Daniel Palken is a Conservative Outreach Fellow for Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), an organization working to build support in Congress for a national bipartisan solution to climate change. On this bonus episode of Reversing Climate Change, Daniel joins Ross to explain what drew him to work with the organization and discuss their recent Conservative Climate Lobby Day for climate advocates right of center.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what Norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change, and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see, but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter, which you can find at nori.com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today is a bonus episode. It’s just me. And I am here with Daniel Palkin, who is a conservative outreach fellow at Citizens Climate Lobby.
He is also a PhD physics student at the University of Colorado Boulder and the chapter co-leader of the Boulder CCL group. Thanks for being here, Daniel.
Daniel Palken: Thank you so much for having me, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed, thanks for helping us get in touch. And Daniel, you’ve been doing some very interesting work with the Citizens Climate Lobby. And we’re going to get into all of that. But maybe to set the stage, how exactly did you get involved in this type of activism? And what is a conservative outreach fellow? How do you spend your time, essentially?
Daniel Palken: Yeah, absolutely. So I got into this space in 2017 at the urging of one of my friends. I was looking for something political to do. Honestly, I felt that I really liked my physics research. I look for dark matter. And I found it very intellectually fulfilling, but I didn’t feel like it was satisfying my desire to do something that helped people in the here and now. And my friend Lindsay talked me into coming to a Citizens Climate Lobby meeting. It’s a grassroots organization that does outreach. I got into this group and I found I could engage in politics in a way where it really resonated with my intuitions about what I wanted my political engagement to look like.
It was a very thoughtful and reasoned mode of political engagement, which nonetheless allowed for For an adamancy on the issues that I cared about on the on the issue, particularly of climate change, and that did it in a respectful way that has had meaningful, tangible success, bringing conservatives into the space. So I actually, from somewhat earlier, I’ve always felt as or more comfortable in the climate space, which I think is somewhat unusual in this area, talking with conservatives. I feel a lot of where conservatives are coming from when it comes to kind of the cultural grievances.
I am myself kind of all over the political spectrum. I don’t fit easily into one camp or the other. But I started working with groups I was already involved with. I’ve since started working with college Republican groups and county Republican groups in bringing in key conservative stakeholders into productive climate conversations around, in our case, carbon pricing policy.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Well, kudos. Sounds like you’re at least making some degree of progress. I’m happy just those conversations are being had. At least then people know exactly what is being proposed, what is being said. It isn’t just some distant people and organizations. Given that the internet works this way, you really, unless you’re like a part of a community, you only hear the nastiest thing that various groups say if you’re not in the mix. That’s just what gets reported. If it bleeds, it leads that whole thing. So that’s good. I think what you’re doing is important.
And also just not as a, I always compare this sort of outreach thing to conservatives with climate change. Have you seen that Sacha Baron Cohen show, Who Is America? , I have, yes.
Daniel Palken: Yeah, I think his parody is actually spot on there. I think there actually is a bit of that happens in our real climate conversation. And, you know, Citizens Climate Lobby is trying to infuse a deeper level of thoughtfulness in how people engage, you know, whether with people far to the left of them or far to the right of them or where they are, just trying to meet people where they are in the political spectrum.
Ross Kenyon: Indeed, yeah, meeting people where they are is, I think, a pretty good strategy for doing so. Even just like one of the goals I have for this podcast is trying to, I don’t always agree with everyone who comes on or everything that they say, but I try to interpret it charitably, talk to everyone like, They’re human. Not browbeat them too hard, even if that might be a fun, rewarding thing to do personally. So I don’t know. I think that’s the way to go. I like to think it matters. If it doesn’t, I’ve been wasting my time.
Please tell me I haven’t been wasting my time, Daniel.
Daniel Palken: I don’t think But a lot of our politics seems to me to be fueled off of from coming from the right and the left, anger at the other side, all too often, rather than a positive vision of the future. And I think, you know, there’s not right now a big market in the clickbaity world that I think people respond to that when they listen to it enough and when it comes at them from enough angles. And so I think your work in this space is not a waste of time in the least.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. I’m happy to have the reassurance. And it sounds like you are not merely speaking with people in your community. You’re also involved with some of the big projects that CCL has going on. Like I saw that there was a conservative lobby day and there’s a bill that Citizens Climate Lobby appears co-authored or maybe even just authored themselves and has been trying to get past at the federal level. So what all is happening with CCL and your work out there in D. C.?
Daniel Palken: Yeah, so I live in Boulder, Colorado, but I travel to DC somewhat regularly for my work in Citizens Climate Lobby. And I’ll first talk about what that looks like, and then talk about, like you mentioned, the bill that we’re fighting for right now. So, Citizens Climate Lobby, as the name suggests, is an organization based on the idea of citizen lobbying. I think we think of the lobbying space all too often as a space reserved for the high-powered lobbyists, somebody who can make a lot of promises and has a lot It’s unfortunate that this is our kind of canonical image for thinking about our right to petition our government.
It’s much more natural in my mind and a much better context. And so I view myself as an ultra low powered lobbyist. Yeah. And so on our recent conservative lobby day, this was a first of a kind event for us. We’ve had a lot of lobby days for citizens climate lobby dating back about a decade or more. And the conservative lobby day, you know, we run a bipartisan organization and the critical mass of conservatives... And our organization kind of hit the point recently where we felt that it was appropriate to fly everybody down to DC, let people connect from across the country, feel that community in person of people who, you know, don’t fit into the stereotypical leftist.
Right of center space where you want climate action, but are in a center or right of center or libertarian space where you nonetheless see climate as a very high priority issue. And then from there, we go into congressional offices, we meet with staff, we’ve developed really two Terrific relationships with these offices. So at this point in our organization’s history, we really, when we go into an office, we often get the legislative director, we often get the top energy aide. Sometimes we get the representative or senator, him or herself. We sit down and we have these meetings.
They often we place a kind of prime value on the role of constituents in these meetings. So we’ll often have several people from in district in these meetings, and we all have roles in the meetings, they’re very well organized and well thought out in advance, but we build in a nimbleness and flexibility. And so having, you know, we have a lot of trainings for our volunteers who go into these spaces, but the best training... So by the you know, your first lobby meeting is frankly a terrifying experience. You’re, you know, if you’re anyone like me, you haven’t been in the halls of power before you go into Congress, it’s a these are kind of intimidating, imposing buildings with With all their old style architecture and their marble and you go in and you’re in an office and you can barely speak and by the 10th time you do this, you’re firmly in the mindset that these people do work for you and that you’re here to kind of jump into the important meat of the issue and to really have a So that’s the first half of the answer to your two-part question.
The other part was about the specific legislation that we’re doing all this lobbying on behalf of. Placing a price on the extraction of fossil fuels, and that price will get passed along throughout the supply chain, ultimately in large part to consumers, but also through businesses and through corporations, companies, and will at every stage of the supply chain. At every stage of the economy, disincentivize the use of fossil fuels to precisely the degree that they put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So what I mean by that is coal, for example, emits more CO2 when burned than does natural gas or than does materials.
And so it gets taxed at a slightly higher rate per kilowatt hour of energy that you extract from it. That price that we then collect into a fund with the Treasury, instead of using it for a government program or anything like that, we take the money and we give it straight back to the American citizens is what we call a carbon dividend. And this simultaneously answers the biggest concern that progressives have about carbon taxes and the biggest concern that conservatives have about carbon taxes. Progressives feel that carbon taxes are regressive because they are.
They hurt poorer people fractionally more than richer people. Well, the dividend actually reverses that paradigm because the dividend is more progressive than the tax itself is regressive. Conversely, conservatives feel that a carbon tax is just a liberal ploy to grow government all too often. It’s a way of raising money for a government that they don’t want to grow anymore. And ensuring that the fund is revenue neutral and that the money goes back to citizens rather than being... This sort of policy, by the way, is... It’s not something we came up with.
The idea has been around for a while. It was kind of come about from Bill Nordhaus, a recent Nobel Prize winning economist. And on that note, the economics community is very much behind this proposal in particular. There was a letter in the Wall Street Journal. Where 3,500 economists, including I think 27 or so Nobel laureates, every former living chairman of the Fed, virtually every former living chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the president, set a carbon fee and dividend proposal like ours. Is not only an effective approach, but the most cost effective approach to reducing emissions in this country.
So it’s a powerful plan. It’s well vetted. It’s supported by a number of conservative and liberal thought leaders and stakeholders. But it’s not something that gets a ton of media play. So it’s something that we have to do our own advertising for and build up a knowledge and awareness of in constituencies in the population.
Ross Kenyon: So is this bill, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, is it? So in the legislative process, I imagine that there are competing bills that are not taking the same fee and dividend approach. There are some that are just carbon taxes. There’s other approaches that are more comprehensive, like the Green New Deal and various bills related to that entire paradigm. Where does it fall in and how is the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act’s prospects right now relative to its competitors?
Daniel Palken: Yeah, so great question. I should have myself also mentioned that this bill since being kind of conceived of as a carbon fee and dividend proposal, when it was introduced in the House and Senate in the Congress of 2018, is called the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. It’s currently just in the House as H. R. 763 is the bill number if people want to look it up there. There are a lot of other carbon pricing proposals floating around right now. There’s the Market Choice Act, which has multiple Republican co-sponsors on it.
Ours has Yeah, absolutely. I’ve heard the feedback from congressional offices when we go in and say, We’re giving our perspective on comparing and contrasting the different carbon pricing bills because they really have different strengths and weaknesses. CCL has thrown its full weight behind this bill, talked to congressional offices, asked them to co-sponsor it, gotten key endorsements on it from members of the committees that it’s in. So the bill is currently in three committees in the House. It’s in Foreign Affairs, Ways and Means, and Energy and Commerce. And it probably won’t move out of those committees until we see progress on it in the Senate for historical reasons, frankly.
There was the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2010, which got kind of ahead of itself in the House before there was a real companion. The other carbon taxes, they serve. Yeah, absolutely. So there’s different things for conservatives and more liberal people to like when it comes to how you assess and what you do with the money from these various carbon pricing bills. You know, in the broader space of climate policy, climate policy really falls into three categories. There’s the category that this bill exists in, which is pricing, which is the government kind of does the bare minimum thing.
It puts a price signal in place by saying we’re going to apply a tax to like a thousand or so entities, coal mines, oil and gas refineries, etc. , And we’re going to let the market signal come into existence and let markets do what they do and foster that innovation and drive a transition, but be technology agnostic. So whichever technology reduces carbon the best in this industry. This view of markets is the one that will come out on top. Conversely, there are proposals that seek more to work through government funding.
So the government identifies technologies that it views as promising and gives them funds to develop. This is actually interestingly an approach that Republicans have shown a significantly enhanced level of interest in. In the past, I’m going to say like two months, this is actually quite new. Minority Leader McCarthy has helped put forth a suite of bills for 2020, some of which are being applauded by the climate community, but which aren’t enough. Frankly, in my view, these bills address the problem around the edges. I think of them as, you know, each addressing something on the order of 1% of the problem.
And they’re kind of speculative because some of the technologies are a long way off. Nonetheless, it’s worth it’s worth. Worth congratulating progress where progress is made. And I think this is a meaningful step. But, you know, subsidization of this sort is viewed by economists as being often a less effective kind of per dollar, how many tonnes of CO2 do you reduce means of emissions reduction. The third approach, which tends to be much more on the liberal side, is regulation. So, you know, the advantage or disadvantage, depending on your perspective of regulation, is that it can be done through the executive more often.
You can also, of course... Citizens Climate Lobby has the view that having the legislature involved is very essential for politically sustainable legislation, because we need legislation that isn’t just turned over as one administration transitions into the next. We need administration that has some measure of bipartisan agreement and that also has been passed into law and that it would take a significant amount of energy and effort to repeal so we can send that signal to companies that, hey, this is here to stay. Time to start adapting.
Ross Kenyon: Great. That’s all very useful information. It leads me into this next question, which is, what do you think is the cause of the climate logjam? What’s it going to take to break it? And I imagine it’s at least partially reaching out to independent voters, conservative voters, libertarian voters, or people who are just somewhat centrist who may not be fully on board for some of what the left is proposing. Is that wrong? Is it not complicated enough? What’s it going to take to get some movement?
Daniel Palken: Yeah, there’s a lot of nuance, I think, to be had in this space. And we should be careful not to oversimplify what it will take. It’s not simply the case that, you know, all we need to do is engage conservatives, you know, liberals, many liberals have been flag bearers for this issue for a long time. And we’re seeing a real uptick in the energy on the left and the center left around climate change. And the key is to channel that energy in a way which keeps driving the conversation forward. But, you know, there are studies in the social psychology.
Yeah. And so often the same tactics that draw more people in from the left can be alienating to people on the right. And, you know, people should practice their politics in line with their convictions and what they feel they need to do. So I’m not here to necessarily to criticize or anything like that. I’m here to say that it’s very important to be cognizant of kind of the effects both intended and unintended of our political actions in the climate space. To move the needle on the climate conversation in the short and in the long term is the engagement of conservatives.
And, you know, that’s everyone from people who are just, you know, closer to the center to libertarian minded folk to moderate conservatives. Conservatives to even Trump Republicans to really create a space where people across the political spectrum feel that climate is an issue they can get behind. No other situation, no other external threat the size of climate change would we ever believe can be handled by half of America with the other half not being on board at all. It would have been utter nonsense in World War II to say, okay, we’re going to fight the Nazis.
With only half of our people really at all invested in even doing this. So in my mind and in my view, and I could cite a number of other studies that talk about the history of legislation in this country and what historically does and doesn’t work and the trends. And so... So certainly bringing conservatives into the conversation is that key ingredient. And, you know, it’s thought of as perhaps a very daunting or hard task to do this. And in some sense, maybe, but I think there’s a misconception among the public.
About where the actual beliefs of a lot of conservatives are when it comes to climate. It turns out that when polled, a strong majority of Americans, including a majority of conservatives, see climate change. As an issue that is worth doing something about. Now, the what to do about it question differs from right to left in meaningful ways. But it’s not the case that the kind of very vocal minority we see saying, you know, this isn’t an issue, man didn’t cause it. That’s actually not the dominant thinking. Just that people are voicing when asked about this issue, right of center.
And it’s important, you know, the question is, why aren’t we seeing that part of the right take a larger and more prominent role? Well, because the culture doesn’t provide that narrative. That it’s actually, it is very much in line with conservative values. I mean, conservative even at its root has conserve in the name. We want to conserve the things that are good about where our society is and how we’ve gotten here. And one of the things that’s good is the clean air we have, the clean water we have, and the livable climate we have.
And so, again, it’s kind of the creation of a space is always the phrase I use for conservatives to rally around this issue, articulate the solutions that conservatives see as the most effective, and then champion those solutions in a way that is empowering.
Ross Kenyon: And one advantage I’ve seen that the left currently has in driving so much of the momentum around climate change is that they have a vision of the future. And I’m thinking of that video that was Naomi Klein and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made, the drawn one, that’s imagining what a future looks like after the Green New Deal. And then, of course, simultaneously looking into the future with a vision of what a transform America and world looks like. There’s also this hearkening back to a lot of what is idealized in the past here, like the New Deal itself sort of has a very rosy reputation, at least among some circles in the United States, or they use the language of the Marshall Plan, It was seemingly a lot more bipartisan and wasn’t nearly as divisive as the New Deal itself was.
But I don’t see much of that from the right at all. It seems like many of the plays that are coming out of the right are reactive to the left. They don’t seem like they have a very strong vision. Do you think this characterization is correct? Are there parts of it that are correct? Is the right working to ameliorate my perception here?
Daniel Palken: I take your point. And I think that’s a valid and to some degree fair point in the context of the climate conversation that the right has not articulated, you know, with exceptions. There are major players on the right. James Baker, George Shultz, former secretaries of state under H. W. Bush and Reagan are big exceptions to this, several members of Congress currently, but have not articulated a vision which competes with – In the public perception, sometimes the vision of the left around climate solutions. And I view this as a real missed opportunity for the right because the right has its own ideas in this space.
What I like to say is that we often forget that the best climate solutions are really right of center. They’re these market-based solutions which take advantage, which tap into America’s innovative potential to bring down emissions. And if you want to see... The people beginning to voice that positive vision in the public sphere and see what that looks like. I encourage listeners to look up the group Students for Carbon Dividends. Specifically, Students for Carbon Dividends has a YouTube channel in which they just I would recommend just kind of they’re all like one to three minute videos.
I should also say a word about... They’re another group that I work closely with. They’re a group of mostly young, well, of course, students, conservatives who are in the climate space and very much want market drivers. They endorse the exact same framework under which Citizens Climate Lobby’s policy falls, a carbon price, a dividend, and then several other elements of the policy, which are also important. And there’s over 50 college Republican chapters that are signed in to this coalition. There’s also a dozen or so college Democrat chapters. So it’s a bipartisan group.
And there’s college environmental chapters and business and economics groups at colleges are also part of this broad coalition. And they’re articulating a market-driven vision of... I think it’s a fair point that the left has taken climate and tied its solution to the solution of other issues, which they view as important. I see the logic and the reason behind that. Citizens Climate Lobby is tying our solving climate change to our solving our political division issue. We’re using climate as a bridge issue to remind Americans that we actually have a lot of common ground because we’re changing.
So whereas, one approaches. Just to tie climate to kind of other tangible political issues of the day that have tangible policy solutions. What Citizens Climate Lobby is doing is we’re tying solving climate change to in a way fixing our democracy from the inside out from the cultural aspects of it by by reuniting America around a more prosperous vision for the future.
Ross Kenyon: Well, nicely done. I mean, I asked, that was a pretty pointed question. So good job holding your own, I guess, Daniel. Yeah, I would like to see more vision. I listened to a political climb. It’s because the right actually doesn’t have a vision for what is happening and what they I’m not sure. I hope to, you know, whether or not I end up ultimately agreeing with it or not, I would like to see that. Yeah.
Daniel Palken: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I know your podcast is somewhat unique in the climate space for having a constituency of a listenership. I just use the word constituency as if I’m in some political office, having a listenership of some, you know, Republican. Yeah. We, you know, organizations like Citizens Climate Lobby are equipped to empower people who want to help create a space for that vision. Because that vision is a key ingredient in what’s going to dig us out of the climate hole we’re in. It’s really, it’s the first law of holes.
When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. And listeners can help with that.
Ross Kenyon: Great. I think that is a good thing for them to do. And just for the record, I’m not sure to what degree our audience does reflect membership in Republican Party or being conservatives or libertarians. I imagine there are some, primarily because we’ve had people on who do share those beliefs and we’ve been fair to them or what I like to think is fair to them. We try to treat everyone that way. Yeah, that was my hope in saying that.
Daniel Palken: Maybe it’s just all liberals listening. It could be. In the hopes that your guest list has churned out some meaningful audience in that space. I hope I’m reaching those people.
Ross Kenyon: And me too. I think they probably are out there. And mostly what I’ve heard is people saying like, oh, thank you. I didn’t know that you could be a conservative or a libertarian and care about the environment. This was such an interesting episode. Or I get messages from people who identify as indisputable. I’m trying to remember if I’ve seen much of that. I think they are out there just because there’s not a lot of climate podcasts who do what we do. Although political climate is a good example of trying to be bipartisan or transpartisan in a really thorough way.
But yeah, anyways, this is sort of a bonus content at the end here. If someone did want to join you in creating this vision for the right of center or independence moderates, people who are not necessarily fully sold on the left and center left’s vision of the Green New Deal, they want to help you with this. How should they do so?
Daniel Palken: Well, I should also say, you know, before I give the short answer of how you can find us to that question, Citizens Climate Lobby is also a real space for the left. The whole point of this organization is we’re a space that takes people where they are in the political spectrum and creates a truly And so, if you find yourself on the left, if you’re a supporter, I just happen to work on the right half of our organization. So you can find us at cclusa.org. You can read about our bill at energyinnovationact.
org. You can also follow me if you like on Twitter at Daniel Palkin. So I encourage listeners to go on to CCLUSA.org and find the nearest chapter to them because We have over 550 chapters worldwide, most of them in the US and Canada, but I think new chapters have recently opened up in the past year or so in Pakistan, in Nigeria, all over the world, really. And I’m amazed to see that because it’s not just a United States organization. And so if, you know, listeners find, you know, if you’re in the United States, chances are there’s a chapter near you.
I encourage you to find that chapter, go to the meeting, wherever you are in the political spectrum and find, you know, find that personal empowerment to engage the community you live in and the people that represent you in Washington on the issue of climate if it’s important to you.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Thank you for correcting me. I don’t think I featured that element of Citizens Climate Lobby nearly strongly enough. So thank you. It isn’t just for people who agree with broadly the topics that we’ve discussed today. It’s for people who want to work together on climate policy across the aisle. Is that a better way of saying it?
Daniel Palken: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a broad space for people who want to work, particularly across the aisle from whatever side of the aisle you’re on or the center.
Ross Kenyon: Great. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for telling us about all of your work. I hope you are successful in reaching more conservatives and libertarians and dependents, people that we don’t really hear from in the climate world nearly as much as I think we should.
Daniel Palken: All right. Well, thank you so much, Ross. It was a pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. And if you enjoy the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, on Stitcher. Send this to a friend who might be in the audience that we’ve just discussed. Maybe they’ll like it. Maybe they’ll really dive into climate change and maybe they’ll become one of these activists who’s working with Daniel. You never know. Well, thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience.
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