We know that minority populations bear an unequal burden when it comes to climate change. And yes, Black Americans are concerned about the climate crisis, but they don’t see the environment as a top-tier issue. So, what can advocates and policymakers do to make climate change more relevant to Black communities and ensure their inclusion in a clean energy transition?
Jared DeWese is Senior Communications Advisor for the Climate & Energy Program at Third Way, a center-left federal policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. Jared joins Ross to discuss the organization’s recent report, ‘Black Americans Care About Climate Change (But It’s Complicated),’ sharing the top takeaways from their qualitative research and explaining how advocates can mobilize communities of color around climate change by connecting the issue with their daily lives.
Jared weighs in on how Black Americans are impacted by climate change, introducing us to the idea of environmental racism and exploring what we can do to confront and transform discriminatory systems and policies. Listen in for Jared’s insight on promoting climate policy in a divided Congress and learn why he is optimistic about the potential for real progress at this particular moment in history.
Resources:
Black Americans Care About Climate Change (But It’s Complicated)
Yale Program on Climate Communication Study on Race & Attitudes Toward Climate Change
The Environmental Kuznets Curve
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequity in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson
Joe Biden’s Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice
Otto von Bismarck & the Welfare State
The Life & Legacy of John Lewis on The Daily Podcast
James Baldwin on Being Black in America
Alexander Hamilton on Slavery as Wasted Potential
W.E.B. Du Bois’ Concept of Double Consciousness
The Environmental Defense Fund Poll on African Americans & Clean Energy Resources
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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. I am the lead strategist at the Nori Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Jared DeWeese, Senior Communications Advisor for the Climate and Energy Program at Third Way, a center-left federal policy think tank in D.
C. Hey, Jared.
Jared DeWese: Hey, Ross. How are you?
Ross Kenyon: I’m doing well. Thanks for being on the show.
Jared DeWese: Thank you for having me.
Ross Kenyon: I was very intrigued by the report. Y’all just issued a research report called Black Americans Care About Climate Change, parenthetical, but it’s complicated. So we’re going to dive into what the report deals with, but maybe I’m going to channel my co-host in absentia, Christophe Jospe. We like to start with people’s stories. So Jared, what led you to this point right here in your career?
Jared DeWese: Yeah. Well, thanks for asking. And again, thank you for having me on. So I started at Third Way about almost three years ago, and I wanted to work in the political space. I wanted to work toward some type of change. And I don’t have a traditional climate and energy background. I’ve taken a few classes in climate and energy policy in graduate school. And that is what kind of led me to Third Way. But prior to Third Way, I had a very unorthodox route. I was a teacher at one point in New York City in the Bronx.
I also worked in fashion communications, which people always find interesting. But my undergraduate degree is in theater, and that’s what led me to New York. So I have a pretty unorthodox winding road to third way. But all along the way, it was my passion for communications and giving voice to the voiceless. When I was a kid, my very first political memory, my family was very politically engaged. I’m from Great Falls, South Carolina, a very small town in the Piedmont of South Carolina. And one of my very first political memories was the first election of Bill Clinton.
In my elementary school, there was a mock election. And, you know, you had people who were on, you know, going for George H. W. Bush and my family, traditionally Democrats, historically Democrats. I was fighting for Bill Clinton, who was my John F. Kennedy. Might not be popular to say now, but, you know, for me, he was. And got me involved in Wanting to inspire people to vote and getting people activated. And so I remember wearing, I had a Clinton Gore t-shirt. I used to wear it three times a week. My mother had to rent it out every single night.
And I would wear it to school trying to get people to vote in this mock election for Bill Clinton. And since that moment to this moment, no matter whether it was getting fifth graders to vote for Bill Clinton, he did lose that election in the high school, but he won the national election, or whether it was teaching students in the Bronx in New York City, or whether it was trying to encourage trends in the fashion industry to now, to communicating to different audiences about climate and climate policy. My own mission in life has always been about Making change happen for progress.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. You must have been a demanding pupil.
Jared DeWese: I was a pretty annoying kid, actually.
Ross Kenyon: I said it diplomatically. You’re in college.
Jared DeWese: You get it. You asked all of my cousins and all of my elementary school friends. They’ll just say annoying, but it all turned out well in the end.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, man. I was a bit of a class clown growing up. How were you? Yeah. In fifth grade, every student had to choose a president. And somehow my name got drawn first. I remember everyone looked at me and I said, Bill Clinton. And the class was just like, oh, no. Oh, no. What’s going to happen? All I really remember from that presentation I gave was holding up a can of peaches and talking about impeachment. It wasn’t my finest work in humor. I think I’ve improved since then.
Jared DeWese: But I bet kids remember it, though. I bet they remembered it.
Ross Kenyon: I’ll never forget that moment. Indeed. All right. So that’s a good place. You got us up to the present now. What is this report and what led to its creation? Black Americans care about climate change, but it’s complicated. Fill us in.
Jared DeWese: Yeah. So we’ve been working on finding ways to give voice to demographics that are often unheard in the climate conversation for about a year. And as the Senior Vice President of our program says, we should have started this work a long time ago because there’s been so little work done within the climate advocacy community around Black Americans that it’s past due. And so I was pushing forward, my SVP was pushing forward, and we said that this is really important to our work to make sure that the solutions that we were advocating for were both equitable and fair.
Because Black Americans not only make a huge voting block in the Democratic Party, but they make up a huge part of the constituency in the U. S. that will be impacted both by climate change as well as climate policies to address the climate crisis. So, you know, we felt that it was only natural and authentic for us to do this work. And so we began this research, the qualitative portion, in February of this year. And it was over a couple of weeks. And it was in Detroit, Michigan, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Greensboro, North Carolina.
We initially were intending to do qualitative and quantitative. But at the end of our qualitative research, the global health pandemic had really taken its toll on the US. And we decided that the quantitative research that we were going to go into the field with wouldn’t match the qualitative research that we had already conducted because priorities were shifting. You know, people were concerned about More immediate concerns about health and job safety and their own safety rather than climate in the immediate. Now, that’s research that we plan to go back in and look at in the future.
But at that moment, it just didn’t really make sense to put that qualitative research that we conducted and our quantitative research together.
Ross Kenyon: What sort of results did you see off of this first phase?
Jared DeWese: Yeah, so we found three main takeaways. And the first of which, you know, is something we all know, that Black Americans care about climate change. And we’ve seen that in Yale’s quantitative study, as well as some other research that we’ve seen. However, we found in the groups that we talked to that while they cared about climate change, it was a bit more complicated, that it wasn’t a top-tier issue for them, that jobs, racism, and the economy rated higher for them. But when we probed a little further with groups in each city, you would find that if you talked about climate in connection to health impacts, or climate in relationship to jobs, or climate in relationship to relocation, all the things that we know that climate is going to have a huge impact on, We found that people were deeply concerned about those things.
So it was about how you talk to communities about climate and how you connect it to their daily lives that would show that how much more they cared about it than they initially cited. The second takeaway that we found was that no one is talking to the communities that we talk to about climate change. They often said that, you know, researchers and politicians only come around when they need something from them, when they need research or when they need a vote, but that no one was providing sustained communication with these communities about climate change.
And part of that is that, you know, a lot of people think that because climate may fall, you know, is less salient in Black communities, that they aren’t as interested in the issue. But that’s not true. And, you know, they are interested. It’s about how you talk to them about it. So they said no one’s talking to us about it. The third thing that we found was that clean energy jobs and resources seemed out of reach to the communities we talked to. In particular, in Detroit, our college-educated mixed-gender group found that, or they said that they knew of clean energy job training in the area, but they neither knew how to connect with that.
They neither knew anyone who did connect with it. And they felt that it was for wealthier, whiter communities. And so what we ultimately decided and what we found that this research suggested was that policymakers and climate advocates have a long way to go to connect climate to the daily lives of African-Americans in these communities and to make it also more salient to them. And to make sure that they have access. I mean, we also, we understand that, you know, in healthcare, African Americans, there’s barriers to access. The same thing goes for climate and for clean energy resources.
Ross Kenyon: Mm-hmm. A good example of the environmental business curve might be, we’re wealthy enough to care about something like polar bears, but you’re not necessarily linking that climate change negative outcome to something like, my kids have to carry around a device, a nebulizer, or they could die. So that’s quite different, I imagine. Which one is it, do you think, or both?
Jared DeWese: Yeah, I think it’s more of the latter than the former. I do think it’s about connecting to tangible evidence than it is about the curve. I think that Generally, the reason why I say that is because we talk to African Americans of various socioeconomic backgrounds and various educational backgrounds and gender and age. And what we found was that no matter the gender, no matter the age, no matter the socioeconomic background, and no matter the education, they all said the same thing, is that no one is connecting this to my daily life.
So that speaks to me of the latter rather than the former.
Ross Kenyon: Mm-hmm. And what sorts of climate impacts are African Americans already experiencing or could expect to experience?
Jared DeWese: Yeah, I mean, for instance, think about the relocation. I mean, African Americans, systemic racism has made redlining. And for anyone who doesn’t know, don’t know what redlining is, redlining was a systemic practice where U. S. banks denied mortgages to people, mostly people of color, mostly black people in urban areas, preventing them from buying a home in certain neighborhoods. So this practice was largely in places like Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, and other places where there are large black populations. And so what happened was that African Americans were placed in communities that were usually near petrochemical plants or other places that would create environmental hazards.
And so that increased health impacts. Not only that, is that those are the places that are going to have the most impact from climate change. And they’re going to either have to, if they are low income, they’re going to have to stay in those areas and suffer from more health impacts, as well as environmental hazards, or they’ll be forced to move if they can. I mean, we saw this in New Orleans during Katrina. So, you know, that’s a microcosm of what the climate crisis will do to black communities.
Ross Kenyon: Is that typically what is meant by environmental racism, which we need to do a full and proper show about it, but maybe this is a good place to introduce the concept to our listeners.
Jared DeWese: Absolutely. You know, we found in our research, the term environmental justice didn’t resonate with the participants that we talked to, but when we talked about racism and climate, that sparked more interest from the participants. And so I do think personally, when you talk about environmental racism, It raises more flags for African-Americans than saying environmental justice. And we talked a little bit about this today during a briefing we held around this research is that maybe people think with environmental justice, you’re thinking it’s tied to the courts or like you’re taking polluters to court.
Whereas environmental racism, I know what racism is. I deal with racism every day. And so I can understand that if I live somewhere, my air is dirtier. I’m going to have greater impacts than another community. Because of the color of my skin. That’s easier and more tangible to understand than the term environmental justice. So environmental racism is definitely directly linked to redlining and other systemic failures.
Ross Kenyon: And it could even be, redlining has this intentionality behind it, but I could also see it just operating through races correlated with wealth and poverty to some extent. People of color are more poor on average than white people in the United States. And I imagine land values and rents are much cheaper around dirtier, more dangerous environments. It might not entirely be intentional, but those outcomes still might have a racial component to them. Is that an appropriate way to see it?
Jared DeWese: I think that’s an appropriate way to see it. I mean, we look at some of the practices, some of the policy consequences of, say, the New Deal from the 1930s. Some of those were intentional and some of those were not, but they still proved to be racist, unintentional, and intentional policies that had Terrible effects for African Americans in this country. So whether it was intentional or not intentional, Black people still suffer.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. Yeah. Actually, I just heard the other day that Social Security was not accessible to African Americans until I think Truman. Is that right?
Jared DeWese: Yeah. Yeah. So you had during the New Deal, there were the Dixiecrats who did not want domestics, our Field workers to receive Social Security benefits. And those people tended to be Black.
Ross Kenyon: Do they actually single those two labor occupational classes out in the law?
Jared DeWese: Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. I had no idea. Wow.
Jared DeWese: Yeah. There’s a really good book that it’s called, and I actually have it on my desk now. It’s called When Affirmative Action Was White. And it talks about the New Deal. Because the New Deal primarily benefited... White, blue-collar workers. I mean, the middle class that grew out of World War II, there were a lot of Black people, yes, indeed, who rose to the middle class at that period, but there were disproportionately more white people who grew out of, you know, the white middle class grew disproportionately more than any other race in this country because of the New Deal and because of World War II.
Ross Kenyon: That’s fascinating. The New Deal has so much mythology around it too, which isn’t to say there aren’t great parts of it that we’re better off for having, but there’s also all these stories in here that are absurd, racist. There are also things like farmers being paid. Yeah. Yeah, I think we’re seeing some of that, especially with Vice President Biden.
Jared DeWese: He just released a climate initiative, the second part of his climate plan, and a core part of that plan was environmental justice, ensuring that there are no intentional or unintentional policy consequences for people who will suffer the most from climate change. Part of that plan is about just transitions. Ensuring that workers who may be displaced in a clean energy transition have a job to go to, or at least we will study how we can make that transition more equitable for people who are going to be displaced. And so, you know, we’re seeing that more and more, especially in light of, you know, rising racial protests after the murders of, you know, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
I think that the time is we’ve learned from the mistakes of the past. I mean, I think the New Deal had, you know, great aspirations and it intended to lift all people, but it did not. And so now we’re in a period where we understand that. And we also understand that, you know, a rising tide doesn’t lift, it doesn’t lift all boats. So if we want to lift boats, we have to do that in a more concerted and directed effort to communities who tend to get left behind.
Ross Kenyon: What provisions do you think are really crucial for doing that? Just transitions seems like a good place to start making sure people are not abandoned after a lifetime of accumulating skills, which have been rendered obsolete by law and just environmental stewardship. What else might be connected to race? How does one be an anti-racist in this capacity? I realize all these questions are gigantic, Jared. You can tell me if I’m asking you to bite off more than one should be expected to chew.
Jared DeWese: I think the way that one is anti-racist, that is a huge question, is to really think about the systems that have been designed to hold people back and then to think about how one might not participate in those systems and then to question other people who might be participating in those systems or perpetuating those systems. To me, it seems like an easy question, maybe because I am Black. And because of that, I have suffered under those systemic failures. But I think that is how I would answer it, is think about your place in that system.
How can you address those failures? And how can you challenge other people to do the same? And whether that’s in challenging your friends in their conversation and the terms that they use, or whether that’s in the policies that we design, making sure that we’re not leaving people behind and we’re not intentionally or unintentionally causing people to suffer. And that’s hard. Admittedly, the latter of that is harder than the former. It is something that we have grown as a society more compassionate to doing, and we have to constantly challenge ourselves to do that.
Ross Kenyon: Well, sure. Fair enough. I’m going to go out on a limb here, and I’m going to spiel for a second. And this might not make sense, but we’re going to give it a try anyways. Okay. When I think about the creation of the welfare state, I think about Otto von Bismarck being... Pretty conservative guy in Germany, you know, late 19th century, trying to make sure that the socialists don’t rise up and cause a revolution and overthrow the monarchy and such. And so how do you give people enough comfort and safety such that they don’t feel angry enough to tip over the ox cart as it were?
And this is a very conservative framing. I understand that. But isn’t it concerning to people that it does feel like we’re in danger from both like my friends who are left of center are increasingly radical. And then the people I know who support Trump and then Trump himself seems to be acting in increasingly authoritarian ways that I find frightening. They seem to feed off of each other, which is extra bad. Wouldn’t it just be in the interest of everyone who likes law and order and safety and comfort to try to deal with these foundational issues in America such that we could believe in it and trust it and not be at each other’s throats?
That seems like a very unifying kind of thing for me. I wish that was more common.
Jared DeWese: That’s interesting. I think that... Give me a second on that one.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, sorry. Was that hot garbage? I don’t know.
Jared DeWese: What I’m looking for is the question specifically. Are you asking about trust in government? Are you asking about how to stamp out revolution? I guess that’s what I’m trying to understand.
Ross Kenyon: Quash the revolution. No, I think the question I have in mind here in particular is my failure for not asking something discreetly. Do you know Mike Duncan, the podcaster, The History of Rome and Revolutions?
Jared DeWese: I’ve heard of it.
Ross Kenyon: It’s great. He sort of takes this sort of Bismarckian approach. I think his politics are left of center. But he’s always talking about like, oh, okay, Rome was on the danger of collapse or it had left-leaning populists who were going to cause a revolution. And so these Yeah, I don’t think there’s any incentive to do that. I mean, our politics are incredibly diverse.
Jared DeWese: The most polarized they’ve been in modern times, right? So there’s no incentive to do that. Our media is polarized. If you are conservative, you tend to watch Fox News. And it’s a cycle of reinforcing what you already believe. And your politicians speak to you in that way. You speak back to your politicians that way. And so there’s no incentive for politicians or advocates on the right To bend to that because they’ll get primary. They won’t get reelected. They won’t get the favor of this president. So what is the incentive? Is the incentive for consensus when you also have the left who may or may not be interested in that consensus?
And both sides, the most well-intentioned of them, believe that What they’re advocating for are the best things for people. So there’s really no incentive when we’re squared off in two different camps. So yeah, I think that’s the issue from the right specifically. I think the left, we tend to bend a little bit more. We tend to want to compromise. We want to get to consensus. But we don’t really get the same. We don’t get the reciprocity from the right on that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don’t see a lot of it either. It’s disappointing. And I actually had a podcast that I did recently that encouraged me to think more that these cycles come back around and there are periods of discord and then there’s concord and it’s okay. This happens. I don’t always get the sense that we’re going to make it through the other side of this. How are you concerned or am I being a bit chicken little here?
Jared DeWese: Yeah. So I’m an optimist. I’m an eternal optimist. And I look at the history of this country and I look at how far African-Americans have actually come. And while there are times that we take two steps forward and we take 10 steps back, we do get to that point where we are better than we were. And as human beings, we are. There’s progress. There’s evolution. I’m a gay man. When I was in high school, when I came out in high school, I didn’t ever conceive of the fact that I would ever get married and have children.
And now I live in a country where I can. It’s possible in every state of the union. I mean, when I first moved to D. C. , my ex-boyfriend, I said to him, I will never live in Virginia because Virginia doesn’t allow gay marriage. We can live in Maryland. We can live in D. C. Within a year or two, gay marriage was legal everywhere. Marriage equality was real. So progress is possible. We just have to keep fighting for it. And the more apathy that develops, I think that is the seed of destruction for progress.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s surprising how fast that happened.
Jared DeWese: Yeah, it was head-spinning, actually.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I remember it just being a long-running campaign issue all through my adolescence and early adulthood. And then it was just like, oh, by the way, this major cultural change happened at the Supreme Court overnight.
Jared DeWese: It was also the third rail of politics at one point. You just didn’t touch it. I mean, don’t ask, don’t tell. All, you know, Defensive Marriage Act, you know, so many things that happened along the way that were just like, this is never going to happen. And then it just happened in the state by state, by court decision by court decision until it became real. And then public opinion moved. That’s what really shifted it. And so I think, you know, we’re seeing, we’re hopefully seeing that now when it comes to police brutality and systemic racism.
I saw a poll that said that, you know, more people were concerned about how President Trump Was handling the racial protests than they were about how he was handling coronavirus. So the deaths, the murders of four black people in this country have shifted how many white people are looking at race in this country. I mean, I was listening to a podcast, The Daily yesterday about, you know, Congressman John Lewis and how, you know, when he went on Edmund Pettus Bridge, he, you know, wore a, you know, a tan colored coat Just in case he was hit by the police and the blood was splatter on it.
And that shifted. People seeing in the South on the news every night, children being set upon by dogs by the police. That shifted public opinion. And so I think that we’re seeing that moment now. We won’t know that for 20 or 30 years. Hindsight is 20-20. So we won’t know that for years from now. But it does feel like a shift. We’re seeing topics like systemic racism become kitchen table conversation. We’re seeing topics like environmental justice and environmental racism come up on podcasts and on the nightly news in a way that we did not see, let alone five years ago, five months ago.
So there is a shift that is happening. It’s just about sustaining this moment to make sure that we have actual, real, practical change.
Ross Kenyon: You made me feel a little bit better. So...
Jared DeWese: I can breathe a little bit. Well, good, good. That was my intention.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, reassure the podcast host. That’s the goal. Yeah, it’s a shame. I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve been in lots of places. I like being an American. I’m proud to be an American. It’s my home. But I wish I could just, I feel the need to, I just said this on another podcast recently, I feel the need to give caveats even saying that. And I would love it if we could deal with some of the foundational issues in American history that led to the way things are now so that we could just feel good about it.
And also, I understand that I benefit in relative terms by being white. And heterosexual and cisgender and all these things. But I also feel like I would be objectively better off if people were not in such strict inequality on various of those fronts. I think about how many people that are I don’t actually know... To what degree I am benefiting in that way, I think I would be better off if we didn’t have this system set up the way that it is.
Jared DeWese: Does that make sense? No, that definitely makes sense. I think what’s interesting to me is that as a Black man, white friends of mine are wrestling with these same questions now. James Baldwin said, to be a Negro in this country, Is to be almost in a constant state of rage. And I would almost say that I would take the almost out and say it is, you know, to be a constant state of rage. And I remember a white friend of mine asked me recently, so, you know, how do you get up every morning to have hope?
I said, well, what other choice do I have? And I think that is true of most black people. And I think that is true of most poor people. It’s like I get up every day and make a decision that today is going to be better than the day before. And then I’m going to do whatever I can to make my life better and the lives of everyone who looks like me better. At least that’s how I wake up every morning. And I know most of the Black people that I know have that same mantra.
As far as what racism does to this country, I think about the words of Alexander Hamilton, who said that slavery was nothing but wasted potential. And that’s the same thing that racism does. Racism is wasted potential. People who could be great and solve some of the greatest challenges in this country because they can’t either get a job, they can’t get the education to get that job, and they can’t live in a community or a zip code that ensures their success. And so I think that we’re in a moment where white people are wrestling with this in a way that they never have, or white people who are wrestling with it now and aren’t from people who ever wrestled with it.
And I think that, you know, Black people like me now are, we’ve always been confrontational about this and we’ve always been challenging the status quo on this. But I think we’re much more forceful now because we see an opening and we see an opportunity to really make real, sustained change. And to me, that provides even more a sense of optimism and hope. Then I’ve ever had before. And I’ve always been proud to be an American. I mean, W. E. B. Du Bois talked about this double consciousness and that our patriotism is complicated because of the history of slavery, because of the history of systemic racism.
It’s not as easy as I fly an American flag and I feel great. And, you know, I feel the Star Spangled Banner in my heart. You know, I can’t forget that even under that flag and even under that anthem, slaves were held in this country. And so I am proud because I know that progress is real and progress can happen. But I also understand the history of this country.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that was beautiful. I’m glad you’re talking me down. I guess, given that you see an opening here, what sorts of expectations do you have for this historical moment in America?
Jared DeWese: Yeah, I think I see... Opportunities to, like we talked about earlier, correcting some of the systemic failures of the past and policies, making sure that people have access to clean energy, clean energy resources, jobs, that they have the information they need to challenge the system, and that elected leaders are held to task and are in response to the people that they represent in a way that they never have before. And that people are engaged enough to say, OK, you’re not responding to the problems of the whole in a way that is moving us forward.
So we’re going to vote you out. It’s time for you to go. Either you listen to these concerns or you have to go. And I think we’re seeing that movement. And I think that this is a very complicated moment. Where, you know, with cancel culture and all of these other things. And I think we’re wrestling with those social challenges now that we’re going to get to a place where people are far more engaged than they ever have been. And that we’re going to have policies that are in response to what people actually need so that they can succeed and fulfill the actual ideals that this country was founded upon.
Ross Kenyon: I hope you don’t mind that I went this direction with the show. Has it been okay for you?
Jared DeWese: No, it’s fine. I think it’s all connected. I think that you can’t pursue happiness if you don’t live in a place where the air is clean and that the air impacts your health and that you don’t have To move or you don’t have a job. All of these things are going to be impacted by climate. So I think they’re connected. And I think that’s part of the problem is that we don’t talk about it in this way with black communities. And that’s why it can be hard to understand and that’s why it can be hard to activate communities around this topic.
Ross Kenyon: And one of the angles that you conclude the report on is that this is to some degree a problem of communication and reaching out to these communities. How do you recommend doing so? Or who might be a good communicator? What needs to happen in order to mobilize communities of color?
Jared DeWese: I think we do want to do more research to find out what are the best messages and who are the best messengers for these things. But going back to what we said, we have to make it more tangible. And as far as messengers, we need to make sure policymakers are not just talking about police brutality and criminal justice reform and all of the typical African-American issues with African-Americans. And they’re talking about issues like climate change and how that’s going to impact or exacerbate all of those other issues that tend to be top tier issues for the African-American community.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine y’all are working on this, but are there other groups that are trying to develop content or messaging around this?
Jared DeWese: Yeah, I mean, you know, like I mentioned earlier, Yale School of Climate Change Communication released a report on this about a year ago. The Environmental Defense Fund also released a study about African-American and clean energy resources. The Center for American Progress has also been interested in this. The Union of Concerned Scientists is also deeply involved in this work. They released a report a year ago, around this time actually, the Killer Heat Index that showed that African Americans I’ll get the exact data for you. You know, it showed that African Americans are exposed to extreme temperatures two to three days more per year in certain counties in the U.
S. So certain counties have more exposure to heat than others, and mostly Black people live in those counties. And by mid-century, the expectation is that some of those same counties would experience 20 more extreme heat days per year. So, you know, A lot of people are starting to do more of this research, connecting it with climate, connecting the climate advocacy community and the environmental justice movement in a way that is tangible for these communities and trying to activate them and also make sure policymakers understand the concerns of these communities.
Ross Kenyon: To what degree have you thought about the necessity or lack thereof of reaching across the aisle? I know there are conservative proposals for addressing climate change. We featured some of them on this show, but I imagine some of these proposals might stick in their craw, one could say. So what is the political strategy for getting policy passed that will at least pass a divided Congress?
Jared DeWese: You know, it would be great to say that I could name a Republican in the House or the Senate who, you know, I think would be willing to work across the aisle on some of these issues. But I can’t really I know that they have released, you know, frameworks for climate that either aren’t backed the science are not exactly serious. And so for me, I think that the best and fastest way to reach net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest is to elect more Democrats. Every single Democrat in this country who is running or has been elected has a climate plan all the way to Joe Biden.
And if I look at that preponderance of evidence and I look at the other side of the aisle, it’s kind of hard to see where we can build that consensus. Now, will it always be like that? No, and it hasn’t always been. I mean, George H. W. Bush was serious about climate. He was serious about the environment. But since that time, we haven’t had, there hasn’t been incentive for Republicans to care about this issue. You know, we have seen as far as certain technologies, there’s consensus between the two parties. You know, Republicans do tend to support advanced nuclear issues.
Carbon capture seems to be a technology that Republicans are warming to, as well as the far left. So I think there are areas around technologies, but as far as holistic solutions to the climate crisis, that’s a little harder to find the consensus on.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve vacillated on this a little bit. I used to think that we should focus quite heavily just on climate change and was a bit suspicious that the left was using this as an opportunity to pass. A lot of social programs that they have previously wanted but could not pass. But this was a useful opportunity to pass under the aegis of climate action. But after doing shows like this and reading quite a lot, I’m starting to think that merely addressing the parts per million in the atmosphere may not be sufficient to deal with all of the justice concerns.
And this might be the chance to do so. So I’m not sure. I hope that conservatives and Republicans in Congress in particular, Are able to find ways to contribute and be a part of climate solutions. And there are groups too, like American Conservation Coalition, house their American Climate Contract. And I’m sure there are others too that I’m forgetting here.
Jared DeWese: Here in DC, you have Clear Path is an organization, a predominantly conservative organization that advocates for some of the same solutions that we advocate for. Niskanen Center. It’s one that is to the right of us. There are other groups out there who are pushing the Republican Party. But again, as long as they’re reinforced by their electorate that they don’t need to care about this. And we’re starting to see a shift among Republican voters that they’re caring more about climate change and they’re caring more about issues like systemic racism as well.
So it would be I am hopeful that push in the electorate will also change the policymakers. We have to get rid of Mitch McConnell. There’s a whole host of Republican politicians that would probably need to go because they don’t actually care about the electorate before we can actually see that change happen.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, maybe so. At least anecdotally, I’ve seen, you know, since I became politically aware, you know, what even is this? Maybe close to two decades ago, there was a lot more climate denial that I would see in more mainstream areas where most of the people that would occupy that intellectual niche now tend to be lukewarmest or the saying, oh, climate change is happening. It’s not as fast or not as severe as we think, or we’ll be able to adapt to it more easily than people typically think or the alarmists think.
So that change, though, has happened pretty seriously. So I wonder what the next step is. It seems like some of the leaders who are front running that are groups like ACC, where they’re saying, like, climate change is real. It’s happening. We’re causing it. And also, here’s a chance for conservatives to have market-based solutions that are not creating a social democracy in the United States any more than we have now. And we should do this. So I imagine that’s probably going to be the next step. And that surely is coming. The ability to deny climate change as a looming threat, even the Pentagon and the DOD, I’m Very, very concerned.
The military is very concerned with what is going to happen with climate change. It’s not really something that’s actively debated, except for people who have an ideological interest in denying it. So I imagine we’ll see more of that movement. And maybe it’ll be as fast as it was for gay marriage. Maybe we’ll just wake up one day and be like, oh, Republicans now believe climate change is a real threat. They just don’t want it to be the Green New Deal that addresses it.
Jared DeWese: Yeah, I mean, you know, I think part of that is due to the media as well. You know, a lot of shows have decided that they would not have climate denialists on their shows or they would not start Because my graduate school thesis was about the polarization of climate change in American politics from 1988 to 2019. Long title. But in my thesis, I talk about how that shift happened. We had a George H. W. Bush and we had more consensus. But then you had certain groups, certain think tanks on the right who believed that climate change would inhibit their donors who were largely fossil fuel.
Barons, so to speak. And they would force FCC laws to, you know, news stations to say, okay, if you have someone on who’s talking about climate change and who’s not a denialist, we need to have a denialist on. You’d have to give them equal time. And now you see, you know, shows saying, actually, no, we’re not going to have people on who deny the science because the science is accepted. You know, more than 97% of scientists Say that climate change is real and it’s happening now. And I think that’s part of it as well.
So we’re getting more of the science to people and in a rawest form and people are accepting it. I think the Trump administration is a throwback, like it’s a step backwards by him having climate denialists as part of his commissions and the over 100 environmental rollbacks or proposed rollbacks that he’s announced. I think that You know, is a step back, but, you know, we have an opportunity. We have an opportunity on November 3rd to say we’re going to reject this climate denialism, this anti-intellectualism, and we can choose progress. You know, we’ll see on November 3rd, hopefully we’ll know by November 4th.
Well, you know, we don’t know, but, you know, hopefully we’ll know like on January 20th, you know, 2021, we can turn the page.
Ross Kenyon: I think even if you are a Republican voter, I think you should recognize that I don’t know that the country would do well for another four years of this. I think inevitably the Trump era is going to come to an end, whether it’s four I don’t know. As of course, you know, working with the Sanders campaign and trying to adopt some of those policy positions of Sanders and trying to make sure that the left wing of the Democratic Party and the more centrists are aligned there. Would you rather have that or would you rather have whatever comes after the country is exhausted from Trump?
I doubt it’s going to be really like more of the same kind of Biden, less threatening to the order. Yeah.
Jared DeWese: I find that argument very challenging. You know, I hear people who say, you know, it’s the lesser of two evils. And I think that argument is false because, I mean, if we want to talk about evil, like Joe Biden is a decent human being and he wants to do the right thing. I don’t believe that about Donald Trump. And if you believe that like I do, at least if you believe that, you know, Joe Biden is not a dastardly man like, you know, Donald Trump, then you’ve already made your decisions.
And you have to understand that we can’t continue to let this man be at the helm of the public health crisis that we’re now enduring, largely because of his lack of leadership and lack of vision. And even beyond that, the next disaster is looming right around the corner, whether it’s another public health pandemic, but for sure, the climate crisis is right around the corner. And we’re already seeing impacts of that. We don’t have to wait until 2035 or 2050 or whatever day, whatever year we wanna put out there. We’re seeing it now.
We’re seeing hotter days. We’re seeing intense flooding. We’re seeing people having to leave the places that they have always lived because they can’t live there anymore. And that’s only gonna become more intense and worse over the years. And having people like Donald Trump Who also doesn’t challenge, you know, Putin and Bolsonaro, who are far worse. And who’s to say that Donald Trump won’t become worse in the next four years or as bad or worse than they are. So we have a choice. We have a choice to look forward. We have a choice to look back.
And I also don’t, I find it hard to, you know, acknowledge that, you know, people who say that not voting is an option as well. To me, not voting is also a vote for Donald Trump.
Ross Kenyon: All right, Jared, you got to give me one little nugget of positivity here. Do you got anything in your quiver you can throw out real quick?
Jared DeWese: I think that I have hope. I have hope in the American people. I have hope in the American experience. Because every time that we have looked backward, we’ve then turned the page to look forward.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. I guess that’s where we’re going to have to call it and hopefully be okay with it. And we’ll try to keep this hope alive here.
Jared DeWese: Hopefully, if I didn’t inspire you in that moment, there is a person out there who’s like, you know what? I got a little bit more hope. I’m going to go vote.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, maybe so. I’m always curious to what degree people enjoy political episodes like this or that unexpectedly became electoral, but that’s okay. Right, right. Where can people learn more about your work and more about Third Way’s work, Jared?
Jared DeWese: Absolutely. Please go to thirdway. org and follow us on Third Way Energy on Twitter.
Ross Kenyon: I imagine you have a personal Twitter too.
Jared DeWese: I do. It’s at Jared DeWeese. My name is at J-A-R-E-D-D-E-W-E-S-E.
Ross Kenyon: Links to all of those things are in the show notes as well as the original piece that we’re talking about. Black Americans care about climate change, but it’s complicated. Thanks for being here, Jared.
Jared DeWese: Thank you, Ross. It was a pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: It was mine too. And if you enjoyed the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, tell your friends, and thank you 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. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up We are also now on Patreon at patreon.
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