The Heritage Foundation.

And this wouldn’t be some stodgy, old think tank that puts tired and dated ethics over results. No, according to this great piece by Jonathan Mahler in The New York Times:

What if they could create a new sort of think tank, one that would actively seek to cultivate and influence politicians, and in the process advance the cause of movement conservatism?

Joseph Coors gave them around $250,000, and the trio founded the Heritage Foundation in February 1973. 

Without Joe Coors, the Heritage Foundation wouldn't exist, and the conservative movement it nurtures would be immeasurably poorer.

As Heritage built up funding and sway through the 70s, the first major test of their newfound status in Washington arrived:

Let’s Make America Great Again.

A few decades before Trump rolled out MAGA, Reagan won the 1980 Presidential election with a slogan so incredibly similar, you’d think they were basically the same. Except, actually Trump thought of that entirely by himself, without ever thinking of maybe the most famous modern Republican Presidential campaign slogan at the time.

One after another, phrases popped into his head. “We Will Make America Great.” That one did not have the right ring. Then, “Make America Great.” But that sounded like a slight to the country. And then, it hit him: “Make America Great Again.” 

“I said, ‘That is so good.’ I wrote it down,” Trump recalled in an interview.

But it’s one thing to win an election. It’s an entirely different thing to actually do the stuff you said you were going to do. And in this case, you is Reagan. And that’s where Heritage saw their opening.

Edwin Feulner, then the president of Heritage, recalls that the inspiration for Mandate was a meeting at which former treasury secretary William Simon complained that when he got to Washington to serve under Nixon, he had no guidance on any “practical plans” for enacting a conservative agenda. The Heritage Foundation set to work to make sure this wouldn’t happen again under Reagan in 1981. 

Heritage budgeted $250,000 (about a million dollars today, adjusted for goddamn inflation) to create a targeted Presidential transition package for the Reagan administration, featuring their brand new 20 volume, 3,000-page conservative federal policy tome:

Mandate for Leadership.

And again, you can read the whole thing if you want to, but here are a few highlights, paraphrased by a Washington Post article from November 1980:

Abolish the Department of Energy by 1982.

Revoke all executive orders requiring affirmative action for minorities in government hiring and contracting.

Strip the Office of Surface Mining of most of its powers in order to "make an example" of the agency.

Return most functions of the Environmental Protection Agency to the states or other government offices.

Use U.S. agricultural exports as a weapon in foreign policy.

Boost the 1981 defense budget by $20 billion, develop a new strategic bomber, deploy the neutron bomb in Europe and raise military spending by $35 billion in each of the next five years.

Revoke the guidelines that tell intelligence agencies how to operate within the Constitution, crack down on domestic radicals and revive internal security committees in Congress.

Impose a 10 percent across-the-board personal income tax cut.

After aggressively marketing the document to Reagan’s transition team, especially his campaign chief of staff Edwin Meese: on January 21st, 1981, at Reagan’s first cabinet meeting, the newest President in the country distributed copies of Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership.

It was a truly wonderful time to be the Heritage Foundation:

• Of the 2,000 policy recommendations in Mandate for Leadership, around two thirds were attempted or adopted by the Reagan administration (at least according to Heritage themselves). This included Reagan’s landmark tax cuts, passed in August 1981, cutting the top tax rate by 20% (from 70% down to 50%) – the U.S. has never returned to anything close to that level of taxation on the rich in the decades since.

• “At least three dozen of those who wrote or contributed to Mandate have switched from the stands to the playing field, accepting policy-making jobs in the administration.”

• Heritage published a cutdown 1,100-page version for the public, which became a bestseller.

Heritage even claims that Reagan followed their policy suggestions so closely that Gorbachev got pissed about their influence. And it must be true. It’s on their blog.

Heritage went on to publish another Mandate for Leadership in 1985, after Reagan won a second term with the incredibly boring, incredibly successful “It’s Morning Again in America”. And they’d keep pumping out Mandates pretty much every four years, until 2005. Except, by then, it wasn’t quite the same.

It just wasn’t fun anymore.

Or maybe their ideas weren’t getting the attention they used to. Whatever the reason, the sixth Mandate was a mere 156-pages, a shadow of the previous policy playbooks. That would be the last Mandate for Leadership for the foreseeable future.

In 2013, The Atlantic published a piece by Molly Ball called The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas. Apparently, the Heritage Foundation was particularly involved with the Republican Study Committee, a large group of Republicans in Congress – Heritage would pay for their annual retreat in D.C. and also provide Chick-fil-A for their weekly lunch meetings, which Heritage lobbyists would also attend (no other outside groups were allowed).

But now (in 2013)? No more sandwiches. No more only-outside-group-allowed-in-the-Congressional-meeting. Their premier status was slipping.

But then, a shining light from the depths of the right:

Make America Great Again, Again.

At first, the folks at Heritage seemed pretty skeptical of Trump. Or, as Heritage Action leader Michael Needham put it in 2015:

Donald Trump’s a clown. He needs to be out of the race. But someone else who’s serious needs to step up and start channeling the voice of very frustrated American political voters.

But as the primaries approached, Heritage president (and former U.S. Senator) Jim DeMint saw the potential in Trump. He could actually win. And Heritage could be first in line after he does.

While establishment Republicans were pushing back on Trump, Heritage was jockeying for positions in his post-nomination campaign. Then, in August 2016, Ed Feulner, the Heritage co-founder and president from 1977 to 2013, joined Trump’s transition team: 

As [Feulner] saw it, Trump held even more promise for Heritage than Reagan had. “No.1, he did clearly want to make very significant changes, and No.2, his views on so many things were not particularly well formed,” Feulner said. “And so if he somehow pulled the election off, we thought, wow, we could really make a difference.”

From there, vintage Heritage launched back into action, including a brand new Mandate for Leadership, the first in over a decade. They also blasted out unsolicited emails looking for potential candidates for the Trump administration, which they signed:

RIGHT On!

In Trump’s first year in office, more than 70 former and current Heritage staffers began working for his administration. And that count included a bunch of high-ranking officials: Betsy DeVos (Secretary of Education), Scott Pruitt (Administrator of the EPA), Jeff Sessions (Attorney General), Mick Mulvaney (Chief of Staff), and more.

Trump even nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the son of Anne Gorsuch, who ran the conservatized EPA in Reagan’s first term – she received distinct praise from the Heritage Foundation in 1981 “for her swift dismissal of subordinates who did not share administration policy views.”

They’re baaaaack.

Heritage claimed Trump implemented or began work on 64% of the 321 policy recommendations in the seventh Mandate for Leadership in his first year, just a bit more than they claimed for Reagan in 1981.

As President Reagan did in the 1980s, President Trump has embraced the comprehensive recommendations made in the Mandate for Leadership.

And now, eight years later, we have the latest work from Heritage:

Project 2025.

Almost one thousand pages of brand new Heritage Foundation policy ideas, like “shutter” any technology or telecommunications company that facilitates the spread of porn. Goodbye, dear internet. And cell phones. Probably regular phones too. Restaurant where you talk about porn: shuttered.

There’s honestly a lot of wild shit in there. And, once again, the best way to avoid this document is to vote (if you’re a U.S. voter).

VOTE. REGISTER. VOTE.

Oh and they also made some Project 2025 training videos, which you’ve probably already seen. But just in case you haven’t, here’s a taste:

Official Rollie (no prize)

While cooking through archival footage of young Al Gore and young George Bush, something slowly became clear: 

These dudes had a real smoke show phase. 

We’re not saying they could have been characters on The O.C. or anything, and it doesn’t absolve anything they did during their lives, but handsome Gore/Bush was an unexpected twist in the research phase for this video. 

So, the Official Rollie (no prize) for this edition of the newsletter: find the most unexpectedly attractive photo of someone in politics. 

We’re casting a wide net here, so think big, dig deep. And, as always, remember that, no matter how perfectly you nail this assignment: there is no prize.

As for last edition’s Official Rollie (no prize), here are your recipients, each linked with their better-than-the-Michael-Bay-Got-Milk-commercial submission:

• Bill Barton

• Greg Bell

• Brendon Coghill

• David Cortright

• Leslie Ellison

• Caleb Hall

• Robert Jackson

• Jack Johnson

• Casey Lantz

• Pierre Fortier

• Daniel Quinan

• Justin [Redacted]

• Benjamin Roth

And an honorable mention to Ellen Woodrow, who described great commercials, but did not provide a video link. Ellen, you win nothing. There is no prize.

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Additional research by: Irene Plagianos, Carly Rizzuto, and Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Matt Nelsen and Rollie Williams

Hello friend!

Well well well, we’ve come crawling back to you with another double-wide 40-minute video when we promised to only make 20-minute videos, huh?

This time it wasn’t our fault: water rights and animal agriculture are simply too complicated to jam into the length of an episode of New Girl. We’re sorry, we party.

And our eagle-eyed readers might notice a marked change in this newsletter: the unsubscribe button. Higher in the scroll than it’s ever been before. But we had no choice, after a reader named Hermanth (“not Heman or Herman”) informed us that another newsletter (from their local garden center) placed their unsubscribe link in the second line of text. 

But we will not be outdone.

So you will now find our unsubscribe button at the very top of the scroll. Victory!

And as a reminder:

• Yes! We still have Patreon.

• Yes! We still have Climate Town t-shirts that we made a whole episode about.

• Yes! We still have a podcast called The Climate Denier’s Playbook.

And if you think that’s a lot of Climate Town-related links, just you wait, because: 

Climate Town writer/director (and co-writer of this newsletter) Matt Nelsen has been making commercial wine in Sonoma, California for the past few years, while he works on a multi-year documentary project about wine and climate change. And at long last, he’s approved and ready to legally sell it. If you want to learn more about that, and maybe even buy some of that wine, here’s the newly announced website to check out (the first release will be in September 2024). 

But also– what about that 40-minute video we mentioned earlier? Well, friend, to lead us in, here’s a great old paraphrased quote we saw flying around, but have no idea where it came from:

“When water’s what you need, water’s the only thing that’ll do.”

A Tall Glass of Livestock Feed Irrigation Water

This video started with one nice-looking chart from this New York Times article by Elena Shao, based on data from a 2020 study on Colorado River water usage:

Because it turns out that, of all the water consumed on the famously constrained Colorado River:

More than half of that water goes to growing food for animal agriculture.

For you statsheads out there, that means more water on the Colorado River goes to irrigating livestock feed than EVERYTHING ELSE COMBINED.

And before we move on, we want to quickly say: Elena Shao does some incredible graphics work for the New York Times and they’re lucky to have her. We also featured her piece examining the emissions per mile of mega-EVs in our newsletter about Super Bowl car ads. So we’ll give you another chance: click here to check out more of her work. And what the hell, here’s her website. Great work!

And of all that one trillion gallons of livestock feed water per year, a lot of it goes to one crop in particular: alfalfa. 

And yeah this is all in the video we just put out. But for you busy folks that haven’t had FORDY MINUTES to watch our video yet, here are some facts you can tell your friends when you want to be depressing at dinner:

• The Colorado River water was divided up over 100 years ago, which came to be known as the Colorado River Compact. But right from the start, they divided up the rights to more water than the river provides. But that should be fine, I’m sure we can OH NO NOW THERE’S CLIMATE CHANGE and there’s even less available water than before.

• The water rights on the Colorado are typically ‘use it or lose it,’ so anyone with existing water rights is HEAVILY incentivised to use every last drop.

• Alfalfa f*cking loves the sun, but also needs a lot of water. So if you can grow it in the desert with nearly unlimited water, you can harvest 10-12 times a year, with incredible yields. And basically no compromise at all!

• That’s how you get a SINGLE FARMING FAMILY in the desert valley near Palm Springs using more water than the ENTIRE LAS VEGAS METROPOLITAN AREA. And the top 20 families in the region (the not-at-all-villainous-sounding Imperial Valley) “use more of the [Colorado] river than all of Wyoming, Nevada, or New Mexico.”

• Alfalfa is prized for its high protein content, and is often fed to dairy cows, who need a higher protein diet to blast out piping hot milk.

So while it’s still an issue to have folks like the Kardashians and Sylvester Stallone using hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a month, when you think about water usage on the Colorado, you really need to think first about meat and dairy.

And you don’t really have to take our word for all of this. Let’s take Brian Richter’s word for it, since he’s one of the authors of that 2020 Colorado River water study, as well as a more in-depth, updated study published earlier this year:

“It’s important to acknowledge that farmers are growing what people want and are willing to pay for. And the reason we’re using so much of the Colorado River water to feed cows is because of our demand for beef and dairy products. And our demand for dairy, and specifically cheese, has been going up, which is causing expansion of dairies in a lot of the West and in the Colorado River Basin, and so that’s why they’re growing so much alfalfa.”

So what if, just as an idea, we didn’t demand so much dairy-and-specifically-cheese?

Well, friend, that’s just not gonna work for Dairy Management Inc:

Please Drink Your Milkshake

If we say Dream Team, you’re probably immediately thinking of the guy from the shoes and a bunch of his friends going full-on basketball on small groups of international plumbers and firemen in the 90s.

But if we say Dairy Dream Team, you probably immediately have no idea what the f*ck we’re talking about. But don’t worry, you only have to read one quote to get caught up:

Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) assembled a “Dairy Dream Team” consisting of chefs, recipe developers, “foodies,” gamers and lifestyle influencers who have a combined 25 million social media followers. They are joined by another 100-plus influencers who work with state and regional checkoff teams and are tasked with presenting unique recipes and ways dairy can be enjoyed by consumers, particularly Gen Z (ages 9 to 24).

And much like the Olympics (keep it steady), this new Dream Team does what it does best (nice and easy) while promoting the interests and positive image of the powerful group behind it (yes, good comparison).

You see, Dairy Management is a massive marketing group which has pretty much one purpose:

Sell more milk.

About 40 years ago, it was the 1980s, and the U.S. government was just coming out of the “government cheese” crisis. 

Basically, after World War II, the U.S. agreed to be an incredibly good friend to the dairy industry. Under the Dairy Product Price Support Program, the U.S. would buy up excess dairy if the price went too low – and in the 1970s, that exact scenario played out, leaving the U.S. with so much quick-to-spoil milk that they turned it into cheese and other dairy products so it would last longer. This article says the U.S. cheese stockpile was 560 million pounds at this time, and we have no reason to doubt that.

But, unfortunately, cheese will also eventually spoil, and that eventual spoiling hit in the Reagan years. That brings us back to the Go Go 1980s baby!

While one USDA official said that “probably the cheapest and most practical thing would be to dump it in the ocean,” the U.S. eventually landed on giving the cheese away. And they gave away a f*cking ton of almost-or-maybe-already-spoiled cheese.

As the dust settled, they knew they didn’t want to repeat this embarrassing government cheese stockpile again. But they also knew the dairy industry needed help to drive enough milk demand to maintain production.

So instead of the USDA just buying up excess milk, they would oversee a promotional group that pushes milk on the public, so that people would choose to buy that excessive milk themselves, giving us:

The National Dairy Promotion & Research Board.

Overseen by the USDA, funded primarily by taxes on dairy products, absolutely gaga for milk, and directly responsible for Dairy Management. And that’s just one of a number of dairy industry promotion groups. There’s also MilkPEP, another national dairy promotion group, as well as state-level groups, like the California Milk Processor Board.

All of these groups are known as checkoffs, named for the way farmers could voluntarily ‘check off’ a box to contribute to these programs in the early days of their existence. And yeah there are a bunch more for other agriculture industries: beef, pork, cotton, American eggs, Christmas trees, highbush blueberries, Hass avocados, and more. Popcorn.

But in the history of all these checkoffs, there’s probably no more famous campaign than:

Got Milk?

Roll the ad:

Good lord we’ve talked about this commercial before, but we really should have waited til now, because it’s actually incredibly relevant to this section. But it’s such a legendary commercial, directed by Michael Bay, that we just couldn’t help ourselves.

And that campaign is the work of the California Milk Processor Board, who hired San Francisco ad agency Goodby, Silverstien, & Partners to help milk stand up to beverage villains like soda, Snapple, and good ole water.

Did they declare victory and go home after that one great ad? Hell no. 

They licensed the campaign to the national MilkPEP for print (which featured celebrity after wrestling celebrity after celebrity) and also made this commercial that shows kids that your arms fall off if you don’t drink The Product:

Success?

According to Edward Wasserman from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism:

“They start with a product with no personality, which, if anything, was forced upon generations of children, which very few adults drank or would admit to drinking, whose health benefits are questionable, whose environmental impact is dubious, and they turned it into something that had a kind of panache. They had a concession of unlikely subjects and had them pose in a way that most people would have deemed a self-parody or ludicrous. And yet, it worked.”

But did it? Well, through the course of the Got Milk era, fluid milk sales actually fell. By a lot.

The daily consumption of fluid milk—as opposed to milk-based products like cheese, yogurt, and butter—has steadily declined from 0.96 cups per person in 1970 to 0.59 cups in 2011.

But wait–

Success!

Because milk can be turned into a ton of other products, and those have gone absolutely demand wild. Cheese, butter, yogurt, ice cream, you know: dairy.

Overall milk production in the US has grown by 35% since 2000. That’s not because Americans want to drink more milk; in fact, per capita milk drinking has dropped by 27%. Instead, much more milk is being produced to meet increased demands for yogurt (+378%) and cheese (+72%).

And you better believe the nationwide web of dairy checkoffs had their creamy little hands in:

• The Domino’s New Yorker pizza that has over two pounds of cheese on a single pie.

• Adding MrBeast to the “Undeniably Dairy” campaign with this virtual farm tour.

• Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust pizza.

• The Quesalupa at Taco Bell. Oh and recently they partnered on “a frozen drink mixing dairy with Mountain Dew and a burrito with ten times the cheese of a typical taco.”

• The viral butter board trend from a couple years ago? Yeah, that’s from a member of the Dairy Dream Team.

• The Grimace milkshake from McDonald’s that a lot of people apparently really don’t like. Also you should just read this tweet so we don’t have to paraphrase it.

There’s even a letter from two Pizza Hut employees praising Dairy Management’s “cheese ideas” that they signed as “LORD OF THE CHEESE” and “LADY OF THE CHEESE” (we found out about this letter in this Johnny Harris video and it seems like he got it from the New York Times):

And you better believe they’re still in the prowl:

“Quick-serve restaurants in the U.S. sell about 2 billion chicken sandwiches each year that do not contain a slice of cheese. This is about 80 percent of a booming category. If the 20 percent of chicken sandwiches that do have cheese grew to 30 percent – and that growth meant a 5-ounce slice of cheese on every item – that’s an additional 700 million pounds of milk moved every year!”

AWESOME!

But if we all just love dairy products so much that billions of gallons of water from one of the most water-constrained regions in the entire country goes to growing dairy cow food every year:

Why is the dairy industry spending hundreds of millions every year to get us to buy more?

And even with all this marketing effort, in 2016, dairy farmers still had to pour out FORTY MILLION GALLONS of milk because there wasn’t enough demand.

And we still have over a BILLION pounds of cheese stashed in refrigerated reserves around the country.

And we haven’t even talked about the beef industry and the whole checkoff promotional side of the cattle meat business.

So do we all really want half of the water we get from the Colorado River to go to cow food?

If we ask the meat and dairy industries, it really seems like the answer is no. Because if they did, we have to assume they’d all be happy to keep those hundreds of millions of dollars they’re wasting on influencing the public.

And to round us off, let’s go back to Colorado River water study author Brian Richter:

“Personally, once I started this research, I gave up beef consumption altogether.”

Official Rollie (no prize): Better Than Got Milk?

We gassed up Michael Bay’s famous Alexander Hamilton/Got Milk ad a lot in this episode, but it’s not like he’s got the best ad gold medal locked up. 

So for this installment of the Official Rollie (no prize): scour your mind and the Internet for what you think is the single greatest commercial ever made and send it to us. 

We will then watch that commercial entry with a critical and discerning, but ultimately fair, eye. And if that commercial beats (or even ties) the Michael Bay/Aaron Burr Got Milk commercial: we will declare you an official Rollie (no prize).

And as for last edition’s Official Rollie (no prize), we had but two successful applicants, who were both willing and capable of completing the challenge, which included mailing one (1) letter:

• Rowan Price

• Holly Sauer

Congratulations, Rowan and Holly. There is no prize.

How about that, friend?

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Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Laura Conte

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams and Matt Nelsen

We’ve gone back down deep into the world of fast fashion and resurfaced with not only a 25-minute video about the seemingly endless issues with the fashion industry, but also:

Climate Town Merch.

That’s right, we’ve finally gone and made Climate Town shirts and you can buy them here. Wait, that's an article about sweatshops in America, the shirts are here. Wait:

This is the link to buy our t-shirts.

Nice. But maybe you already have enough t-shirts. And maybe you even have enough newsletters. What’s the point of this anymore? Well, lucky for you, we are quite possibly the only newsletter in the world to put the unsubscribe button this high in the scroll:

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For the rest of you, wheeeeeeeeee:

Tchotchkes!

If you already watched the episode, some of this will be a repeat for you. But what the hell, this email’s free and we’ll make it fast. But then again, if you really want to skip ahead, you can scroll down until we’re not talking about the shirts anymore. Old school.

For the past couple years, we’ve wanted to make Climate Town shirts. But we also made a whole video about the massive problems with fast fashion, so we first needed to find a shirt that didn’t do the following shit:

• Use factories that pay workers less than living wage and also have conditions like those that led to more than 1,100 worker deaths in a single factory collapse.

• Have a supremely globalized supply chain where different parts of production are spread out over thousands of miles, all over the world.

• Overproduce so much that somewhere between 10% and 40% of clothing is never sold or worn at all. And wow, that’s a huge gap between 10% and 40%, but that’s kind of how it goes for fashion industry research at the moment (more on that later).

And when it comes to labor practices, according to a report from Follow the Money, even companies like Patagonia are using some of the same factories (and pay and working conditions) as fast fashion brands:

“One day people make clothing for Patagonia, and the next day, they make items for brands such as GAP, Levi Strauss, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, Amer Sports, Asics, US department store chain Target, e-commerce platform Amazon, supermarket Aldi and fast-fashion icons ASOS, Boohoo, H&M and Zara.”

And this was honestly pretty shocking to us. Even Patagonia, a company that prides itself on sustainability and seems to do a lot of things well, still doesn’t require the factories they work with to pay a living wage. And their defense sounds remarkably similar to a lot of fast fashion companies:

“Like most clothing companies, we do not make our own products, nor do we own any of the factories that do.”

Classic!

But after not making shirts for a while, we finally came across a company called Ethix Merch, which runs the merch programs for the Sunrise Movement and Third Act and a lot of unions. And when we asked about shirts that might check a lot of our boxes, they pointed us to TS Designs in North Carolina.

The good folks at TS Designs make a shirt they call Cotton of the Carolinas, which is entirely grown and made in North and South Carolina. And each step of production is trackable and verifiable, so if you want to call the cotton ginner, you actually can. They even made this nice graphic to show you all the steps of making a shirt:

But somehow we’re supposed to assume you can pay people a decent wage to do each of these specialized, highly skilled steps, and still sell shirts for less than $10. Wild!

Then we got some art from a fantastic artist named Margalit Cutler, printed up a run of 423 of each design, and put them up on our webstore, which is run by Ethix Merch.

And that’s how we finally made some Climate Town t-shirts we actually feel good about.

The Trash Clothes of the Desert

If you’ve watched either of our videos on fast fashion, you probably now know that even if you donate your clothes with really good intentions, and they’re actually really nice clothes, and you want them to go to a really well-decorated home:

“According to the Council for Textile Recycling, 80 to 90 percent of donations to charities are sold to recyclers.”

But even that quote doesn’t tell the full story. Because the reality is that a lot of those “recycled” clothes get sent to another country, where they sort through bales of discarded textiles only to find that a lot of it is basically trash.

And in the case of Chile, the largest importer of used clothes in South America, a lot of those trash clothes end up in:

The Beautiful Atacama Desert.

Now the Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on Earth.

*Crowd calls out* HOW DRY IS IT?

The Atacama Desert is SO dry NASA goes there just to pretend it’s Mars.

*Crowd goes wild*

But starting in 2001, a woman named Manuela Medina (or at least that’s what she told Grist, who did more of their always great reporting here) found a different use for the positively bone dry desert: it turns out the Atacama Desert is so dry that she could get cheap bales of ropa americana, unload them into piles on the ground for people to buy, and then never have to move the piles until they sold, since it never rained.

*Crowd goes wild again*

“Soon, importers and secondhand merchants began to deliver surplus used clothes directly to Medina. Fed by daily truck deliveries, and then by multiple daily tractor trailer load deliveries, Medina’s pile grew.”

And within the last few years, this clothing trash pile had grown so large that it could even be seen from space. According to an interview with the environmental manager of Alto Hospicio (a nearby city):

"It is known that at least 60% (of what is imported) is waste or disposable and that is what ends up in the hills.”

And, of course, there are a lot of people outside of Chile dealing with the same absolute landslide of unusable used clothing. There’s even a specific term for it in Ghana: Obroni Wawu. And if you want to know what that translates to, it’s honestly pretty depressing. But if you really want to know, you can click this link.

But as for the Atacama Desert pile? Well in 2022, it was lit on fire. They really can’t catch a f*cking break down there. And that fire was particularly nasty, because these days the majority of our clothes are made from that famed fossil fuel derivative we’ve all been told to love: plastic.

*Crowd goes wild, but one octave up*

Chart Town: the Rise of Polyester

Just when you thought you weren’t dressed like a water bottle, turns out the majority of our clothes are made from plastic. According to a report from the Changing Markets Foundation called Synthetics Anonymous: Fashion Brands’ addiction to fossil fuels:

“Synthetic fibres represent over two-thirds (69%) of all materials used in textiles, which is expected to reach nearly three-quarters by 2030.”

So while cotton was the top fabric up until 2000, since then polyester has blasted into the lead, and “is present in more than half (56%) of textiles we use today.” And just so we’re all clear: 

“Polyester is generally produced from PET, which is derived from crude oil and natural gas.”

But here’s the thing about PET: that’s also how you spell pet. And pets are way more popular than polyethylene terephthalate. So if you go to google PET, you’re not going to get the information you need. And you’re probably going to get distracted. But don’t worry: 

Here is the Wikipedia page for PET.

Read it and see what you think about your clothes being made of that. 

And at the very least, thank you for your service as part of a global human experiment to figure out what all these microplastics in our bloodstream are going to do to our bodies.

REMINDER: DO NOT GOOGLE “PET” IF YOU WANT INFO ON THE THERMOPLASTIC POLYMER. YOU WILL GET DISTRACTED AND WILL NOT COME BACK.

PDF Town: Mythic Proportions

Every once in a while we read a PDF that completely blows us away. That’s why we created our signature offering, A Top List of Interesting PDFs.

And it was as we were researching cotton for this episode that we came across our current #5 Top Interesting PDF from the Transformers Foundation (and authors Marzia Lanfranchi and Elizabeth Cline):

Cotton: A Case Study in Misinformation.

While there’s a lot of misinformation in all the climate topics we cover, fashion’s one of the trickiest:

“Fashion has a major misinformation problem. Half-truths, out-of-date information and shocking statistics stripped of context are widely circulated, from the notion that fashion is the second-most polluting industry to the idea that cotton is thirsty or that it consumes 25% of the world’s insecticides. While there have been attempts to debunk fashion misinformation, we have not taken the problem seriously enough.”

The fashion industry contributes between 2% and 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. There are between 80 and 150 billion articles of clothing made a year. A McKinsey study says 60% of clothes end up in a landfill or incinerator within one year. Or maybe it’s a few years. Who knows?

But what if a potentially inaccurate claim is then repeated so often, over and over again in trusted media for years, until no one seems to even remember where the original statistic came from, just that it’s eye-catching and everyone uses it? Then that claim has:

Mythic Proportions.

“When a claim is used for so long and by so many that it gains a false sense of legitimacy”

Want an example? Okay. Take this quote from the UN from 2019:

“The fashion industry is widely believed to be the second most polluting industry in the world.”

Now if you want to write a quick article about the climate issues with fashion, that’s a great fact to toss in near the top.

But the problem? No one seems to have any idea where that stat came from. The New York Times even took it upon themselves to figure it out, and still couldn’t find the source. Luckily, it looks like the word got out on that one, so the second most polluting industry line has mostly faded away.

But then we hit the end of that 2018 NY Times article, to find a list of stats they thought we could really rely on. Including that same McKinsey figure from about 150 words ago: that “nearly three-fifths of all clothing ends up in incinerators or landfills within a year of being produced.”

And this is not to say the fashion industry doesn’t actually have problems.

It super does. It’s just hard to nail down the numbers because it’s an incredibly globalized industry that lacks the well funded oversight organizations that the energy industry has (IEA, EIA, or really any combination of those three letters). 

And while we did our best to root out these kinds of mythic proportion facts in our episode, we’re sure a few still slipped by. So please, join us next year, as we look back at this episode to see what better research we wish had been available when we made this piece.

Lightning Round (dear lord we’re almost done)

I love/hate Elvis. No video about merchandise could be complete without at least a little section about the big dog king himself, Elvis Presley. And it isn’t just talent that gives Elvis his staying power, it’s the Elvis brand surfing on a tidal wave of Elvis merchandise.

The quantum leap in merch was due to Elvis’ manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker. This is kind of the bedrock of the recent Elvis movie (which was how America’s Dad, Tom Hanks, contracted Covid in 2020, by the way), but basically Parker was a bit of a wheelin’ and/or dealin’ type and quickly recognized an incredible opportunity in the young King of Rock and Roll. 

Parker used his background in carnival barking and marketing to build a brand around Presley with products that could be sold to teenagers and their parents. Parker was able to leverage the success of Elvis’ music and the box office numbers of the movie Love Me Tender, to make millions from over 50 Elvis products, including bracelets and shoes and lipstick. Apparently the Wall Street Journal calculated Elvis grossed $22 million dollars on merchandise alone by 1957, but we couldn’t track down the actual article, so we’re saying apparently.

Part of the frenzy to monetize Presley came from Parker’s 25%+ stake in Elvis profits, mixed with his anxiety that Elvis’ popularity had a 2-year shelf life. A much quoted and apparently true Parker story is that he even sold I Hate Elvis buttons, determined to maximize his revenue, even off the haters.

Parker’s formula for marketing Elvis may have been shameless, but the colossal revenue it generated was not lost on advertisers, and Tom Cotton can reasonably be considered one of the godfathers of cheap bullshit with somebody’s face on it.

Official Rollie (no prize). For this Official Rollie (no prize) you need a little back story:

The Atacama desert may be home to a massive pile of clothes, but it was also the backdrop to one of the greatest global news cycles of all time. And unlike balloon boy, this one has a happy ending. 

Get ready to be transported back to the year 2010. You ready? Okay. Chilean Mine Collapse. Yeah, let that marinate. Where were you? What do you remember? Well one night in 2016, Rollie got a little too high and watched TWO documentaries about the Chilean mine collapse back-to-back. He was so moved by the drama, logistics, and complete lack of casualties, that he wrote an immersive comedy show about it called “Dark Down Deep Down Dark.” 

It was very weird, but the fact that the show took place in a cave-like basement gave it a lot of momentum. At one point in the production, there was even an opportunity for the audience members to write one last letter to someone close to them. At the end of the show, the letters were mailed. It was a great gimmick to advertise the show, but also a lot of people got nice letters in the mail. WHOLESOME!

So this time around, you can be declared an Official Rollie (no prize) by: 

1. Watching the show’s trailer.

2. Writing and mailing a letter to one of your friends. 

3. Then responding to this email saying you did that (no cheating).

As always, pretty easy. It’s really easy to be Rollie.

And as for last installment of Official Rollie (no prize), we asked readers to submit suggestions for Al Pacino movies Rollie should watch that aren’t Heat or The Devil’s Advocate.

And of the many great choices suggested, Rollie watched Serpico (he yelled “Serpico!” around the office for a week straight) – which means the following readers have been declared Official Rollie (no prize):

• Nitesh Kartha

• G.S.

How about that, friend?

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Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen

Hello friend!

We’ve done it again: a new record for the longest Climate Town episode yet. 

Dead-on 40 minutes long, which means we’re getting dangerously close to videos as long as an entire episode of the hit television show House. A couple more minutes and we would’ve left you wondering:

Maybe doctors shouldn’t be renegades? 

Of course, we wanted to solve a medical mystery, but instead we made a brutally long climate comedy video, produced in partnership with Canary Media and Climate Power.

And if that isn’t your thing, we understand and appreciate that and are quite possibly the only newsletter in the world to put the unsubscribe button all the way up here:

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And while we’re up here, Climate Town is HIRING. That’s right, we’re looking to hire an Associate Producer, and if you think that could be you, here’s the job listing. Check it out!

Also, check out the methane leak regulation action playbook Climate Changemakers created for our episode. They’re also hosting in-person and Zoom Hour of Action events this week, where you can run through the playbook as a group.

And this is our newsletter, no one can stop us – we also updated our Patreon and added a ton of perks that are certified good. We’re talking a Patreon-only Discord channel, episode Q&As, Rollie cuts your hair once a year (NYC only) and why list them all when you can see the full breakdown here. On our Patreon. 

Now? Let’s scroll:

The Pause of the Year

If you’re reading this and you haven’t watched our latest video yet? Well friend, that’s quite alright. You can click that video box right above here and begin your winding journey through the past decade and a half in natural (methane) gas expansion in the U.S.

Okay now that you’ve watched or decided you’d like to go in cold (very House-like btw) let’s cut to the chase. A couple months ago, the Biden Administration delivered:

Quite possibly the biggest pushback against the fossil fuel industry by a U.S. President ever.

And it came in the form of: 

A permitting pause. 

Sounds boring? Yeah, it really does. But it’s also a big deal, so here’s what you need to know:

1. Natural gas is mostly methane, which has over 80 times the global warming potential of CO2 in the short term (a couple decades). So when natural gas leaks, that’s mostly methane busting up into the atmosphere – and methane is responsible for around a quarter of our current climate change.

2. For electricity generation, natural gas produces less CO2 than coal, but obviously way more CO2 than wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, or any zero carbon options. But then you add in the methane leaks, and natural gas GHG emissions are back up towards coal territory.

3. The U.S. now produces so much natural gas that we’ve started exporting about 10% of our production.

4. The only reasonable way to export gas via ship is to supercool it down to -260F, turning it into a liquid. That’s Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).

5. As you can imagine, the process of cooling and shipping all that LNG means a lot of GHG emissions.

6. The U.S. is now the #1 LNG exporter in the world.

And with all that info crammed into your own personal head, we’ll now tell you this:

The U.S. was set to more than QUADRUPLE our LNG exporting capacity.

We’re already #1 in the world (14 billion cubic feet per day). If all the new proposed LNG infrastructure is built, we’d then be able to export almost five times that (66 bcf/d). Which is about half of our 2023 domestic gas production. That’s a f*cking ton of gas.

And up until now, new LNG terminals moved through the permitting process with (what appears to be) minimal concern for climate change. In fact, there are already permits issued for enough LNG infrastructure to triple our current capacity.

But then, after years of activists pushing for climate concern, we got this from the White House in late January:

“Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing a temporary pause on pending decisions on exports of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) … until the Department of Energy can update the underlying analyses for authorizations.”

Again, that’s a massive shift in the traditional U.S. approach to fossil fuel projects. The LNG projects that are now paused represent more export capacity than the U.S. has right now.

And that friends, is:

The Pause of the Year.

And goddamn we hope this is the start of the U.S. Government taking the climate impacts of fossil fuels more seriously. Maybe they’ll even look at the local impacts on people that live near LNG terminals. 

But whatever happens next, this is: 

A bonafide climate win.

If you want to read more about the permitting pause, here are a handful of pieces to check out:

• Understanding Biden’s LNG decision | HEATED

Actually, just read that one. If you want more, you can click some links or search LNG Biden Eye of Sauron. But Emily and Arielle at do a great job – if you haven’t already, you should check them out.

The Methane Slip of the Seas

Even though it’s been over a century since the Iceberg, your average ship will still do pretty much anything to avoid being compared to the Titanic. 

But the Icon of the Seas is not your average ship. In fact, the president of Royal Caribbean (the company that owns and operates the ship) called it:

“The biggest, baddest ship on the planet.”

And at almost five times the volume of the Titanic, with twice as many decks, at double the total height, the Icon of the Seas is the largest cruise ship in the world. Ever. In the world. Ever. (This part echoes out)

And, after one of the more depressing christenings we’ve ever seen, the Icon floated out to international waters on January 27, 2024. Nice.

Now, if we were a typical media site in our modern internet age, that would be the end of one of the twenty five articles we write today. I mean, “The Top 14 Illiterate Television Dads” isn’t gonna write itself! But we don’t have those kinds of problems. Our problem is that we can’t stop ourselves:

• Built to carry almost 10,000 people (7,600 passengers, 2,350 crew).

• It’s longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall.

• Has a beach club with a suspended infinity pool, which sounds terrifying, and we refuse to look it up. It also has 6 other regular pools.

• Features a jewelry store that only sells Royal Caribbean-themed jewelry.

• You can rent a multi-level, kid-friendly townhouse for $100K per week.

• This woman’s son called the ship “human lasagne”.

Awesome stuff. 

And look, the cruise industry has gotten a lot of shit for its climate and environmental problems in the past. Shit like:

“Passengers on an Antarctic cruise can produce as much CO2 emissions on a seven-day voyage as the average European in an entire year.”

Or maybe like the shit they got when a whistleblower from Princess Cruise Lines told everyone about something known in the cruise industry as:

The Magic Pipe. 

Sounds completely 420 stoked bro (yes!). But actually it’s just a pipe (maybe even a tube) they would secretly connect to the tank that’s supposed to be holding the ship’s oily bilge water, where that oil-contaminated water is supposed to wait patiently before it’s safely discharged at port – but instead they’d run that secret pipe (or could be a tube, you never know) to a different tank, so they could just drop that sludge water into the sea without all the hassle. F*cking fantastic.

But Royal Caribbean seems determined to leave behind that unfortunate cruise industry public image. They even started putting out Seastainability reports in 2018 about how determined they are to put an end to this terrible behavior (nothing says “we take this seriously” like puns).

And luckily for them, there’s a new climate solution that will help Royal Caribbean drop their carbon emissions by double digits by 2025:

Liquefied Natural Gas.

But unluckily for Royal Caribbean, they seem to either not know, or don’t really want to talk about, all the issues that come with LNG. Here’s a sentence from Bryan Comer, from The International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT):

“Royal Caribbean’s decision to use LNG is their biggest climate blunder.”

But how could that be? The cruise industry has been telling everyone that using LNG leads to a 25% decrease in carbon emissions. But then here’s Bryan again:

“They are doubling down by calling LNG a green fuel when the engine is emitting 70 to 80% more greenhouse gas emissions per trip than if it used regular marine fuel.”

But how could that be? Well, among the other LNG issues we painstaking laid our in our video, it turns out there’s yet another big one:

Methane slip.

In a perfect world, a fossil-fuel-exploding engine would smash and blast every last molecule of fuel sent its way. But unlike the world Dr. House inhabits (brilliant/enigmatic/no consequences to law-breaking), the real world is far from perfect, which means some of that fuel escapes un-exploded.

And in the case of LNG, that’s mostly methane, rolling right up into the sky. That’s methane slip! (Author’s note: if possible, read that last line aloud in the same intonation as this clip)

And it really seems like the methane slip from some cruise ship LNG engines can be quite a lot… of methane slip:

“Cruise ship engines have an estimated methane slip of 6.4 per cent on average, according to 2024 research funded by the ICCT and other partners. The [International Marine Organization] assumes methane slip at 3.5 per cent.”

Huh?

Methane leaks potentially getting underestimated?

Good god they’ve done it again.

And if that’s all news to you, truly consider watching the video we just made about this.

Chart Town: a Chart of U.S. LNG Projects (In Operation to Proposed)

This chart from Jeremy Symons features pretty heavily in our video, but let’s take another good look at it.

That dark red chunk labeled “Proposed” is the part the Biden Administration paused. Wow, that’s so much natural gas.

If we built all those LNG projects, and kept our U.S. demand level, we would need to increase our domestic gas production by almost 50% to make use of that incredible increase in LNG capacity.

Alright, you get it!

Other Video Town: The Really Good Frontline Doc on Big Oil

Sometimes, when we’re researching an episode, we stumble across another piece of media that’s so incredibly well done we just sit back in awe. This is one of those.

It's the finale of a three-part Frontline series on Big Oil – this part’s simply called Delay. It covers the past decade or two of oil and gas companies delaying climate action, while simultaneously asserting themselves as the climate leaders of the future.

You should watch it.

And then go and watch the first two parts. Or you can watch all three in order. Either way, here we are, in our 30s, telling you about a PBS documentary we really love. Okay!

Chart Town: Electricity from U.S. Renewable Energy Sources (1950 to 2022)

Let’s roll towards the end with some good news. While natural/methane gas has taken the top U.S. power generation spot over the past decade, renewables (mainly solar and wind) have also been on a historic tear.

And a lot of that comes down to cost:

• In 2009, solar was almost six times as expensive as gas combined cycle (per megawatt-hour).

• Solar costs have dropped 83% since then – utility scale solar has been cheaper than gas combined cycle since 2016 (according to Lazard’s LCOE). 

• Onshore wind costs have also dropped 63% since 2009.

Now go back up and look at that renewables chart. Pretty nice.

And maybe you want to read more about the costs of renewable energy as it becomes a larger percentage of our power generation? Well, we don’t have it. BUT WE KNOW WHO DOES! You should just check out this piece from Andrew Dessler at :

• Is renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels?

Official Rollie (no prize): Rollie Recently Watched Heat

The title pretty much says it all: Rollie recently watched the movie Heat and he’s been talking about it a lot.

Don’t believe us? If you remember from earlier today when you started reading this newsletter, we recently updated our Patreon offerings (which you can check out here) – and Rollie really wanted to include a Climate Town hotline as a perk. So he could get an old school phone for his desk. Like Al Pacino. In the movie Heat.

Help.

So here it is: send us a recommendation of an Al Pacino movie that Rollie should watch to get his mind off Heat. And keep in mind that this recommendation needs to include a pitch that’s strong enough to make Rollie actually watch this other movie, instead of just rolling Heat yet again. 

AND DON’T SUGGEST THE 1997 KEANU REEVES/AL PACINO FILM THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE. 

He already watched it and felt it was pretty bad. Good first act, then it fell off a cliff.

If Rollie watches your recommended movie before the next newsletter? Well then you will be declared an Official Rollie (no prize). Good luck.

And of course, we have our Official Rollie (no prize) honorees from our last newsletter, where we asked for submissions for a new Climate Town catchphrase. But just a list wouldn’t do them justice here, so here are your top three Official Rollie (no prize), along with their catchphrases:

1. Amanda Thoren – ‘Cli-yiy-yiy-’ and then you say ‘-mate!’ while high fiving

2. James Richard – Bike me!

3. Jack Johnson – Inbound for Climate Town!

Congratulations Amanda, James, and Jack. You win nothing (no prize). And here are the rest of your Official Rollie (no prize) for this round:

• Marty H.

• Loren [Redacted]

• Colin Kuroishi

• “Megafauna”

• Chris Rudkowski

• Clayton Summers

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen

In the media world, news cycles are a way of life.

Dr. Phil starts popping off about the U.S. border? The next day there’s a gnarly wave of journalists pounding the keys trying to parse what the f*ck he’s talking about.

But here at Climate Town, we take our sweet time researching the hell out of any little detail that’s even got a chance of being relevant. If we wanted to cover Dr. Phil’s border stance, even for this one anecdotal joke about our researching process, we’d probably spend days learning about the 1990s Texas food libel laws that led to Oprah hiring Dr. Phil and his next-door neighbor to run a fake trial for her (which is how they met).

Also, Jon Stewart already covered it on The Daily Show, and he kinda picked that bone clean.

And so we find ourselves here: 

Sending you a newsletter about Super Bowl ads more than a month after The Big Game. 

But we’re not monsters. We put that unsubscribe button RIIIIGHT at the top in case you’d rather read about what Shaquille O'Neal’s done lately somewhere else (probably nothing, just an example).

UNSUBSCRIBE

Pysch!

The 90s are back, Jackson, and if you don’t want to do what you just said you were going to do, all you have say is:

Psych!

Every year from 2020 to 2023, General Motors ran a Super Bowl ad touting their transition to electric vehicles (EVs). GM was officially the good guy. Gas-powered cars, take a hike because we’re saving the planet. EVerybody in. Gorgeous.

And we already made an entire video about how postposterous™ it was for GM to be bragging about making EVs (we used to make 7-minute videos). 

But maybe they’re actually changing their time-honored ways–

Sike!

Goddamn that’s right: after years of marketing and millions of dollars worth of sweet semi-comedic advertising, GM has decided to “[moderate] the acceleration of EV production in North America.”

• A quiet revolution? Nah.

• 30 EV models by 2025? Really doesn’t seem like it.

• Let’s give EVs the stage they deserve? Noopee (new no just dropped)!

And it’s not just GM. This year, none of The Big Three U.S. automakers ran ads during the Super Bowl. According to Ford CEO, and Chris Farley’s cousin, Jim Farley:

"If you ever see Ford Motor Co. doing a Super Bowl ad on our electric vehicles, sell the stock."

But if we can’t trust Ford or GM to lead a climate-friendly transportation transition:

Which car companies can we trust?!

There’s only one way to find out: watch their Super Bowl ads. Fortunately, there weren’t that many this year. And what the hell, we’ll even grade ‘em.

Toyota

Show your friends just how little a human life means to you with a joyride at the top of a protected nature preserve. 

It’s the all-new 100% gas-powered Toyota Tacoma. And it’s still got that handle moms have clung to for dear life since the Cleveland administration. 

Is it electric? No. Is Toyota pretending to care about the environment? Not on your life. Is there an extremely tired ‘shut the front door’ line that’s been thudding in commercials since at least 2011? You betcha.

Grade: Bad

Volkswagen

This one’s technically a teaser for their full 60 second Super Bowl ad, but it gets right to the point: when Volkswagen first tried selling cars in the US in 1949, why wouldn’t people buy them?

Because it was the N*A*Z*I CAR. 

Volkswagen was created by the N*a*z*i*s so they could have a car that’d give them “strength through joy.” Then WWII swept through (they lost) and the victorious Allies gave control of the Nazi car factory to a British Army officer, who started producing “people’s cars” like no one would remember the N*A*Z*I*S. But they did remember. On account of how it had only been FOUR YEARS.

But as the years wore on, the N*a*z*i car image faded away, leaving us with one of the great rebrands of the post-war era: The Beetle. Cute, peaceful, and The Love Bug/Herbie.

And recently? Well, in 2021, Volkswagen said they were going all in on EVs and changing their name to Voltswagen. But then that turned out to be a “marketing prank.” Hahaha awesome.

Oh and before that, there was a massive scandal where they designed their cars to fake the diesel emissions test so they could emit way more than they were allowed.

But at least they’re actually talking about making more EVs.

Grade: Pass (they took it pass-fail)

BMW

Christopher Walken mentions that his car is electric, then endures a series of impressions of himself. Usher is there too. 

That’s the whole commercial.

Grade: See Me After Class (so we can tell you not to make this)

KIA

A perfectly fine little story about a girl who loves figure skating and a man (probably her dad) who loves his Kia EV9. We don’t always agree with the New York Times, but we think they gave this an appropriate rating: 

“Perfectly fine.”

The man (probably her dad) does use the EV to power the lights and karaoke machine by the big finale pond and that’s a nice touch – something Tesla owners weren’t allowed to do until recently. It’s extraordinarily sappy, but still:

Grade: Perfectly Fine

And there you have it, all the Super Bowl ads we’re going to–

SIKE!

Coors Light

A f*cking train! 

Yes it’s a beer commercial, but it’s a company from Rollie’s hometown and all we want is some goddamn decent public transportation options.

Run that shit straight through our family’s wall. We don’t care. Ice my dog’s water bowl while you’re at it.

Please. Just give us some good trains. Stop taking our infrastructure money and spending it on wider and wider roads that we now know don’t relieve traffic in the long term. They just make more people need cars.

Give us the trains.

But for the time being, it seems like we still have to live in the world from the movie Cars – a world so car-centric that when they removed the people, they didn’t need to change the design, because it was already perfect for a cars-only world. That’s our society right now. 

Warning: we can’t remember who told us this Cars take recently, but this is not our original thought. We just liked it and are repeating it here for you, the reader. We have never seen a full Cars movie, but it’s an interesting perspective and we wanted to include it. If this is your original thought, please let us know.

Grade: Good, Because of the Train

Chart Town: Electric vs. Gas Vehicles

That good-looking chart is from this New York Times article (using lifecycle emissions data from the MIT Trancik Lab) about the lifetime emissions of those big ass EVs that car companies are really hoping you want.

Here’s what we’re seeing: unless you’re getting one of those 6,000 pound lithium battering rams, your EV is almost certainly better for the climate than a gas car.

And if you are getting one of those Hulked out mega-EVs – please tow something with it. Often. Or use it to build something nice for your neighbors. Maybe truck some hay around your farm or move a couch every single weekend for your legion of friends. Please do something like that.

Because if you’re not doing that stuff, you’re wasting valuable resources, including one we really need for this energy transition to go well: lithium.

“The battery used to power General Motors’ Hummer E.V., for example, uses about the same amount of lithium per rider as three smaller car batteries or 240 electric bike batteries, according to a recent report. And it uses about half as much lithium as a battery that can power an entire electric bus.”

But maybe there’s something we can do about it maybe?

Chart Town: It’s Time to Need Less Lithium

If the current trend continues for U.S. EV demand, the U.S. alone will require triple the current global production of lithium, just for our national EV production.

“If today’s demand for EVs is projected to 2050, the lithium requirements of the US EV market alone would require triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market.”

No other countries, no phones, no laptops, no other uses – by 2050, U.S. EVs alone will require three times the lithium we produce in the whole world right now.

But there’s hope – at least according to the UC Davis study we quoted, called Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining. They took the time to figure out how we can drastically reduce that lithium demand, focusing on these three factors:

1. How big’s that battery?

2. Will it get recycled?

3. Could we finally go back to a society designed more for people than their cars?

And now look back up to that chart above this text. It turns out the biggest way to reduce our future lithium demand: 

Need fewer cars.

And of course it is! Build cities where we can walk. Or bike. Or to put it intelligently:

“A zero-emissions transportation sector that reduces car dependency in favor of expanding mass transit, walking, and cycling paired with urban and suburban planning that permits these changes would bring countless co-benefits. These include reduced injuries and fatalities, reduced tire and brake pollution, reduced financial burdens on low-income car owners, and even reduced residential segregation by race and class, while simultaneously improving physical well-being and local economic vibrancy.”

It really makes you wonder if car companies got so hyped on EVs because they were worried about a future where people wanted/needed fewer cars. Maybe they figured they’d try to stall that future a bit by saying they’re pivoting to EVs? And maybe now that the coast is clear, they’re finally free to make the truck they’ve dreamed of making for the past 30 years? 

It really makes you wonder.

Official Rollie (no prize)

All this ad talk reminded us that there’s one ad phrase we really can’t stand: dilly dilly.

If you don’t remember dilly dilly, fantastic. If you do, you might also remember wazzup, one of the greatest comedy ad catchphrases of all time.

Same company. Beers with the same three first letters. You win some, you dilly dilly some.

And here at Climate Town, we want a catchphrase. But we’re frozen with fear at the idea of accidentally writing a dilly dilly of our own.

So let’s get right to the point: send us a truly wazzup-level Climate Town catchphrase and we may declare you an Official Rollie (no prize).

And speaking of which – if ever there was an Official Rollie (no prize) who deserves a prize, it’s:

Rowan Price.

Last newsletter, we asked readers to submit the date they believed NYC would receive its next one inch (or more) of snow. Having just ended a 701-day-long streak of no significant snow, this was as tough a challenge as we’ve ever given.

But within the next few weeks, NYC received not one snow (February 13th), but two snows (also February 17th) in the same week. And Rowan, Official Rollie that he is, guessed a date exactly between those two snow days: February 15, 2024. 

A simpler Official Rollie would’ve guessed the first date only – but Rowan rose to the next level.

And for that, Rowan receives nothing. There is no prize.

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen

Hello friend!

It’s a new year, and you’re off to a red hot start by opening AND READING at least one sentence of this newsletter. Looking good!

However, we must also mention the looking bad: that New York City went 701 days without receiving so much as an inch of snow. The longest such streak for the city in modern history. And even worse (for our productivity), Rollie decided to make an Instagram video per day until the snowless streak ended. 

But luckily, nine days later, New York got exactly 1.4” of snow. And THANK GOD because, given the lack of snow since, it looks like Rollie narrowly avoided making QUITE A LOT of Instagram videos.

And, of course, we are quite possibly the only newsletter in the world to put the unsubscribe button this high up in the scroll. If you must, you must:

UNSUBSCRIBE

For the rest of you sticking around:

Fly You Foels

If you’ve never heard of an “oil uplift” before, it’s probably because you haven’t watched our latest video yet.

The same team that gave us Keith McCoy speed confessing Exxon’s secret strategy to undermine climate action is back! They’re called the Centre for Climate Reporting, and this time they posed as oil investors and recorded Saudi officials detailing their:

Oil Demand Sustainability Program.

Despite all the climate action talk from Saudi Arabia, somehow they just can’t quit oil. They really, really love it. And they aren’t going to let that oil love slip away just because they made a lot of announcements and videos and speeches that make it sound like they are.

Instead, they’ve developed a 46-point plan to drive oil demand in emerging markets (re: the low income portions of Asia and Africa), including:

• New car-centric infrastructure (and not the electric kind of car, the kind that blows up little dollops of gasoline in the front part of the car).

• Supersonic jets that use WAY more fuel than typical air travel.

• Floating power barges that can burn Heavy Fuel Oil (after it’s been banned in a lot of other places because it’s an incredible source of pollution/emissions).

And yes, we understand that Saudi Arabia depends on oil for pretty much their entire economy, and it’s not really that surprising that they want to sell more oil. So much oil that in 2021 their energy minister described their future fossil fuel plans like this:

“We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”

So yes, they almost certainly know the game they’re playing by announcing climate action plans, while plotting to increase fossil fuel use in other parts of the world. Luckily we know that game too.

And even more luckily, the International Energy Agency (IEA) knows that game extremely well. 

And to save some of you a trip to Wikipedia, the International Energy Agency is an intergovernmental organization whose whole job is to analyze and predict changes in the world’s energy system and issue policy recommendations to its 31 member countries and 13 association countries. They just released an updated report all about how oil and gas companies need to transition away from fossil fuels.

And more on that in a couple hundred words, but first:

A message from our sponsor, Atmos

Here’s the thing: a ton of traditional banks invest a lot of money in fossil fuels. A LOT. The world’s 60 largest banks financed over 5 TRILLION dollars between 2016 and 2022. That’s more than the GDP of any country besides the U.S. and China. Think of a country besides the U.S. and China. Yes. It’s bigger than that country’s GDP. We even did a whole episode about it.

Luckily for all of us, there’s Atmos.

Atmos offers climate-friendly banking options that put your money to climate work. 

Instead of funding coal or oil or gas, your money directly supports solar and electrification. You can also boost your savings rate with automatic donations to approved nonprofits or get cash-back on environmentally aligned purchases. Wow!

Click on any of these words except this one to be whisked away to Atmos to check out their offerings. And honestly: you should at least check them out. Financing is one of the pillars of the fossil fuel industry – and if that industry is unwilling to join the climate transition, then we need to find ways to move on without them.

Atmos: put your money where the Climate Mouth™️ is (the Climate Mouth™️ is a good thing that invests money in climate action).

Shut It Down: the Oil and Gas Path to Net Zero

Let’s just start this off with a couple of direct IEA quotes (bolding by us):

“The uncomfortable truth that the industry needs to come to terms with is that successful clean energy transitions require much lower demand for oil and gas, which means scaling back oil and gas operations over time – not expanding them. There is no way around this. So while all oil and gas producers [need] to reduce emissions from their own operations, including methane leaks and flaring, our call to action is much wider.”

“To escape the narrowing walls of their businesses based on traditional fuels, producers need to embrace the clean energy economy.”

You can read all that and more in the International Energy Agency’s 224-page special report entitled The Oil and Gas Industry in Net Zero Transitions. And damn, “to escape the narrowing walls of their businesses” – that’s beautiful. WAY better writing than we typically see in a report like this. 

What the hell, here’s another couple chunks:

“Oil and gas producers account for only 1% of total clean energy investment globally.”

“For the moment the oil and gas industry as a whole is a marginal force in the world’s transition to a clean energy system.” 

Ohhh yeah baby, for all the BP solar farm commercials and ExxonMobil algae biofuel New York Times advertorials, all the fossil fuel producers combined account for a rounding error in the renewable energy ledger.

Well that really f*cking sucks.

But there’s always hope that these companies can FINALLY change. And to illustrate that hope, the IEA created three possible scenarios:

• STEPS (Stated Policies Scenario) – based on what governments and companies are currently actually doing. Carry that out to 2050.

• APS (Announce Pledges Scenario) – based on what governments and companies say they’re going to do (climate pledges, etc.). And carry that out to 2050.

• NZE (Net Zero Emissions) – what it would actually take to get the “global energy sector” to net zero by 2050.

And those three scenarios give us these three nice-looking charts:

Basically, to actually get to net zero energy by 2050, we need to almost completely stop exploding oil and gas. We can use some oil for aviation and diesel trucks, and we can use some (methane) gas for power generation. But the devil-may-care-exploding-anything-for-energy needs to drop off drastically. And fast.

But wait– maybe there’s another way. If emissions are such a big problem:

Why not suck that CO2 right out of the air?

Now you’re thinking like some of the most powerful corporations in the world. 

It’s called direct air capture (DAC) and the idea is to pull CO2 right out of the atmosphere using New Technologies™️. And Microsoft alone has been all over the place signing deals for massive amounts of carbon removal.

But does DAC really work?

Yeah it kinda does:

• In 2021, Climeworks opened a facility in Iceland that can capture 4,000 metric tons per year.

• A few months ago, Heirloom opened a facility in California that can pull 1,000 metric tons of CO2 a year.

But Microsoft signed deals with both of those companies for waaaaaay more than that – they’re looking for 315,000 tons from Heirloom and 1.3 million tons from Climeworks. And that’s just the beginning for one company.

But will DAC work as much as we need it to?

Not unless we transition away from fossil fuels. Let’s run another quote:

“Some producers have argued that levels of oil and gas demand much higher than those seen in the NZE Scenario could be consistent with achieving net zero emissions by 2050 by deploying much greater levels of CCUS and DAC. The difficulties in doing this should not be underestimated.”

So what happens if we just keep burning fossil fuels like we are now?

“If oil and natural gas consumption were to evolve as in the STEPS … to achieve net zero emissions in 2050 and limit the temperature rise to 1.5°C, the DAC would require around 26,000 TWh of electricity to operate, more than global electricity demand in 2022.”

“And it would require over USD 3.5 trillion in annual investments all the way from today through to mid-century, which is an amount equal to the entire industry’s annual average revenue in recent years.”

That’s right – if we want direct air capture to fix climate change for us, we would need to spend more on DAC than we currently spend on all global energy production combined. And it would require more electricity than all of the current global electricity demand. AND we have to start doing it right now – if we wait, those numbers only get higher.

So while we will ABSOLUTELY need some amount of DAC to bail us out to a certain extent (which the report includes in the net zero scenario), carbon capture alone will not save us. Not even close.

So we really have to stop exploding so much oil and gas?

In conclusion: down it ought be shut.

Lightning Round (wait, wait there’s more)

That Concorde sound. There’s nothing like an earth-shattering boom to remind you that the richest people in the world were able to get from NYC to Europe twice as fast as a normal person.

From 1976 to 2003, the Concorde was the height of spending money to go really, really fast. For around $12,000 (in 2003 dollars – around $20,000 today), you could get a round trip ticket from NYC to London or Paris, on a plane that:

• Made an incredibly loud boom when it broke the sound barrier – supersonic flight over land is “currently severely restricted” because of the insanely loud sonic boom.

• Could make the normally seven hour flight from NYC to Paris in three and a half hours.

• Used four times as much fuel as a 747, including two tons of fuel just while taxiing on the runway.

• Could include Paul McCartney singing his own songs with the guitar he brought on board.

• Maintained an open-door policy in the cockpit, allowing passengers to say hey to the pilots whenever they felt like it.

But the sonic booms wouldn’t last forever. A 2000 crash killing 113 people, followed by a downturn in air travel demand after 9/11 and increased costs, led to the end of the Concorde as Phil Collins and Sting knew it. Sting!

But now two decades have passed. And, while no one we’ve ever talked to has ever expressed an interest in supersonic aviation making a comeback, United Airlines, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and probably others are licking their lips like they’re looking at some delicious food. 

But it’s not food. It’s bringing back supersonic travel, so they can make more money.

Three beautiful deportations. Okay, let’s rip the band-aid off this story right now: the three handsome dudes were not *actually* deported from Saudi Arabia for being too alluring, despite what dozens of digital media companies loudly published. 

In the salacious-but-wrong version, three absolute smokeshow hunks from Abu Dhabi, led by the glistening adonis Omar Borkan Al Gala, attended the 2013 Jenadrivah Heritage & Cultural Festival in Saudi Arabia. Women were so involuntarily turned on by the three beefcakes that a crowd formed – Saudi officials sensed a sort of Lion King gazelle stampede was imminent, and promptly deported the three men. 

Now I don’t care who you are: that’s a fun story. It’s basically an international Footloose. It’s got hunks, we get to feel superior to a bunch of prudes, no one got hurt, and the best part is we have a ton of pictures of the handsome devil Omar Borkan Al Gala. It was perfect for the loosely-researched, no-fact-check-required newscycle of 2013. 

ALERT: IF YOU’D RATHER LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE THEY WERE HOT AND DEPORTED, SKIP TO THE NEXT SECTION.

But for the rest of you truth-seekers, there are a couple more things going on here than meets the eye:

1. Deportation is a long legal process that involves lawyers, sentencing, the works. The three men were asked to leave the festival by the “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice”, but that was the extent of the reprimand. Omar Borkan Al Gala was already scheduled to fly home that day, and the combination of being asked to leave a festival, then immediately flying out of the country was evidence enough for the Internet.

2. We really thought that Omar himself might have started the rumors that he was deported for being too hot. He was a model/aspiring social media influencer at the time, and this was an amazingly viral incident with a tenuous connection to reality, it just seemed like an inside job. But we watched a few interviews featuring Omar, and he was surprisingly cool about the whole thing. He also explicitly states he was never deported and that it was a rumor that got out of hand. He’s beautiful, he seems nice, and we believe him.

Official Rollie (no prize). Last month’s Official Rollie (no prize) task proved to be a joyous, and somewhat challenging, event. After more than ten minutes of searching, multiple readers have been declared Official Rollie (no prize). And we also have multiple newly discovered embarrassing pictures of Al Gore to enjoy.

But this month won’t be so easy. Well it is easy, but it’s hard to complete.

To achieve the rank of Official Rollie (no prize), you must correctly predict the next time it will snow in New York City:

1. Send us the exact date of Central Park’s next 1” (or more) snowfall.

2. Be right about the date.

If you complete both of those steps, we will send you nothing. There is no prize. But you will be declared an Official Rollie (no prize), and have your name printed in this newsletter.

And here are your Official Rollie (no prize) from our last newsletter:

• Sean Andreas

• Lori Hight

• Joe Kuykendall

• Crystal Miron

• Amelia Fernández Rodríguez

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen

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Hello friend!

COP28 (the 28th annual U.N. climate summit) has come and gone: twelve days of absolute talking, hosted by the U.A.E. and Abu Dhabi’s national oil company CEO, a topic you might remember from our last newsletter. 

Did they finally solve climate change? We f*cking hope so!

And while we’re in the middle of the edit on our new video, we figured what the hell we can also write a newsletter, especially if we can make it mostly about Rollie’s original climate muse: Al Gore.

So strap in and get ready to read. Or, if you’d rather strap out and read something else, we are quite possibly the only newsletter in the world to put the unsubscribe button this high in the scroll (you have to click the button, then find the UNSUBSCRIBE on your account page):

UNSUBSCRIBE

And for the rest of you sticking around:

Just Do It

Goddamn can powerful people pledge shit. Seems like they’re all pledging shit every day. The thing is: it’s obviously worthless if they don’t DO IT.

And so, the international powers of the world found themselves at COP28 in oil-rich Dubai for a couple weeks, ready to pledge yet again. 

But, of course, there’s an obvious conflict of interest when petrostates with oil expansion plans host COP28. Don’t believe us? They prepared talking points for the Abu Dhabi national oil company (ADNOC) CEO to use his position as COP28 president to sell more oil.

So it’s not shocking when they turned out a “historic” deal that fails to offer a concrete plan that might actually limit warming to 1.5C. But it did get good press for being the first deal to MENTION FOSSIL FUELS. We are 28 COPs in and they had never before mentioned fossil fuels in the final negotiated agreement. F*cking WILD.

When referencing the newly passed deal, this is what the lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States had to say:

“We didn’t want to interrupt the standing ovation when we came into the room, but we are a little confused about what happened. It seems that you just get on with the decisions and the small island developing states were not in the room.”

But even with this watered down deal: do what you say you’re gonna do. Transition away from fossil fuels. Or shut up if you can’t make it happen. Be really really quiet for a few years and let other people try their hand at power.

The U.S. stumps for climate praise, calling for aggressive cuts to fossil fuel emissions. But then turns around and breaks records for crude oil production, with no discernible plan to stop any time soon. It’s time to finally be the leader we make children say we are.

JUST DO IT.

If you want to get involved, and are looking for a couple resources for climate action, check out: 

• Stop the Money Pipeline – a coalition fighting to hold the financial backers of climate change accountable.

• Cap Canada – a group leading action to demand a fair cap on Canadian oil & gas pollution.

And if you’d like to read more about COP28, here’s a list of pieces you should check out, written by some of our favorite climate journalists:

• HEATED – It’s official: COP28 has more fossil fuel lobbyists than ever (by Arielle Samuelson)

• NY Times – Air-Conditioning Use Will Surge in a Warming World, U.N. Warns (by Hiroko Tabuchi)

• The Crucial Years – What can we do with a sentence? (by Bill McKibben)

• Centre for Climate Reporting - COP28 president secretly used climate summit role to push oil trade with foreign government officials (by Ben Stockton)

• The Guardian – Agreement to phase out fossil fuels would be huge for humanity, says Gore (by Oliver Milman)

Al Gore & the Climate Protocol That Couldn’t (Be Signed By the U.S.)

Right around 1990, the U.S. seemed poised to become a leader on addressing this new issue everyone’s talking about: climate change.

Led by President George H.W. Bush – who declared himself the “environmental president” – the U.S. was on an early-stage climate action roll:

• 1989 – established the U.S. Global Change Research Program. And that program led to the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which required the U.S. to study and document climate change’s impact on the country every four years (the National Climate Assessment).

• 1990 – signed the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which were designed to address “acid rain, urban air pollution, toxic air emissions, and stratospheric ozone depletion,” according to the EPA.

• 1992 - signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro, with the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations "at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human induced) interference with the climate system."

But, although adding the U.S. signature on the UNFCCC was a victory, 1992 was also an election year. And the Republican (H.W.) Bush felt pressure from both political directions – he’d gone back and forth on even attending the U.N. summit in Rio, and decided against signing the Convention on Biological Diversity.

So, it looked like a big move back in the climate direction when Bill Clinton selected Al Gore as his running mate, a senator who had just released Earth in the Balance, an environmentally focused bestseller which… honestly neither of us have read. And we could have found a synopsis and just summarized that here, but we really wonder what we’d think of this three-decade-old book. 

But the important thing is that the U.S. elected:

Al Gore, an environmentalist Vice President.

And he and the Clinton administration had a monumental task ahead of them: take the climate action talk from the 1992 Rio de Janeiro U.N. summit, and turn it into climate action action.

Starting in 1995, the U.N. organized the first annual Conference of Parties (COP) for this exact sort of action taking. The general plan was to get the big greenhouse gas emitters of the world to come together and agree to knock it off. And knock it off a lot.

“The European Union and the G-77 signed on to the Alliance of Small Island States proposal that developed countries commit themselves in a binding protocol to reducing their emissions 20% from the 1990 baseline by 2005.”

That quote is directly pulled from Reason in a Dark Time, a fantastic book by Dr. Dale Jamieson that’s all about our on-going struggle to address climate change, which we referenced a ton to write this section. We might not even have written this section without this book. Check it out!

And, of course, the U.S. was wildly opposed to that proposed 20% emissions cut. But the U.N. countries did agree to the Berlin Mandate, which told them to spend the next couple years negotiating:

A more friendly, likable (weaker) emissions reduction plan.

The big sticking point for the U.S. was the developed countries part of the plan, which meant that developing countries would be left out of emissions cuts. 

And for a country obsessed with staying in a dominant global position, putting the climate action on the historically largest emitters was downright unfair. Uncompetitive. Unthinkably unpatriotically un-American.

So while the U.S. was pushing to make the future U.N. protocol more palatable, Congress wanted to make sure the U.S. couldn’t possibly sign onto that protocol no matter what. And for the task, they created a dynamic Congressional duo:

• Senator Chuck Hagel (R, Nebraska) – a Vietnam veteran, who joined the Senate less than a year earlier, and would later go on to serve as Obama’s secretary of defense. Hagel also loved to dress up for Halloween. But really we want to talk about:

• Senator Robert Byrd (D, West Virginia) – the longest serving senator in U.S. history (51 years), who got his political start in that very famous white supremacy group you’re probably thinking of as you’re reading this right now, but it couldn’t be, right? Unfortunately, yes, it could be. The [K][K][K]. In the early 1940s, Byrd formed his own chapter of the [K][K][K]. When asked about it years later, he reportedly told young people interested in politics to:

“Be sure you avoid the [K][K][K]. Don't get that albatross around your neck. Once you've made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena.”

You really don’t want to inhibit your operations in the political arena. THAT’S what’s wrong with starting your own [K][K][K] chapter. He was a senator until 2010 (when he passed away) – Byrd was replaced by Joe Manchin, a changeover we guess we now have to look at as a big win. 

And so, it was that two man team that created:

The Byrd-Hagel resolution.

The resolution stated that the U.S. should not sign any protocol or agreement unless there are “commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period.” 

And then Congress passed that resolution UNANIMOUSLY. 95-0. Effectively ending the potential for the U.S. to sign on to the expected Kyoto agreement. Goddamn sometimes you lose the big game before they even take the big tarp off that perfect green grass.

But despite having almost no chance of signing on, the U.S. continued to push back against the potential agreement. 

The reductions should be smaller. You should be able to buy non-emission offsets from countries who don’t blast CO2 into the atmosphere and count it against your own CO2 blasting. Oh wait – maybe there are so many trees in the U.S. that a third of the emissions reductions are already taken care of. Trees, Jackson!

Then, finally, on December 11, 1997, after the many sleepless nights of COP3, the U.N. officially adopted:

The Kyoto Protocol.

A historic climate deal in a line of historic climate deals. The Clinton administration even signed the protocol in 1998, but then never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. 

Then, in 2000, Gore became the first presidential candidate in over 100 years to win the popular vote, but lose the election – and while many believe he actually should’ve become president with a fair vote count, the new (George W.) Bush administration had “no interest” in implementing the Kyoto Protocol. And so it was: de-nied. 

The Kyoto Protocol would finally be ratified in 2005 by most of the other developed nations, although without the involvement of the two largest emitters at that time (China, a developing nation, and the U.S.) – by 2005, the protocol reportedly only affected 20% of global emissions. 

F*cking Bummer.

It would take another decade to reach the Paris Agreement in 2015, which effectively replaced the Kyoto Protocol.

And here we are now, almost a decade after the Paris Agreement, still searching for a concrete plan to actually address climate change. What could have been.

Chart Town: the Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment

Remember that National Climate Assessment the first Bush president signed into law? You might not, because it was all the way at the other end of the last section, and sometimes we reeeeeally write more than we need to.

But the good news: the National Climate Assessment is still going. The U.S. actually takes the time and money to consistently assess and prepare for climate chaos. And the most recent (fifth) NCA was recently released. Hoopie (just thought of that one, hope it doesn’t mean anything else)!

The bad news: there’s a lot of climate chaos to assess.

“The effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States. Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions can limit future warming and associated increases in many risks.”

Even more good news: that most recent assessment has had a meteoric rise up the ranks of our list of Favorite PDFs, currently sitting at #4. Exciting!

Official Rollie (no prize)

We read and write and think (the big three) about climate change a lot. And honestly, writing the newsletter this time around was a bit of a bummer, because people in power have had MAJOR opportunities to address climate change, and then skipped right past them. Pretty much every time.

But we do what we do because we have hope. We think there’s a chance we change our course, and we want to change our course because we believe humanity is worth saving from climate change. But sometimes you need a little reminder of that beauty of humanity.

It turns out it’s pretty common for U.S. presidents – and vice presidents – to dress up for Halloween. Normally, the costumes are either tasteful safe bets with moderate effort or basically not a costume at all, like when Biden dressed up as hat-and-longer-coat-Biden in 2022. 

But not Al Gore and Tipper. Not them at all. 

So here’s the Official Rollie (no prize) trial:

Spend no less than 10 minutes looking for an embarrassing picture of Al Gore. And if you find a truly embarrassing one, and it took you more than 10 minutes – send it to us (email, reply, etc.) to enter yourself into consideration for Official Rollie (no prize).

And to make it a little tougher, we already know about this one and this one, so those don’t count. Happy picture looking!

And of course, here are the successful Official Rollie (no prize) candidates from our last newsletter:

• Bob Jackson

• Patrick Kennedy

• Soham [Redacted]

• Stuart Bartmess

• Victor Ling

• Zack [Redacted]

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Edited and additional research by: Caroline Schaper

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen

This newsletter has been supported by the Meliore Foundation. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this newsletter lies with the author. The Meliore Foundation cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained or expressed therein.

Hello friend!

We’re back, mere days after the release of our latest episode, all about the terrible deal Chicago made to privatize its parking meters.

We honestly didn’t expect to make a full video about this. It was supposed to be 10 minutes, in and out. A brisk explainer. But the more we learned about it, the longer it got, and time makes fools of us all, because somehow this is now our longest video ever. 

In our defense, it really was a terrible, terrible deal. And, as always, we had more interesting things to share than we could fit in our episode – so you also get this jam-packed newsletter.

And, of course, this is quite possibly the only newsletter in the world to put an unsubscribe button this high in the scroll. Use it, if you really need to (you have to click the button, then find the UNSUBSCRIBE on your account page):

UNSUBSCRIBE

And maybe you haven’t even watched the video yet? Big mistake, Jackson! Luckily, you can check it out right here, inside the newsletter:

And now that you’ve watched the whole thing, we’ll take a moment to say thanks to our British collaborators, Stand-up Maths. We couldn’t have made this episode without them, and we have to believe they’d say the same thing about their wonderful companion video, which dives even deeper into the mathematics behind this awful deal. And while you’re over there, check out some of their other videos!

And now? We scroll.

The Deal of One Entire Lifetime

If you ever:

1. Find yourself at a conference table.

2. Look across the table and see representatives from a famous and powerful bank.

3. And then see that those bank representatives are really excited about a deal they just offered you.

Then you should: 

WALK AWAY. Leave. DO NOT SIGN THE DEAL. Go home and fuck around with some dinner. NEVER TALK TO THEM AGAIN.

Because whether they’re fighting regulation or blasting people in debt with terrifying interest rates, banks pretty much love one thing: money. So if they’re very, very happy, you really need to figure out what they know that you don’t.

Unfortunately, this message is arriving 15 years too late for the good people of Chicago. 

This could’ve been the email newsletter that saved them. 

But instead, they signed over the rights to the vast majority of their parking meters to Morgan Stanley’s private entity for 75 years. For 1.16 billion dollars. Which really sounds like a lot of money. 

But perhaps you’ll remember the red flag: the bankers were excited. And it turned out, they were right. Just over a decade into the deal, Morgan Stanley (and their minority investors) had already made back their original investment, and also made an additional:

$500 million of profit.

WALK AWAY.

And while the finances have gotten more complicated in recent years (making it harder to discern true profits), the meters have been pulling in more than 100 million dollars in revenue per year since rebounding from Covid shutdowns.

Ah-ooo-gah!

And it’s not just Morgan Stanley scrooging around in that meter money. It turns out none other than super-oil-rich Abu Dhabi owns around a quarter of the privatized meter company. Wow!

But why would Abu Dhabi give a shit about parking meters in the U.S.? Whyyyyy????

Hold that thought, while we give you:

A word from our sponsor: Ground News

Here at Climate Town, we read a ton of news articles while researching our episodes (arguably, too many). But, unfortunately, it's often difficult to discern biases in a sea of for-profit media. Luckily, our friends at Ground News can help. A lot. This is their thing.

Ground News makes it easy to see how a single story is being framed across the media landscape. You can compare news sources, view political biases, and even see who owns the news you're reading - all right there in the app or website. Get the information you need on the news you read.

And you know what? If you sign up through this link, you get 30% off your Ground News Vantage subscription by going to ground.news/climaterollie. Go on! Try it out!

Abu Dhabi: Building a Diverse Portfolio Through Hard Work (Oil Money)

Right around the start of the 2000s, Abu Dhabi began to get nervous. Well, not nervous as much as interested in diversifying in the off-chance people start to act on this whole climate change thing. So far, they’re in the clear, but you can never be too careful.

As part of the United Arab Emirates (a country made up of seven separate emirates, including Abu Dhabi and Dubai), they were coming up on 50 years of delicious profits from their deep reserves of Hot Chocolate for Cars.

But what to do next? Perhaps a birthday party for the money? Or maybe a daring plan: use that extreme profit to make extremely more money, but in more diversified ways than just oil and gas. Introducing:

Abu Dhabi 2030: Still Oil, But Also Other Stuff.

And they were off to secure their future:

• Step 1: Create a tourist island using migrant workers. Abuse and exploit those migrant workers so badly that the island project gets its own human rights violation report from a group simply called Human Rights Watch. Don’t worry, that report won’t stop a new arm of the Louvre from opening.

• Step 2: Start a renewable and nuclear energy subsidiary (Masdar) that recently announced that they “expect promising results by 2071, the UAE’s centennial.” Side note: Masdar released a commercial that has somehow been viewed ten million times and only received TWO COMMENTS. 

• Step 3: Use Masdar to build Masdar City: a super-sustainable carbon neutral, zero waste city of the future, which will lead Abu Dhabi’s transformation into a renewable energy powerhouse. Okay maybe that city will be low carbon. The only way to get there is by car. And only a tiny fraction of the planned residents will live there. Leave them alone!

• Step 4: Don’t forget to own around 25% of the private entity that now owns Chicago’s parking meters.

• Step 5: Build and power enough desalination plants to provide 90% of your potable water. This one maybe isn’t about diversification, but that was a shocking number to us. They really don’t have a lot of freshwater in the UAE.

• Step 6: Establish the first human settlement on Mars by 2117. New climate!

But if you really want to transform your oil economy, you need to transform your oil identity. Rebrand. Reborn. Reba.

Qatar hosted the World Cup (in 2022). Saudi Arabia’s attempting to purchase golf, women’s tennis, and allegedly Formula 1 – and they’ll also host the World Cup (in 2034). And now the UAE has:

The 28th Conference of the Parties (aka COP28).

Where better to host the annual UN climate summit than the UAE, a country that gets at least 30% of its GDP from oil and gas? And who better to serve as COP28 president than the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), Sultan Al Jaber? 

As you might expect, a lot of people are pretty pissed about this. But the UAE and Adnoc were ready for the controversy, with a team to:

Edit the Wikipedia pages.

Thanks to an investigation published in the Guardian, we now know that a Wikipedia user, who disclosed that they were being paid by Adnoc, suggested edits to Al Jaber’s page, hoping to remove some references to his fossil fuel expansion work, and instead focus on their push to “invest in carbon capture and green fuel technologies.”

Another Guardian investigation revealed that the COP28 team had shared email servers with Adnoc, and allowed the state oil company to read emails to and from the COP28 office. Adnoc also consulted on COP28 team responses to media inquiries.

And then there was the leaked recording of a meeting between UAE officials and COP28 team members, where they strategize about the “need to preserve the reputation of the UAE, to look at how we can protect that and enhance its reputation.”

Somebody’s nervous?

While Abu Dhabi does invest in renewables and other climate-friendly tech (like pretty much every major oil and gas company), they’re also not looking to ramp down oil and gas any time soon.

At the end of last year, Adnoc announced a $150 billion investment to increase oil production and take part of its gas operations public. Which, again, might explain why two PR professionals from Adnoc are providing support to the COP28 team. What a helpful bunch.

When you’re this deep into fossil fuels, it must be hard to quit. Now, it’s easy to say you’ll quit. But it must be really, really hard to actually quit.

Chart Town: Half of a Terrible, Terrible Deal

About a year after the parking meters deal was finalized, the Chicago Inspector General put out about as scathing a report as an Inspector General can:

“The hasty, ‘crisis’ nature of the decision-making process meant that the short-term budget problems and the large upfront payment the City was receiving overshadowed all other legitimate, long-term, public-interest issues – the exact concern raised in the best PPP studies.”

Now, they mostly focused on how Chicago got WAY too little money for the deal overall. But they also snuck in that curvy little chart featured above to really stick it to the Daley administration.

Because it turns out, with the calculations used to get to the $1.16 billion/75 years deal: the city of Chicago could have cut the lease length in HALF and still received 93% of the total value. Or, in other words, they gave away their parking meters for 38 years (2046 to 2084) for around $80 million in 2008 dollars. Less than the private company now makes on those meters pretty much every year.

WALK AWAY.

Lightning Round (we’ve never been closer to the end than now)

I don’t recall. In his 22 years as mayor (one more than his also-Mayor-of-Chicago father), Richard M. Daley had his fair share of scandals. 

The Alderman Huels scandal, the Hired Truck Program scandal, and the his son and nephew secretly profited from no-bid city contracts scandal. Oh also the Meigs Field scandal, where Mayor Daley faced opposition to his plan to close a small airport near Chicago’s downtown, so he decided to just have city crews bulldoze six large X’s into the runway, rendering the airport unusable.

"To do this any other way would have been needlessly contentious."

But the scandal that led to the most forgetful deposition was probably: the Park Grill scandal.

Basically, in the early 2000s, the $475 million Millennium Park (home of the Bean) was finally ready to open, including its now controversial restaurant, Park Grill. Somehow, a group of people close to Mayor Daley were given a 30-year contract to operate the restaurant, which included free gas, water, and garbage collection from the City.

But when the first new mayor in decades took office in 2011 (Rahm Emanuel), he quickly brought a lawsuit against the “commercially unreasonable” deal, which the suit claims cost taxpayers $5 million in just under a decade. And as part of that lawsuit, former Mayor Daley was forced to not remember very much on record:

Q: Were you ever asked in the 22 years that you were mayor whether the city should enter into a particular contract?

Daley: I don’t recall.

Q: You don't recall that ever happening?

Daley: No, I don't recall.

Okay, but what about the planning of quite possibly the most famous Bean in the world?

Q: Did you develop the concept of having — what do they call it, “The Cloud” or “The Bean” over in the park?

Q: “The Bean.” Let’s start with “The Bean.”

Daley: No. I could never — no.

Q: Did you know there was going to be a Bean?

Daley: No.

Q: At the park?

Daley: No.

Q: One day, you saw it, and that was the first time you knew about it?

Daley: I don’t even remember. I never knew it was coming.

Q: So you were involved in some of the details at least?

Daley: Trees, size of trees, just making sure that the facility would be up-to-date. Trees. I’m a tree lover. Put that on the record.

Never heard of the Bean, or any sweetheart deal, but fully focused on the uncontroversial classic: trees. Awesome!

Good looking parking. We’ve been critical of car-centric infrastructure in the past. Quite critical. A few times.

But if we’re forced to live in a for-profit-car-playland, we might as well live in a more beautiful for-profit-car-playland. Or at least that’s how we felt when we came upon the most artful parking structure we’ve ever seen: the Marina City towers.

We changed our routes to walk by them. We marveled at how they’re really nice. We even included them in one of our shots for the episode.

And, like many things you think without looking at the internet first, we came to believe we were uniquely able to see the beauty of these concrete creations. But we were wrong. These buildings are ridiculously famous. Everyone talks about them. For decades. They even inspired this striking sentence on their own Wikipedia page:

“The towers' symbolic similarity to rural Illinois corncobs has often been noted in media.”

And often noted in the media they remain.

Official Rollie (no prize). There were no successful entries for Official Rollie (no prize) this cycle. Rollie has once again been consumed by his ego. He walks around signing city buses and mailboxes to “make them more valuable.” He keeps saying, “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM” to strangers (they don’t). It’s getting bad. We need a winner. 

So we continue our search for the perfect level of difficulty to become an Official Rollie (no prize). And we may have finally found it.

For our most recent episode, we spent a lot of time reading (and re-reading) Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. And we think you should do the same. So we’ll offer this: send us proof that you bought a copy of Paved Paradise, we’ll assume you also read it, and will consider declaring you an Official Rollie (no prize). You can buy it here, or wherever you want, really.

How about that, friend?

Subscribe now

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen

Hello friend!

Another newsletter already? Why yes! 

And that means a new video (about fossil fuel interests infiltrating the US education system), which came out earlier today? Yes indeed! 

Things are really moving along nicely around Climate Town. But eagle-eyed readers might notice a change. Something amiss.

A mystery.

That is easily solved! After a lovely two email run with our previous hosting provider, the nice people at Substack welcomed us with open arms. And we have also welcomed them, by moving this newsletter to Substack.

But don’t worry, we are still quite possibly the only newsletter in the world willing to put the unsubscribe button this high up in the scroll. If you want out, here’s your chance (on Substack, you have to click the button, then find the UNSUBSCRIBE button on your account page):

UNSUBSCRIBE

And for those of you who are sticking with us: last week was back to school week, and this week? We scroll.

Think of the Children!

And think of the children the oil companies did, by spending millions of dollars across a bunch of industry-funded groups to influence the US education system in their favor. 

Worried you don’t know anything about that? Well you probably haven’t watched our new episode yet. So why not take TWENTY EIGHT MINUTES MY GOD and click on that video link above.

And once you finish that brand new video, scroll on down, friend.

The Pledge of Increased Flag Sales

America is the Land of the Free™.

And to make sure our children don’t forget how free it is, we force them to pledge their allegiance to the Republic every single day. And while this tradition does feel a smidge brainwash-y/indoctrinate-y, the history of the United States pledge of allegiance is extremely American. 

In the late 1800s, James Upham (nephew of the publisher) and Francis Bellamy (former minister) were working at a popular magazine for American boys called The Youth’s Companion – a magazine which had also recently started selling American flags on the side to earn some extra revenue. Well, after 26,000 schoolhouse flag sales in just a few years, the magazine was starting to get a little hooked on that flag money. 

When sales took a dip in 1891, Upham and Bellamy hatched a plan to move some serious flag. And if the year 1892 sounds familiar, it’s probably because it’s got three of the numbers from 1492, the year Christopher Columbus sailed the absolute shit out of that ocean blue. 

Upham and Bellamy figured the 400th anniversary of that prolific and completely uncontroversial murderer’s journey would be a fantastic opportunity to: 

Juice those flag numbers. 

After lobbying schools across the country to do a “flag salute ceremony” on Columbus Day, Francis Bellamy crafted a fun little chant that would specifically mention the flag thereby making schools feel pretty stupid if they didn’t have a physical flag. Cha-ching!

“I pledge Allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.”

And just to say it… trash. It doesn’t rhyme, it’s a pledge for children that contains pretty technical terms like ‘Republic’ and ‘Allegiance’, it’s not terribly inspirational, 3/10, see me after class.

But what the pledge lacked in quality, it made up for in quantity, selling a catastrophic number of flags and forever dooming our nation’s youths to taking an oath of obedience before cracking into To Kill A Mockingbird.

But wait there’s more!

The original salute was not the famous hand-over-heart salute, but it was a different famous salute. That’s right. 

Ask yourself what the other famous salute was, and then say quietly, “come on, there’s no way the original salute to the American flag was that salute.” Well, I regret to inform you that it was that salute, and if you want to see a whole bunch of American kids doing that salute to the American flag, go ahead and click on this link or this link. Not coincidentally, America officially changed the salute in 1942 (a little too late, if you ask us) to the classic hand-over-heart.

And you better believe that wasn’t the only change made to the pledge:

• CHANGE: In 1923, we changed the line, “I pledge Allegiance to my Flag” to “I pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States”

• REASON: Officials didn’t want new immigrants to accidentally be loyal to their country of origin’s flag rather than the U.S. flag.

• CHANGE: In 1924, they added ‘Of America’ to ‘United States’.

• REASON: To cover immigration from one of those sneaky OTHER groups of united states.

• CHANGE: In 1954, “One nation indivisible” became “One nation UNDER GOD, indivisible”

• REASON: We were so freaked out about those godless Commies from the Soviet Union that we crammed UNDER GOD into our pledge to differentiate ourselves from our sworn enemies. Who cares if it doesn’t really fit into the pledge and kinda sounds like we’re saying it under our breath, it’s going in the pledge.

But the biggest change of all?

In 1940, a Supreme Court case called Minersville School District v. Gobitis sought to answer the question: can schools force students to say the pledge of allegiance?

And it turns out the court decided (8-1) YES! That’s right, the highest court in the land decreed that schools could coerce children into reciting a magazine advertisement. And isn’t that what America is all about? 

And now a word from our sponsor: Climate Changemakers

If you’ve ever taken action after watching one of our episodes, you probably used an Action Playbook from our good friends: Climate Changemakers. They’re really good at making them.

And right now: they’re running a hot little solar power campaign that helps bring solar projects to disadvantaged communities – sounds pretty great, right? But what can YOU do about it? Well, if you like decarbonization and the democratization of energy resources: take a breezy 20 minutes to help make a positive change in the world using these powerful playbooks.

Seriously, 20 minutes is nothing. We haven’t made an episode under 20 minutes in over a year. We keep trying to make them shorter, but we’re addicted to context. Help!

Ellen and Her Big Oil Adventure

It’s the 1980s and Exxon is having a relatively bad run. Sure they’re still raking in money – but they also figured out that climate change is real and happening, and then remembered that their industry is a big part of the problem. Bummer!

Luckily, they turned their frown upside down and… gave a lot of money to Disney to sponsor a fossil fuel themed ride, nestled in the culturally sensitive land of:

EPCOT, formerly known as The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.

Now before his death in 1966, Walt Disney dreamt of EPCOT as a fully functioning, utopian community, serving as a beacon of the possibilities of the modern city. 

Want a job? Why not work down at the industrial hub? Want a flight? Why not take the high speed rail to the on-site airport. Want a car? Fuck off! This city will be designed for people, not machines (you can hide your car under the city).

And so life would go on perfectly for the 20,000 residents of Disney’s own company town. And yes, there would have been a small theme park on the north side of the 27,400 acre property, which in total would have been twice the land area of Manhattan.

“Everything at EPCOT will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who will live, work, and play here.”

But Walt Disney passed away just two months after filming the video that outlined his grand plan. His vision for EPCOT was abandoned, and the good folks at Disney Corp (famed CEO Card Walker – yes, Card Walker) decided they’d rather just have a second theme park instead. 

So in 1982, EPCOT, as we know it, opened: the most expensive private construction project in history (at the time), featuring a perplexing mix of monetized homages to a dozen countries, as well as attractions dedicated to the ideas of the future, including:

The Universe of Energy.

That’s right, we’re back! 

That Exxon sponsorship money you almost forgot about? It was for a “ride” called the Universe of Energy.

Starting in 1982, adults and children alike were strapped in for the oil-loving time of their lives. They watched a film about the beginning of life on earth (and fossil fuels), then rode through a dinosaur diorama, then finished with another film (this one expressly about energy). Awesome!

And because oil tankers are almost never famous for something good: 

One of the films included footage of an oil supertanker called the Exxon Valdez. Disney then had to close the ride and un-include that footage in 1989.

And a half decade after that, they couldn’t help but go for the full scale, high budget redesign, including a $2 million animatronic of their new star, one of the biggest names in Ellens:

Ellen DeGeneres.

And Bill Nye, and Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Richards (Kramer), and even Alex Trebek. What a cast!

And thanks to a bootleg handycam recording of the full ride that’s available on YouTube and you can find it easily but we’re not going to link to it here: we were able to experience Ellen’s Energy Adventure for ourselves.

Basically, Ellen passes out on the couch and has a nightmare where she doesn’t know a lot about oil. Luckily, her neighbor Bill Nye is obsessed with energy, and takes her on an educational tour. First, they travel back in time to the dinosaur diorama, before coming back to the present to explore all the modern forms of energy.

To be fair, Ellen and Bill do explore solar (expensive), wind (doesn’t always blow), and hydro (already built on the best sites). But then Bill gets to the serious stuff: fossil fuels.

Coal (two centuries worth), gas (sixty years and we’re finding more), and oil (fifty years and there’s more in the ocean and maybe some in space too). Radical!

Ellen: “What about global warming?”

Bill: “It’s a hot topic with lots of questions. It’s one of the main reasons scientists are working on ways to burn fuels like coal more efficiently than ever.”

And for the grand finale, Final Jeopardy:

“This is the one source of power that will never run out.”

“What is brain power?”

Really, really awesome.

But after two decades in its final incarnation, Ellen’s Energy Adventure officially closed in 2017, apparently due to declining popularity. And also they wanted to smash a new Guardians of the Galaxy ride in there. Wow, maybe fun really can be profitable.

Chart Town: a Really Misleading Graph

When you look at it that way (the graph right above this), maybe things really aren’t so bad. Current CO2 concentrations are fully within the normal historical range, right around the higher end of 280 PPM.

But, unfortunately, looking at it this way means you’re getting your information from The Kid’s Guide to the Truth About Climate Change, a recent addition to the child indoctrination genre, brought to you by former Governor Mike Huckabee. 

And you better believe this book absolutely doesn’t care what year it actually is. Because it turns out that “present day” in the chart above refers to roughly 391 BC, back when cell phones looked like this.

Fast forward roughly 2,400 years, and you have this more current chart:

Damn that’s a nasty looking CO2 spike on the right. But from what?

At the moment, our CO2 concentration is over 400 PPM, according to data from NASA and NOAA. And if you think that’s bad, you’re not alone.

Of course, there are a ton more examples of this kind of misinformation in US schools. And goddamnit we tried to cover them all ourselves. But now that we’re on Substack, we don’t have to – because we have the great pleasure of being on the same website as some incredibly talented and smart writers, who also happen to be covering these exact issues:

• HEATED by Emily Atkin & Arielle Samuelson – Prager U says it’s approved in Texas Schools. It’s not.

• Popular Information by Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby – Pennsylvania school district requires social studies classes to incorporate right-wing propaganda

Subscribe!

Billboard Town: Another Good Idea From the Heartland Institute

There it is. The billboard that somehow hurt the Heartland Institute’s reputation more than when they spent decades blasting out misinformation about tobacco and climate change.

The backlash at the time (2012) was so swift and unanimous that Heartland actually apologized and pulled the other planned billboards in the series, which supposedly would have featured Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Osama Bin Laden. But even this amount of discussion about Heartland is probably too much. They seem to be mostly interested in drawing attention as much as anything, so really: that’s enough.

But here’s something else that’s related: remember the part in our video when we showed Ted Cruz repeating a really common (and really debunked) climate denial claim? Now you can watch a couple videos where other people explain why he’s wrong: like this one or this one.

Memory Town: Rollie Didn’t Score a Single Point as the Starting Point Guard of His Middle School Basketball Team

Frosted tips and the ability to cross yourself up? Watch out ladies, he’s also under five feet tall.

And yeah we have a couple more photos: one where Rollie doesn’t come up to the shoulder of the other team’s #21, and another where it looks like Rollie’s own teammate is trying to block his shot. But at least he had fun (no he didn’t).

Lightning Round (You’re So Close, We Swear)

Point Zero One Percent. That’s the “difference it would make in terms of global warming” if “the United States shut down all fossil fuel usage tomorrow” – at least according to a representative from Arkansas Energy Rocks (an education initiative of an Arkansas oil & gas industry group), when speaking to a class of seventh graders in an Arkansas middle school. 

0.01%.

Of course, that’s really not even close. The “difference it would make in terms of global warming” is a little vague, but no matter how you slice it, the US is obviously contributing to more than 1/10,000th of anthropogenic climate change.

And we only know about all this because journalist Katie Worth happened to be sitting in this classroom, recording the presentation, while researching her book Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America. Check it out!

Dallas Cowboys x OERB. When they’re not working away on jump rope rhymes such as “we need oil, we need gas, where are the oil products in our class,” the Oklahoma Energy Resources Boards focus on oil well site rehabilitation and safety.

And for the safety side of things, the OERB created a commercial called Play It Smart in the 1990s. The thinking seemed to be: draw the kids in with TWO FULL MINUTES of football highlights, then WHAM smash them with the cold reality that they could die if they go near an oil well.

It’s one of the all time great oil industry ads we’ve come across, and we’d love to share it with you today, for free: click this link to check it out for yourself!

Official Rollie (no prize). After we found only a single Official Rollie (no prize) in our first newsletter, Rollie felt unique and egotistical. But our most recent call yielded a record-breaking 36 Official Rollies (no prizes). Rollie was devastated.

So this time things will be more difficult. 

In our research for this episode, we discovered that the American Petroleum Institute themselves funded and created a short film called Fuel-Less. It’s a Clueless parody, except instead of anything remotely related to the plot of Clueless, Fuel-Less tells the story of a rich young woman who doesn’t love oil as much as she should. Or so we think. We searched, but couldn’t find a copy anywhere online. So this time: 

Send us a copy of the full Fuel-Less film, and you may be declared an Official Rollie (no prize).

And, of course, here are those 36 Official Rollie (no prize) names:

Amelia Fernández Rodríguez

Ben Roth

Botond Makai

Brian Penkrot

Carson Brill

Chelsea Payton

Chris Rudkowski

Clayton Manley

Clayton Summers

Darrien Glasser

Derek Nelson

Eonoire [Redacted]

Felipe Souza

Gordon Phoon

Isaac Birch

Jack Johnson

Jack Okada

Jeremy C.

Joey Knapp

John Orr

John Shulters

Joshua Miller

Kevin Ellis

Krishana [Redacted]

Marty Hoefkes

Matty B.

Mike Roller

Mitch Armstrong

Molly Elliott

Nick Sorauf

Robbie Grieco

Rowan Price

Sam B.

Thomas Zambiasi

William Lentjes

Zack Youngren

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen

Last time you heard from us was three months ago and we were neck deep in research for what we promised ourselves would be a light and breezy 10-minute video about parking in America. Definitely under 12 minutes. ABSOLUTELY NOT OVER 15 MINUTES. 

So, naturally, that turned into this 31-minute video about parking. 

Yet somehow, we still have more to say about parking. We still have research that got cut from the episode. And, yes, we still want to send out a newsletter. This newsletter. Quite possibly:

The only Climate Town newsletter in the world.

And of course, we are one of the only newsletters that would DARE put the unsubscribe button this high up. So if you want out, click that button:

UNSUBSCRIBE

And if you’re enjoying this so much that you want to double subscribe – you can’t. It’s illegal. But you can:

• Share this newsletter with a friend, using this nice “share” button:

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Now, there is one perfect song that should absolutely be in our episode, but legally? We couldn’t use it. But we can link to it. We can link to it a lot. Yes, we can even link to this one. Consider hitting play in another tab while you read this. 

Now you are, as they say, immersed.

An Episode That’s Longer Than the Album Jolene

At 31 minutes, this episode is a full 6 minutes longer than Dolly Parton’s album Jolene. And remember, not only is Jolene one of the great albums of its era, it was also Dolly’s THIRTEENTH solo album in SEVEN years, a period which also included ELEVEN albums with her former partner Porter Wagoner. And speaking of audio (yes, good one):

We started a podcast!

It’s called The Climate Denier’s Playbook, and it’s hosted by Rollie and Nicole Conlan, a writer on The Daily Show (and also for Climate Town). Together, they examine such climate misinformation favorites as: you owe your life to oil & gas or that climate change is caused by the sun’s natural cycles. Listen up!

An Ode to Donald Shoup

For decades, there was pretty much only one major name in US parking minimum criticism: Donald C. Shoup AKA Shoup Dogg (we didn’t make up that name, that’s the actual URL of his website).

Shoup has been a professor at the vivacious UCLA since 1974, more specifically the Luskin School of Public Affairs, and what the hell, more specifically the Department of Urban Planning. And it was around the start of his time at UCLA that he first got really pissed off about parking.

Yes, even more specifically, Shoup read a parking study, inspired by a man named Rex Link.

Rex Link is the man’s name.

Basically, two USC students published a study detailing a situation where county government workers were offered free parking while federal workers were forced to pay. That study found that the vast majority of county workers drove to work alone, while the majority of federal workers carpooled, took public transit, or even walked. WALKED!!!

And that changed Shoup’s life forever.

For the next few decades, Shoup wrote a ton of articles and papers about parking issues, including Problems with Parking Requirements in Zoning Ordinances, all the way back in 1978, which has vaulted to #3 on our list of Favorite PDFs. At the time, there were very few academics focused on parking (“people thought I was nuts”), but Shoup persisted, and after 30 years, he gave us his masterpiece in 2005:

The High Cost of Free Parking

It’s an 800 page breakdown of parking issues in the US that’s both thorough and surprisingly entertaining – and it seems fair to call it the foundational text of the current parking reform movement in the US. You can even read a copy yourself right here for free. Rollie’s dad even gave it a look.

The High Cost of Free Parking (and the rest of Shoup’s work) inspired a generation of advocates (Shoupistas), including Strong Towns, whose videos and work we referenced throughout our episode, and Henry Grabar, who wrote the recently released Paved Paradise, which we also referenced a bunch.

Shoup’s a good man, we’re thankful for his career of advocacy work, and here’s a little, hopeful clip of him at the end of a Vox video.

Chart Town: But a Moment With the I.T.E.

Wow, we bet you didn’t think we’d throw a full on chart in the middle of this newsletter, huh? 

Well, as long as we’re all looking at it together, this chart was created by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, a group that publishes a ridiculously expensive manual that a ton of towns and cities use to decide how much parking to require. Naturally, you’d expect that manual would be pretty well-researched, right? 

RIGHT??!?

Well, allow me to draw your attention to that lonely little pirate’s treasure map X in the upper right corner. Alas, there is no treasure there, just a single data point. Cold and hungry, this single data point tells the tale of around 350 cars that parked at some point in time at one movie theater with 9 screens.

Uh yeah that’s gonna be exactly 38.89 parking spaces per movie screen for every movie theater in the entire country. Send it, Joni!

The Power Broker and His Precious Automobiles

There was a time when the NYC subway system was the centerpiece of the city. But that time was before the reign of Robert Moses, the “master builder” of NYC, and a man who fucking loved cars. 

"When Robert Moses came to power in New York in 1934, the city's mass transportation system was probably the best in the world. When he left power in 1968 it was quite possibly the worst."

That charming quote is from the 1974, 1,300-page book entitled The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which you’re welcome to read to get the full rundown, entitling you to one (1) exciting month of bringing it up to your friends. But just to name a few accomplishments:

• He developed Jones Beach and the highway that went right to it, fully equipped with overpasses designed to be low enough that buses for regular people couldn’t get there. Awesome!

• He led the building of a series of highways straight through existing neighborhoods, including the Cross-Bronx expressway, which the current mayor now calls “a scar carved through the heart of the Bronx” that brought “elevated asthma rates and other inequitable health outcomes”. In total, he’s estimated to have displaced 500,000 residents in his tenure. 

• Despite denial of approval from the Bureau of International Expositions (a real, powerful organization), Moses pushed ahead with his leading of the 1964-1965 World’s Fair in Queens – it turned out to be such a disappointing event that famed architecture professor Vincent Scully wrote a Time Magazine article entitled If This is Architecture, God Help Us.

• And he also pushed to build public pools only in predominantly white neighborhoods - and when he had to build one in racially mixed Harlem, he hired only white lifeguards and refused to heat the pool.

But he was a cool guy, right? 

Right! Moses himself never learned to drive, so he instead had round-the-clock, city-funded chauffeurs. In his bid for power, he at one time held TWELVE city positions concurrently. And he gave us this incredibly depressing quote:

“We simply repeat that cities are created by and for traffic. A city without traffic is a ghost town.”

Subway ridership peaked in the late 1940s, which is: a long time ago. This map of the potential future of the subway never came to be, but somehow this map of highways made by Moses has been pretty much fully realized.

But at least we had Jane Jacobs. 

Fresh off the publishing of her book The Death and Life of American Cities, Jane Jacobs was a strong opponent of the prevailing Smash-for-Roads city redesign technique of the post-World War II era. 

She was also a resident of the West Village, one of the neighborhoods targeted for Moses’s lower Manhattan obsession: a 10-lane highway called the Lower Manhattan Expressway (LOMEX), connecting two bridges from Brooklyn with the Hudson tunnel to New Jersey. If you’re not super familiar with NYC, this probably doesn’t sound that crazy, but if you’ve spent as much time doing shitty improv shows in Williamsburg basements and Lower East Side dive bars as we have, it would have been a nightmare.

But, for once, Moses met his match. 

Jane Jacobs. She was his match.

Having just witnessed a minor victory saving Washington Square Park from an impending road, Jacobs established the Committee to Save the West Village. She rallied her neighbors around the cause, and even got Bob Dylan to come over to her house and write a song called Listen, Robert Moses.

After some years of back and forth, as these guys turned into these guys, the final showdown arrived. The state hastily scheduled a meeting for public opinion, seemingly hoping no one would show up – but Jacobs and her legion of supporters did (show up). She took the mic and gave a speech so powerful that she got arrested for being too rude.

Her arrest finally brought widespread attention to the issue, the Mayor withdrew support for the project, and LOMEX was: 

De-mapped.

So if you’re ever strolling through Washington Square Park, or catching a flick at the Angelika, or even catching a flick at the IFC Center, please mutter “thank you, Jane” under your breath. And why not catch a flick at the Film Forum after? That’s a nice day, moviegoer.

Number Town: Cement Can Reeeeally Emit

Goddamn 8 is such a cool looking number – so it really sucks to have to use it in a negative way here.

But cement production is a massive CO2 emitter, and also particularly difficult to decarbonize. And apparently: if cement were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world behind the US and China? 

Honestly, that’s the kind of movie pitch that’s probably floating around Hollywood right now. Sovereign Cement: Back to the Stone Age. No writers, no actors, just that sexy cement oozing all over its own countryland for 134 minutes. And you know the Sovereign Nation of Cement would be putting up NUMBERS at the Olympics. Not swimming, obviously, but maybe like … wrestling?

So while we’re tallying up the problems with excessive parking, why not add cement emissions to the mix? You know you wanna.

Map Town: the Parking Lot Where We Shot the Video

We spent exactly one day shooting on this expanse of pavement, and honestly it was one day too long. Here’s a satellite photo of it and my god they have a lot of parking here.

If you’re at Costco, and you want to go to Wendy’s: it’s a 30 minute walk. Through the same contiguous run of parking. We even considered doing the whole episode as one big walk from end to end where Rollie slowly loses his mind like in John Wick 3, but we decided against it. 

P.S. we will spoil movies and we don’t do spoiler alerts! If you have not seen John Wick 3 yet, that's on you, brother!

Lightning Round (Enjoy It While It Lasts)

That’s one beautiful SimCity. The original designer of SimCity revealed, in an interview with the Atlantic, the game was originally just going to model real cities, but there were so many parking lots that it would have been more like SimParkingLot – he didn’t actually say SimParkingLot himself, but he did laugh and say “exactly” when the reporter said it, which is the highest form of agreement.

If you laugh and say “exactly”? Buddy, you better hope it’s not in reference to a criminal act, because if you laugh/exactly a crime? In the United States? Life. Maybe even two or three consecutive sentences. DO NOT DO IT!

This shit actually works??? It turns out, after decades of criticism, the tides have finally started to turn on parking minimums. City after town after city has repealed their parking minimum laws either entirely, or at least partially (typically in downtown areas). 

Did we hear a “prove it” from the crowd? Who said that? My god, you must be seven feet tall. How old are you? 15?? You “want more information or you’ll braid [our] corny asses like a stack of pretzels”? Well, fortunately for us, we have this nice looking parking minimum law reform map from Parking Reform Network – in fact, there are so many dots representing parking minimum changes that it’s pretty much completely useless as a map. But in this case, that’s actually good.

Official Rollie (no prize). Every other newsletter (one) has had an Official Rollie (no prize). Last episode it was to report a part of this relatively boring video that you think is funny. 

Out of thousands of readers, there was but one Official Rollie (no prize) from our last newsletter: Meg Wilson. It seems that becoming an Official Rollie (no prize) is quite hard, which has done wonders for one of the egos here at Climate Town. Please help us set this straight.  

This edition asks you to reply to this newsletter with a link to a sound effect that you believe should be part of a future Climate Town video. Something like this or this. If Rollie likes it, you could be declared an Official Rollie (no prize).

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Edited by: Caroline Schaper

Legal support from: The Civil Liberties Defense Center

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen

You have the honor of receiving our first ever newsletter.

That's right, we're making the bold decision to grow our media empire from one punishingly long video every 1-3 months, to one disgustingly lengthy video AND ALSO one email (still every 1-3 months, but we’re working on it).

But why a newsletter? Well, believe it or not, we are actually cutting material from our videos to keep them at their tight 27-minute-plus runtime. But instead of tossing that research in the trash (bad), we've decided to recycle it as text and let you have it (good). And those are the kinds of hard-hitting thematic metaphors you can look forward to if you choose to read further.

And if you're already pissed off at yet another newsletter, you can piss right back on, because this is a newsletter you can and should bail on if you don’t like it! Look! Here’s the unsubscribe button (on Substack, you have to find the UNSUBSCRIBE button on your account page):

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For those of you sticking around: wazzup and let's get this thing rolling!

Stick to Videos, Hack

If you've somehow made it to this newsletter, but haven't watched our newest video on food waste yet, well— you were probably busy.

But now you're not. So click on that spooky YouTube triangle and settle in. Or just jump into the text like a maniac. You’re the boss of your own body.

And now here we goooooo!

Henry Heinz & the Love Apple: the Story of Modern Ketchup

Well folks, it turns out ketchup used to suck *ass*. And thanks to Stanford Professor Dan Jurafsky we know all about it.

The story goes that, a few hundred years ago, some British men floated east to take their rightful place in charge of China and, while they were there, tried fish sauce. And they fucking loved it. But by the time they got back home, they completely forgot what that tasted like, and just started guessing, filing all of it under the title of ketchup.

A few generations later, their descendants were slurping some combination of vinegar and whatever they could think of: mushrooms, lemon, ox liver, raspberry, oysters, elderberries, alcohol, sugar, preservatives, you get it. Basically like spiced up compost scraps and shut up about it. 

Jane Austen supposedly loved walnut ketchup, which was so strong that one cookbook from the time argued that fresh walnut ketchup “is not fit for use in the first year.” My god would folks just wait and wait back then. Everyone’s excited for Spring, when the ketchup is finally fit for use. That is, until:

The Pride of Pittsburgh.

After years of waiting, a young Henry Heinz's mustache finally completed the long journey to his hairline, and he was ready to change the world. Heinz's struggling horseradish business was... struggling, so in 1876, Heinz turned to the tomato for salvation.

Tomato ketchup had been around for a few decades, but it had gotten a bad reputation: a nervous condiment made from moldy old tomatoes, with a little coal tar added for redness. Which gave Heinz his brilliant idea: don’t do that. Instead, he found a recipe of tomatoes, brown sugar, vinegar, salt, and spices that was shelf stable, really fucking delicious, and sold in a clear glass bottle you could see through. That was how low the bar was for food after the Civil War: If you could see it, it probably wasn’t poison.

And of course, Heinz ketchup sold like elbows at the arm store. Someone named Stephanie was even saying that 97% of US households currently have ketchup in their kitchen. That’s really not the most important stat to fact check, but it sounds right.

And the Ketchup King rolled on.

Heinz would go on to lobby in favor of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the FDA. He also may have put an 800-pound, 14 foot long, 150-year-old live alligator in a tank on top of one of his factories, so his employees could see an alligator just like he did in Florida. What a guy!

Nowadays, ketchup is HEAVILY regulated by the FDA, requiring that it be based on tomatoes. They also dictate the viscosity by using a little sauce racing ramp called a Bostwick Consistometer. Too fast or slow: my friend, that’s not even ketchup.

Wow we really can go down a rabbit hole. And we'd love to explain why we put "love apple" in the section title, but this one's getting long, so you'll have to Google that yourself. Let’s take an easy ride to:

Chart Town: the Impact of Uneaten Food

Goddamn those are some massive numbers.

You can see them on this lovely graphic from the Belle of the food waste media Ball, ReFED, but let's just make it a list too. Uneaten food in the US accounts for:

• 4% of US greenhouse gas emissions

• 14% of all freshwater use (by the way, 70% of all global freshwater use is agriculture)

• 18% of all cropland use

• 24% of landfill inputs

Pretty bad! But maybe there's something we can do about it maybe? Let’s go to another part of:

Chart Town: What Should We Do About Food Waste?

The chart really says it all. Another nice one from the EPA. Eat your dinner.

That Nasty Stink: Methane vs. Compost

Landfills are one of the biggest sources of methane emissions in the US (around 14% of the total). And we may actually be undercounting emissions by a lot. And also landfills stink so bad their shower's trying to move out- YES!

Unfortunately, that stink is largely the product of anaerobic decomposition (no oxygen and yes that's Wikipedia), which is also the primary driver of methane emissions from landfills. You can read more about the phases of landfill gas creation by downloading this PDF of Chapter 2: Landfill Gas Basics from a 9/11-era textbook- but you really don't have to, because the main thing to know: you can avoid this anaerobic methane mess by composting.

Is that really you, Compost?

That's right our old friend Better Dirt (don't steal that name, we might use it later) is primarily made through aerobic decomposition. And while that does involve turning the compost pile to add air/oxygen to the mix, the results are beautiful, dense, and dreamy brown gold that nourishes plants, while producing little to no harmful greenhouse gases.

Life is good. Or at least it could be.

Walmart & the Forty Seven Date Labels

The year was 2013, and Harvard and the NRDC joined forces to release The Dating Game: a 64 page food date label takedown that is currently quite high on our list of Favorite PDFs. And yes, we’ll give you one quote:

“This convoluted system is not achieving what date labeling was historically designed to do—provide indicators of freshness. Rather, it creates confusion and leads many consumers to believe, mistakenly, that date labels are signals of a food’s microbial safety, which unduly downplays the importance of more pertinent food safety indicators.”

Wow that really sums up a lot of our video in two sentences. Painful! And none other than Walmart felt the pain too.

After reading the NRDC/Harvard report, Walmart took it upon themselves to investigate their own date labeling practices. And they found they were using FORTY SEVEN different terms on their own products. We sat down and tried to come up with 47 different food date labels and we gave up after clamped and stamped.

So if you’re wondering why consumers are confused by date labels: it’s because they really can be quite confusing. 

Now, to Walmart’s credit, we know about their date label issues because they reported them, as part of a press release promoting their transition to more consistent labeling. They decided to go with the classic: best if used by. Walmart cares so much about food waste they even made this modestly budgeted cartoon.

Walmart Animation: Messages You Will Like, No Faces.

Lightning Round (There's More But Not That Much)

Ralph Capone. Now there’s a rumor that Ralph Capone was the reason why there are expiration dates on milk bottles, and we earnestly tried to get Ralph Capone into the episode. I mean, that bit writes itself. Maybe Ralph Capone was just Al Capone doing an episode of undercover boss (‘RALPH’ is just the name ‘AL’ wearing a disguise). Here’s what we found when we looked into it: Al Capone did have a brother named Ralph, and the Capones decided to develop a dairy side hustle in the 1930s, with Ralph at the helm.

They reportedly kidnapped the president of the Chicago milk union, held him ransom, then used that ransom money to buy a milk processing plant. But it wasn't all about that big milk money. The son of one of Ralph's friends apparently got sick from drinking spoiled milk. And Ralph would not stand for it.

So he traveled to Springfield, Illinois, where he successfully lobbied the milk industry to start putting the bottling date on milk bottles. And then he insisted people start calling him "Bottles," and it seems like a lot of people did. Wild stuff.

Wild stuff, but it's also hard to say if it's actually true or not. And with the episode already at its normal-but-really-very-long runtime, we left the legend of Ralph Capone’s milk bottle label to sleep with the fishes.

Glean. Sometimes a word simply doesn't look right. And glean is definitely one of those naughty little words. But hopefully seeing it multiple times here will help. Because gleaning is the act of harvesting food that would otherwise go to waste in the field. It ripened too early or too late, there wasn’t enough labor to pick it, etc. And what a good thing to capture that often perfectly good food which would otherwise rot. On the ground. Alone. Food. 

If you want to learn about becoming an active gleaner, you should look up more info. Because it really depends on where you live. And know that we support you!

Rollie Town. In the middle of editing this video, Rollie had everyone stop working so he could show them a really funny old movie he was excited to use in the edit. We all sat down and watched the first 5 minutes of what turned out to be a 23-minute slog of an internal sales training video from the 1950s. Here's the link.

If you can find any part of it that you think is funny, send us the timecode (email below) or even a clip or EVEN EVEN a video you edit and we may declare you an Official Rollie (no prize).

Well that's the end of the newsletter. If you want to send in a question, all you have to do is respond to this email. Or contact us directly at newsletter@climatetown.tv. We may never answer it, but you never know.

Also, if you think you found a mistake, let us know. We try our very best to research and review our way to full accuracy, but it's a big world out there.

Art by: Kelsey Bravender

Executive produced by: Rollie Williams, Ben Boult, Nicole Conlan, and Matt Nelsen