There’s a lot of advice on how reduce your carbon footprint. But everything seems to come with a caveat. You can stop eating meat, but do synthetic meats require monoculture? You can boycott Bitcoin, but would that make the grid itself any cleaner? You can drive an electric car, but its battery is made with rare minerals. So, how do you make choices that really move the needle?
Paul Greenberg is the fisherman and bestselling author behind Four Fish, American Catch, and The Omega Principle. His latest book is called The Climate Diet: 50 Simple Ways to Trim Your Carbon Footprint. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Paul joins Ross to explain what we can do to support sustainable fisheries and why we should be ‘picky plant eaters.’
Paul challenges us to be mindful of how many children we add to the planet and shares his argument against building infrastructure that gets us ‘back to normal’ after the pandemic. Listen in for Paul’s insight on electrical versus gas appliances and learn how The Climate Diet can help you make conscious choices in a spirit of kindness to the environment.
Connect with Ross
Subscribe to the show on Substack @ rosskenyon.com/subscribe.
I also write Carbon Removal Memes and curate Climate Workers Anonymous.
Resources
What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins by Jonathan Balcombe
‘The Wrong Mine for the Wrong Place’ in The New York Times
‘The Plant Prescription’ in Eating Well
Goodbye Phone, Hello World: 60 Ways to Disconnect from Tech and Reconnect to Joy by Paul Greenberg
How to Break Up with Your Phone by Catherine Price
Empty Planet on Reversing Climate Change EP105
‘Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever?’ in The New Yorker
‘We Don’t Need More Life-Crushing Steel and Concrete’ in The New York Times
Natural Resource Defense Council
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
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Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori’s Carbon Removal Marketplace. Today I have with me Paul Greenberg, fisherman and author of Four Fish, American Catch, The Omega Principle, and his latest, The Climate Diet, 50 Simple Ways to Trim Your Carbon Footprint. Thanks for being here, Paul.
Paul Greenberg: Oh, my pleasure, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: It is my pleasure too. I’ve read all those books that I’ve named and got a lot out of them. And so my first question has to be the most obvious one, which is why have you left your beat on fish? What did they ever do to you?
Paul Greenberg: Overfishing.
Ross Kenyon: Overfishing?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. No, I mean, no, I still love fish and I still write about fish and I still am actually, funnily enough, launching a podcast with a co-host. I think it’s going to be called Fish Talk, like Car Talk, but with fish. But I guess I felt like I had said what I wanted to say on a fairly deep level. And also in all three books, climate change just kept coming up again and again. And so rather than kind of Ross Kenyon, rossken, Reversing Climate Change. All I was trying to do with this book was, to some degree, it’s kind of a thought exercise.
It’s sort of like, all right, we read Farhad Manjoo and he says, a trillion, two trillion is not enough. We need a trillion every year. And other people say, we’re doomed. We’re totally screwed. There’s nothing to do. Done. But meanwhile, there’s us, right? We’re living here. You know, you’re like a nice, responsible person. You want to do something. So I just thought, okay, well, what if I asked the 50 smartest people I could find on all of these different topics and just ask them, what could I personally do? And so that’s this book.
Ross Kenyon: And one of the things I associate with your previous writing in particular is this, you have some line, I think it’s in Four Fish, correct me if I’m wrong, but you have some line about how American consumers can only keep one piece of advice in their heads at a time. I think you’re using the example of mercury and tuna.
Paul Greenberg: That is true. I think in that case it was mercury, but you keep mercury and overfishing in your mind when you’re spreading the tuna on your sandwich. So again, you know, there could have been 150 or 350 ways to trim your carbon footprint. But I was just trying to kind of put something that would fit in your pocket to some degree as well. You know, Mao, Chairman Mao had his little red book. This is my little green book that hopefully, you know, people will find. This book is specifically designed not to be overwhelming.
If that... Which I guess an author, that’s sort of like setting a low bar. We try to make a huge book. But in this case, I was really just trying to make a small, manageable book.
Ross Kenyon: Has your publisher pre-approved the comparison to Mao?
Paul Greenberg: Well, in terms of total market dominance, I think they would agree.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I bring up that mercury comment because you were saying that the story was actually much more complex than the consumer wanted to believe. They just want to be told, eat this or don’t eat that. And any nuance further downstream from that is functionally impossible to get into their heads. So is this your attempt to make peace with that? The fact that you’re writing books that do not sink into people’s heads in neat ways?
Paul Greenberg: I think it’s an attempt to do the backstory And one of the biggest challenges I had with this book was saying to the different experts to stop qualifying. You know what I mean? I’m sure you must interview a lot of academics, right? And academics never want to say tuna is bad, right? They never want to say, well, but this, there’s that. So I really said to everyone I interviewed, no, no, no, no, don’t do that. Just give me the best that you can do. There are certainly people who are going to find fault with this book.
But, you know, I tried my best to kind of, if you will, maybe square that circle that I raised earlier in my earlier books. But really just like most people who read these books, they’re not experts. They’re not climatologists. You know, they have their own various degrees of expertise, but they just want something quick.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s true in general. And writing something that is, you know, simple as in the subtitle here, fights over life cycle assessments and the actual impacts of actions are notoriously disputed, right? Yes. I mean, again, I took my best shot.
Paul Greenberg: The thing is, again, let’s think who I would like to read this book. Obviously, I’d like you, somebody like you to read it, but also I’d like your, you know, maybe I’m assuming too much. I’d like your mother or your grandmother to read it and feel like not totally like left out in the woods so that the maximum number of people could actually be brought into that question. You know, like, is a chicken good to eat, you know, relative to a cow? Yes. But anyway, so anyway, ask away. I don’t want to tread on your interview.
Ross Kenyon: No, that’s okay. That’s totally fine. Before we dig into the book, I was hoping you might indulge me with, I had a listener email come in recently asking about Seaspiracy. I’d love your thoughts and also just the state of the fisheries in general. Has anything changed with your writing? What should we be eating and not eating? Can you just discourse for a moment with us?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, so Seaspiracy has been like bubbling up in my sphere. I teach a course in the animal studies program at NYU. And we happen to have as our guest a guy named Jonathan Balcom, who wrote a really great book called What a Fish Knows. And he had tipped me off, tipped our class off. Watch out, Seaspiracy is coming. Full confession- I have not watched the movie yet. I’m planning actually to show it to my class in a week or two and then go over it. The chatter I am hearing, of course, is, you know, from the big environmental nonprofits, not happy with it, not happy with the journalistic methods.
Obviously, the fishing and aquaculture sectors, also not happy with it. You know, personally, I have really shrunk down my seafood consumption. I actually went totally vegan for a year and only added fish back in Partially as an omega-3 thing, but partially just kind of as a sociability thing, if that sounds horrible. It’s very hard to be a hard vegan and have non-hard vegan friends and go out to dinner. Which, of course, nobody’s been going out to dinner for the last year. But assuming that we’re going to go out to dinner again...
I don’t know. There are certain things that I will always buy, eat, order wild sockeye salmon because it’s a well-managed fishery. It’s carbon efficient. Good for you. Low pollutants. I will always eat farmed bivalves, mussels, clams, oysters, et cetera, because they’re very low carbon. It’s hard to argue for the intelligence of a mussel. Maybe people are ready to do that, but I will eat them. I will always eat canned or frozen anchovies, sardines, Small forage fish that, as you know, having read Omega Principle, 99% of which is ground up and fed to other animals.
I would much rather more efficiently eat them directly myself. And then the other thing, it’s a little bit of a double dip, but I will always eat a canned salmon. Canned salmon is pretty much always wild. So I will always eat canned pink, canned sockeye salmon without much feeling of regret at all.
Ross Kenyon: I love this counterintuitive idea. Maybe it’s not counterintuitive, but at least on first look appears that way, that the best way to support some of these sustainable fisheries is to eat more of that fish. Is that still something that people should be considering?
Paul Greenberg: Well, I think in the four things that I’m talking about, yes. I mean, prime example, again, so nice to talk to somebody who’s read all of my books. But take the huge fight we had with the Trump administration over the Pebble Mine, which would have been the largest copper and gold mine in North America, sited atop the largest wild salmon run in America, if not in the world. So the people who largely fought that fight were commercial fishermen. And we won the fight. You know, we won the fight actually even before Trump was out.
We got Donald Trump Jr. to go come out against the mine because he was a fisherman, not a commercial fisherman, just a sport guy. And actually, back story is that is we saw him post about Bristol Bay Sockeye on his Instagram feed and then did a whole New York Times op ed about it. And I think it got back to him and so forth because of the hypocrisy. We say, look at these great salmon that my father is just about to destroy. So that’s a case to be lockstep. The people who protected this watershed protected salmon, protected bears, protected all these kinds of things.
And the other thing, which again, I always talk about is farmed mussels and oysters and clams. Those things clean the water and they require clean water in order to exist. They are the economic argument for clean water, in fact. So there are these things out there that I think can be fulcrums. For positive change, if you support the way the industry is being, if the industry is acting well. So yes, that’s counterintuitive, but I agree. Yes, I agree with myself.
Ross Kenyon: I forget which book I was reading of yours at the time, but after I read this one, Facebook, I think, knew that I was reading you or something because Taylor Shellfish started getting advertised to me because I’m in Seattle. So I was like, ooh, I’ll get some of these oysters and mussels and do my part. And I got to say, I’m pretty impressed by it. And it’s nice to know that the carbon impact of them is very low. They clean the ocean. Yeah. They’re not popular with their rich neighbors, apparently.
Paul Greenberg: They are not. They are not. And, you know, that’s a whole struggle over the coast. And it’s happening in Long Island, too, where people were upset about oyster leases, you know, basically taking up yacht space, in my opinion.
Ross Kenyon: It’s like the least sympathetic fight of all time.
Paul Greenberg: Exactly. It’s like, oh, Buffy, we can’t steer our yacht past these oyster bees. But yeah, I think these things, people who work in concert with the environment, If they’re making food, I’d much rather eat an oyster or a mussel than, you know, a soybean farmer that’s dumping pesticides into the waterways, you know? So anyway.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I find this is one of those nuanced cases of whether or not to eat meat and what’s replacing it. And some of the plant-based meats that I’ve seen that rely upon monocultured soy, you’re like, this is not a great solution. Exactly. Surely there’s going to be something a little bit better than that. And I think you get into this too. Like you even say, be a picky plant eater. You can be an ethical vegan or an ethical omnivore. There are ways to screw both of these up. Is that sort of what you’re getting at?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, I mean, this mostly came from a researcher at Bard named Gidden Eschel. And he’s the one who had that great quote, you can be a perfectly horrible, I can’t remember what the exact quote is, but horrible citizen of the world or wonderful citizen of the world in either direction. I summarize here. But yes, And the biggest aspect there is that to recreate meat out of plants takes energy and takes resources. And my personal approach to veganism, and I have been largely vegan with the exception of a few fish per week, Is to have a whole plant-based diet.
That’s also based on, if you Google around, you might want to link back to it. But I did an article for Eating Well called The Plant Prescription. Where basically I looked at all my cardiovascular, I was having like midlife cardiovascular issues. And, you know, I followed the advice of a number of cardiologists or lifestyle people, doctors who looked at this. And basically a whole plant-based diet is going to steer you towards the right nutrients away from things like saturated fat. And all these other kind of additives, excess sugar, things that are going to show up in the process product.
So you save your health, but you also save all the energy it takes to recreate the feeling of meat in your mouth, which I don’t really need.
Ross Kenyon: And you get to act extra ethical in front of everyone. You get to hold that over everyone’s head. What’s that like?
Paul Greenberg: Absolutely. Well, you know, it’s funny you should mention that. So this last couple of weeks, Nissan Leaf loaned me – or Nissan loaned me a fully electric vehicle called the Leaf. And I’ve been driving it in New York City writing an article like, is it possible to own an electric vehicle in New York City? So at one point, I needed to charge up. And you can imagine, I don’t know if you’ve spent time in New York City, but not so easy to find a charger in New York. Where did I find the charging station?
Whole Foods. So I’m a perennial insomniac, and I drove my electric vehicle to Whole Foods in Gowanus. Hooked up to the charger. It was like 5 in the morning. And I was sitting there charging, right? I’m charging. I’m there at Whole Foods. I’m like, Whole Foods is going to open in a couple hours. Like, it probably gets my quinoa there. And I’m sitting there. Meanwhile, Whole Foods is abuzz with activity. And who’s in there? Amazon workers boxing up quinoa for these peoples. And so I suddenly realized, like, oh, my God, I am in this new area.
I’m calling it the smugosphere. Like the smugosphere. I’m in my electric vehicle charging at Whole Foods and then I’m going to buy my smug food or I’ll have these other people bag up my smug food and then I’ll go back and I’ll feel like I’ve just totally been good to the world and no problem. I’m not doing any of this bad stuff. So I think all of us, you know, big parentheses around everything we do that tries to make things better. Be careful of the smugosphere.
Ross Kenyon: We just had Easter, but the people who get in trouble in the New Testament are always the people who think that they’re better than everyone else. The people who are like, yeah, I’m a sinner. It’s like, cool, you’re good. The people who don’t do that step, they get in trouble. So is that the smuggish fear? Maybe that’s it.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. And also to tell you the truth, like that’s another reason why I wrote The Climate Diet. It’s sort of like, it’s not a smug book. It’s not a gotcha book. It’s just like, as best as I can tell, this is the best you could do. And actually, one of the rules sort of in the afterwards, I think I tell people like, basically, don’t be smug. Like if the point of the climate movement is to get as many hands on deck as possible, what’s the point of being all high and mighty about the fact that you had an impossible burger instead of a burger burger.
Like the point is to just get as many people as possible to be better than they are. And for some people that might be going from conventional radishes to organic, but for other people who are like in the middle of like Iowa, switching from beef to chicken is actually a huge improvement. And so if you’ve got a lot of people to go from beef to chicken, Who were not going to go from beef to radishes. That’s actually a significant change. And so that’s kind of was my thinking in all this.
Again, maybe it’s flawed, but that was my thought. No, I get that.
Ross Kenyon: I want to run the LCA on the smugosphere, which is that... You know, if you see someone on Instagram or something bragging about their choices, I think many people roll their eyes at it. But I’m wondering, does that actually cause people to change and imitate that? Should I not be rolling my eyes? Should I also be double clicking that and liking it? Because it makes me feel weird to brag about something that you think you should be doing anyways. I don’t know. What do you think I should do in a case like that?
Paul Greenberg: Well, you know, here’s the thing. I mean, you’re actually touching upon my other recent book, Goodbye Phone, Hello World, which is that like, you know, and that’s kind of in a way this other book about like 50 things you should do to get the fuck off of your phone and stuff. But Gandhi said something which I think is really good. Don’t speak unless it improves upon silence. And extend that to posting, right? I think anyone who’s about to post something should really truly ask themselves, is this approving upon my doing and saying nothing?
If you think that your post is an improvement on that, then do it. But I know so much of what goes online because I do have this whole other side of me that looks at the tech industry and stuff that is like, man, it’s all about virtue signaling, which is not necessarily virtue. Right. So I don’t know. I guess my feeling is we’ve got this whole 40 or 50% of the country. Well, it’s actually not that much. Let’s say 30% of the country that is locked in, not wanting to admit climate change.
So if we want to persuade them To get on board with this is the way to persuade them through lots of smugospheric actions, or is it to maybe lower the bar a little bit for them and not be so judgmental? Should they say, well, what could I do?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that’s actually a really smart way to go about it. I think being holier than thou is a pretty big turnoff. My dad had this line, he coached basketball when I was a kid, is that if you go for a layup, you put it in, you don’t look back and check that it went in, you know that it went in. That’s like the epitome of cool. And so posting about something good you did on social media has always struck me as a violation of that core principle that I hold so deeply inside myself.
But if it works, I don’t know, maybe there’s a way to virtue signal that actually gets people to act that wouldn’t otherwise. It isn’t just people who did the same thing as you all collectively back patting each other.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, I mean, I think people tend to do what their peers do. You know what I mean? And it’s like, we’re social animals. We’re very governed by what fits in our community. So I think it’s sort of like, what pebble can I throw that will make a ripple? Do somebody who’s sort of on the fence kind of get in line? I mean, of course, there’s this whole other argument. Do you ever have like arch conservatives on your show?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we’ve had a fair number of conservatives on the show. I don’t know about Arch. How conservative do you have to be before you get Arch? We’ll say yes.
Paul Greenberg: So Arch conservatives. So like, have you had somebody on your show that was just like dug in? There is no climate change. That’s it. What do you even have a podcast, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: No, I’ve thought about it before, but I never have. No.
Paul Greenberg: Because I’m just wondering, you know, I go back and forth. I have a friend who’s running for city council. And actually, I drove him around in my electric car the other day. We had this whole discussion. And we were wondering, like, is it worth trying to reach that 20% or 30% that is so dug in? I don’t know. I maintain a little bit of hope. At the same time, I do kind of like what our president is doing, like in just saying... $1. 9 trillion? All right, I’m going for another two, and this time we’re going to build windmills, you know?
Like, I do think there is something about pushing it forward in a really hard way, but also not making a war out of it. I don’t know. I’m still trying to work through it.
Ross Kenyon: No, that concern has come up so many times on this show, too. One of the things I’ve been enjoying about the Biden administration is how he’s just sort of receded into the background in some. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Paul Greenberg: This is very intentional and stage managed, right?
Ross Kenyon: Because we’re all just sick of it. It gets us all riled up. I’ve seen a lot less anger lately. I don’t know. So maybe some of that stuff actually does work.
Paul Greenberg: I think so. Also, keep in mind that, again, circling back to this food question and food footprint, so much of our improvable footprint is happening in the heartland. The whole corn, soy, cow complex. Before we started recording, we were talking about the difficulties of life cycle assessments and stuff like that. But I don’t think anyone can deny that the corn, soy, cow combo is really... At the heart of what we need to rethink climate wise. And so if you have the people who are politically in control of those states, completely uninvited into the dialogue, then I don’t really see how you’re going to unwind that to some degree.
Ross Kenyon: I think that mentality is, it reminds me of conquerors, but you know that in a democracy, whatever happens, it’s going to swing back, whether it’s four years, eight years, 12 years. So there is some, if you think medium term enough to not piss them off so much that they’re going to really revolt against everything and to treat people with some degree of respect and get proper buy-in, trying to shove things down the other side’s throat. I don’t I don’t know, maybe some political scientists will be like, actually, all the important change in history has come from shoving things down the other side.
But my intuition says that’s probably the wrong strategy.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there is a long tradition. And as you know, those of us who’ve looked at the politics of it, you know, many of these states were more liberal leaning in their past. And the replacement of economic values with cultural values has put us in a pretty tight spot. And so, you know, if we can, through this administration, Start to see some economic advantages for some of these people who, frankly, are getting screwed by the corn, soy, cow, oligopoly. If we can start improving those people’s lives through an alternative approach that is also climate friendly.
I mean, that seems to me worth a shot.
Ross Kenyon: Would you say that you wrote this book with some of those insights in mind? Is this pointed a bit more towards someone who maybe is this their first climate book at all?
Paul Greenberg: I would hope that many people will find this an accessible entry point. To me, when I thought of like how this book was going to happen or how this book was going to land, I was kind of imagining like the college student who leaves Des Moines and goes to NYU or something.
Ross Kenyon: Oh man, so the Mao’s Little Red book is really in play now.
Paul Greenberg: Well, sure. But like somebody who, you know, younger people obviously always tend to skew a little bit more liberal, but somebody who goes and takes an environmental studies class and is like, oh my God, there’s this and this and this. And then they go back to wherever they’re from and they, you know, they sit down at Thanksgiving table and they’re about to launch into like a screed that makes everybody at the table feel terrible.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve been that guy. I’ve done that, for sure.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, me too. Sure, sure. And there will continue to be people like that forever and ever. God bless. But my hope is that in addition to this greed, afterwards, the apology comes, right? It’s like, Grandma, I’m really sorry I didn’t eat. Also been this guy? Yeah. I’m so sorry I didn’t eat the ham. I’m sure it was delicious. But listen, as a peace offering, I just thought you might like this little book. It’s sort of like a calm way of sort of saying what I’m into. And, you know, it’s funny because we’ve been going back and forth, me and Penguin Press, about like how to promote this book.
And one of the things we’ve been doing is like these little Twitter cards. And it’s like and one of them is just like, can’t get your parents to go vegan? Ask them if they consider the chicken, you know, which, again, goes back to this idea that chicken is a lot smaller carbon footprint than a cow. You know, and some might call me an accommodationist, and I’m sure there’s a certain wing of the climate people who would say, like, burn this book because we’ve made so much progress getting people talking about veganism.
But have we really? You know, I don’t know. What’s your food? Are you a vegan or what’s your eating pattern yourself?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know that I have something really strict. I try to eat, when I eat meat, I try for it to be pasture raised if possible. I want to make sure the animal had a good life at least reasonably. I don’t feel perfectly great about that, but I’ve also hunted and fished a fair amount too. And I don’t think people who eat factory farm meat have anything to say to hunters about being ethically superior. But I try to be reasonably thoughtful about it, but I don’t have some really defined system.
I’d be open to finding one. I just haven’t. But I’ve been cooking more and more vegetarian at the very least and vegan too. And just trying to get more comfortable with delicious vegetarian fare and my ability to prepare it. I don’t know. What do you think? You can dunk on me now if you want.
Paul Greenberg: No, I don’t really want to talk on you. I mean, I think that it’s a spectrum. And I think I personally have chosen vegan, vegan with a little fish, but, you know, mostly, mostly vegan in a large part because of cardiovascular health. And it seems to work for me in those in reflecting better cardiovascular numbers. I also it’s interesting. Once I started opting out of the industrial animal economy, I was like, wow, do I really want to hop back into this? You know what I mean? I had a whole year away from it.
In a way, it was a little bit like being off my iPhone. Once I had a whole year with my iPhone not beeping at me, would I really want that noise in my consciousness again? And the answer was no, and it didn’t really affect me. But one area, since we’re both like to fish, I realized that was actually a part of me that I do like to fish. I do like my participation in the ecosystem. I don’t fish for like over fish species, but I’m not going to make a hard fast line about that.
And there are many people like I teach in the animal studies program at NYU. There’s some ferocious vegans in that department, you know, lovely people, but ferocious. And they think I’m a murderer. I don’t know. Human biology is such that we did not evolve as vegans, and I’m going to permit myself to have a little bit of interaction as a predator on this planet.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s fine. I think the mere fact of people actively thinking about this and debating it is a good sign. I think you even have this too about number six here is be thoughtful with local, but there’s also thoughts about how exactly you’re eating meat and when. You also have suggestions. This reminds me of the Jonathan Safran for his whole thing about only eating meat for dinner because that’s a social occasion and Getting that far is already, I think, most of the battle, right? Like, is it just the tyranny of small differences and you’re there and so let’s pile drive you?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, I mean, I think there is something about making the full switch to veganism that causes a little bit of a programming shift, which, again, compared to the iPhone thing, like there are people, there’s a woman who wrote a book called How to Break Up With Your Phone and she suggested to break up with your phone, you should spend a month off your phone and then gradually add back in the things that you think, you know, are kind of useful to you that you truly need. And I felt that way about veganism, right?
Like I subtracted all these things. And then I suddenly like I do a fair amount of reporting like in the heartland. You know, I did a piece about Ohio agriculture. I do stuff on the dead zone. I’ve been up and down the Mississippi and Minnesota and stuff like that. And like, where are you from originally? Are you from the Seattle area? Are you from? I’m from the Southwest, Arizona. Okay. Well, anyway, I thought perhaps maybe you’re from the Midwest, but like, if you go to the Midwest, like there’s this moment.
I remember once I was, I was doing a story about the dead zone, the Gulf of Mexico, and I was in Minnesota. I was like in the corn and soy heartland of it all. And it was just like this cloak of like fertilizer fog just like enveloped this entire little town. And then I went to the fertilizer depot and it was like a mountain of freaking fertilizer just like standing on top of it and looking down. And it was just like so shapeless and industrial. Meanwhile, it’s like totally rural America.
And I go to the guys showing me around. I go, what’s the name of this town again? He goes, oh, Walnut Grove. As in Little House on the Prairie. And I was like, can you imagine what frickin’ Pa would think if he saw what had been done to Walnut Grove? And so I guess, pulling back to your question, the fact that I am no longer really very much engaged with that whole system, I feel karmically makes me feel a little better. I mean, yeah, yeah, I eat some wheat. Generally speaking, I’m not in that system as much.
Ross Kenyon: It’s funny you locate your desire to be in it somewhat as, how should I frame it? It’s a naturalistic language. You have a desire to remain a predator in some cases, to have that sort of old school hunter gathering. Is that part of why you think it’s important still to fish, even though you’re functionally a vegan most of the time?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, well, it’s sort of like, I don’t want to be an invisible predator, right? I mean, you know, it’s like, Gosh, darn it. Here we are with that millennial authenticity question. But if I’m going to like kill stuff, I mean, to some degree, I would like to be the agent of death in that rather than being this sort of person behind the cloak. You know, that is prompting somebody else to do the killing. I know that’s like kind of also ran and, you know, Mark Zuckerberg went out and killed his own deer and so forth.
But that is that is how I feel. But there’s something a little bit more. There’s a little like more Walden-esque, you know, Thoreau-esque, which is that, you know, you must have had these experiences. I don’t know where you fish, but like when I wade into a river to fish for trout, I’m reading the river. I’m looking at the caddisfly hatches. I’m seeing how the water slackens behind a boulder. I understand that an undercut bank is a place for a fish to get out of the mainstream of the current and perceive and save energy.
So there is no other way that I would ever have learned to feel that except as a fisherman. Some people I know can enter into those systems and just meditate on it. But for me, the act of participation in the ecosystem made me understand it as a child. And so I keep that with me in what I do as a fisherman, as an adult fisherman.
Ross Kenyon: This is a very good segue into some of the ones that I wanted to poke on a little bit.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, please do. Please poke away.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, you can let me know if you think this is fair or unfair, but I think the desire to merely minimize one’s carbon footprint, it’s the same problem that happens whenever you are maximizing for a single variable within a complex system. So there are other things of value that are important and may in fact outrank one’s carbon impact. For instance, I think if someone is called vocationally to be a parent and to have multiple children, I would say it would be a bad thing to curtail them. And not for demographic reasons, but I think just for living a good life.
I think that should be an option. And sort of whenever there’s fights about Bitcoin, it’s always about, is it Bitcoin or is it the grid? Because people are going to use energy and they’re going to find ways to use as much energy as cheaply as possible. That’s just what they’re going to do. So do you want to fix Bitcoin? That cat’s probably out of the bag at this point. Or do you want to just make the grid clean? I would rather focus much Betsy Colbert wrote to me, she’s like, well, you know, I said, what do you think of the whole premise of the book?
Paul Greenberg: And she’s like, you know, frankly, the only thing that would really make a difference is not to have children. And I have two children. So I’m not gonna, I couldn’t recommend that. She did. She said that. There is, as you know, you personally have spent a lot of time, I think, looking at these numbers. And when you look at the comparative graphs, it is true that like adding another person to the planet, you know, like that’s about the most significant thing that you can do carbon wise is just not is to have one less person in the world.
I do believe that what I was trying to do. In the book is to say, you know, again, different people come to the table at different times in their life, but say this were to fall into the hands of somebody who was like 25, right? And they’re having that discussion with their partner, like, are we going to have kids? How many kids, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think it’s worth having that discussion. Okay. If you decide not to do that, I understand. And that’s why in the making family section of the book, there are other Things that you could do.
Like, you know, number one is like, stop the freaking crazy wedding shit. And I know there are so many, as I called it, it went up and I’ve been working on, but not just the Bridezilla’s, but the Grumenteins, you know, who are ready. COVID’s ending. Oh my God, I’m going to do the biggest freaking wedding of all time. I mean, just stop it already. Like, you look at the carbon footprints of weddings are pretty, pretty intense. So just thinking about Like if you look at it as a spectrum, right? And on one side of the spectrum is having no kids.
Then a little closer is having one kid, even more two kids. But along that spectrum are all, as you say, smaller carbon things to do. So like keeping in mind, right, that the best thing I could have done was to not have children. Be super, super mindful about how you add children to the planet. You know what I mean? Does that make sense? Or does that satisfy your poke? Or do you still feel like poking?
Ross Kenyon: Well, I think it’s a fine response, too. I am worried. We’ve had a previous guest on who wrote a book called Empty Planet and just talks about the demographic changes in the developed world are going to be from a political economy. Yeah. And I used to think, well, that’s a good reason to just do whatever I wanted to in the first place. And I’ve since sort of changed on that. There’s a... I always forget if it’s Dostoevsky or Kierkegaard. I said this so many times that it’s basically a meme right now for listeners, which is that the point of praying isn’t to change the mind of God, but to change the person praying.
So maybe it is, if that’s the only thing I can control is my actions, then maybe I should just do the right thing, even though it doesn’t make a difference.
Paul Greenberg: Absolutely. I do believe acting in the spirit of a way that is kind to the environment in which we live. Adds a layer of kindness to you and kindness in general leads to a certain kind of fulfillment. Now, denying children. Now, listen, I have the edge on you here because you don’t have kids. I’m saying that I have a child and full confession. So actually, this is when I go through these like mindfuck situations. So I actually have two children from two mothers. So I have a total of two children from two women.
So technically, I’m better than, you know, the replacement rate. You know what I mean? Like I’m still underpopulating the planet. You see? But all that’s my way of saying is that I did talk to a few different people. I talked to two people that had sort of interesting family models, which I talked about in the book. One guy doesn’t have kids, but has just decided to fully embrace his mentoring role. In the small community in which he lives. He’s also a professor at NYU, but he mostly lives in a rural community.
And he takes his mentoring super, super seriously. That’s interesting. Another interesting format that was two women who are married to each other or partnered with each other and two men who are partnered with each other. They have two children between the four of them. So they all get to parent and But not so much. And I have to tell you, as a full-time parent and as a dad, you know, I’m a stay-at-home dad, you know, a little less parenting couldn’t hide. So again, you’re at the front end of the funnel, right?
Like, sounds like you’re going to eventually have kids, right? But it’s like, you don’t see it going in. It’s only, it’s unfortunately... I think the biological imperative to reproduce is so strong that we have a very hard time visualizing the downsides of it before we go through it. So I guess all I’m sort of doing is shooting up a flare to those kids who are just listening would love to see Ross’s face as he knocks back his head. No, no, no. I don’t know. I just, the other thing is like, again, again, per Betsy Colbert, like you can’t not address the family question.
So it’s, it’s, it’s there and you should consider it.
Ross Kenyon: People write us and ask us this question quite a lot too. And there are people on the team who have disagreed at Nori too. So I love that your response is basically, I’ve said what I told you to other people before that are parents and they’ll just look at me with that thousand yard parents there and be like, oh honey, you don’t even know. I’m just like, I have this attitude that the most important thing a person will probably do, like the most important thing most people will do is to raise children and hopefully raise halfway decent children.
And so I do have this very idealized version of what being a parent means. I might be holding onto that a bit too statically for meaning. Maybe not everyone needs as much parenting in their life. Maybe there’s some diminishing marginal returns. So it sounds like what you’re saying is that you still enjoy parenting, but you wouldn’t mind sharing those duties a little bit more outside of yourself.
Paul Greenberg: Absolutely. If the opportunity to have a four-way parenting system had realistically presented itself, knowing what I know now, that could have been freaking awesome. And for my friend who has that situation... She feels that her children’s lives are very rich because she, instead of having intimate relationships with just a pair of parents, she has, you know, like a totally, you know, like I’ve been writing and think a lot about the octopus, you know, how the octopus has like brachiated intelligence, like every tentacle has its own mind. But, you know, going in that direction as humans, right, we’re kind of heading in this direction anyway of being more networked than one to one.
And so having that kind of family structure might be in a way more appropriate to where we’re headed.
Ross Kenyon: So a suggestion that might derive from this is that people should form thruples or quadruples and have fewer children and share them.
Paul Greenberg: Maybe, maybe.
Ross Kenyon: Time share your children.
Paul Greenberg: Also, you know, so my son and daughter are many years apart and basically my son has been effectively raised as an only child because my daughter lives abroad. I just also wanted to stick up for people who have one child. You know, it’s not, you know, for those of us, I grew up with an older brother and then a younger half brother. And, you know, I think those of us who’ve been born into multi-child households think that’s the only way to go. But I think that like my son has had a very nice life as a as, you know, basically an only child.
And I think that parents shouldn’t get into a twist about it.
Ross Kenyon: You know, probably less nuggies. You probably had a lot of those.
Paul Greenberg: Oh, God. Yeah. I mean, it’s like, you know, that children there were some crazy stuff. I remember when my friend had their second son. That children of a certain age, like fight something like, you know, whatever it is, five times every hour or something like that. It’s like crazy, right? So boom, you have one child in your house, like that’s not there. That’s kind of good.
Ross Kenyon: Also that thing you said about octa octopus, octopuses? You’re the fish guys. What is it?
Paul Greenberg: It is in fact, octopuses.
Ross Kenyon: Octopuses. Thank you.
Paul Greenberg: Yes. That’s what I mean, whatever it’s open to interpretation, but most fisheries biologists say octopuses.
Ross Kenyon: Because if you needed one more reason not to eat cephalopods, it’s that their tentacles are smart themselves.
Paul Greenberg: Yes, indeed. And no, I do not eat octopus anymore.
Ross Kenyon: It’s best to just stay away from tapas restaurants, because once you’re in there, you’re not going to be able to resist.
Paul Greenberg: You can have the bocarones, though, the little, you know, the white anchovies. That’s cool. Just run into the tapas restaurant, grab the bocarones, and get the fuck out. Before they start shoving intelligent tentacles down your throat.
Ross Kenyon: I know, if I see it there, I’m like, mm, that does sound good. The answer is no. No pulpo. Stay away from that pulpo.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: God, there’s more things in here that I feel like there’s about, too. Another one was telecommuting. So the company that produces this podcast, I’m a co-founder of. It’s called Nori. We’re a carbon removal marketplace, and we try to help people get paid for pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it. Nice. Yeah, and before the pandemic, we were already very pro-co-location, if that’s enough prefixes for you. And telecommuting, we don’t love just because we miss the sort of water cooler environment. We miss the creativity of being in the same place.
For integrated teams that are dynamic, we think it makes a lot of sense. And I think also the experience is better. But okay, so I’m gonna do the same thing I did when you challenged me on the kid thing. Going to the office every day also kind of sucks. So am I like misremembering this?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, so first of all, I’m a freelancer, so I haven’t been going to an office for a very long time. So to some degree, this whole thing has been a shit show for me because everybody has been invading my office. My son is going to school in my office. My partner is going to work in my office. So there’s that. And you’re also catching me at this moment, having just written this book, Goodbye Phone, Hello World, the book that came just before Climate Diet, which really stresses the importance of physical...
You know, space co-occupying and stuff. And I do agree with that. Did you read that article in The New Yorker a couple, maybe a month ago? And it was like about the future of offices. I think it was John Seabrook wrote it.
Ross Kenyon: There’s been a couple articles like this recently. I’m not sure of them.
Paul Greenberg: Yeah, whatever, you know. But anyway, you know, it seems that whether or not we think telecommuting is a good idea, that sorry, brother, we’re headed in that direction. Like I live right around the corner from Spotify and Spotify just like We’re done. We’re done with the office. Yeah. Like this huge, you know, which was good for my neighborhood, good for my property values, but they’re gone. I do think that the thing that Seabrook pointed to, and I think that a lot of people are going to point to, is that we’re going to need some in-person time, but not necessarily five days a week of in-person time.
And this whole infrastructure package that, you know, is just on the table right now, right? Like, you know, this idea of building an infrastructure to support a five day a week commuting system seems kind of stupid, frankly. And I would much rather like build for two days a week or three days a week, build infrastructure around that. And I know We may need to have like a Chinese type authoritarian system to enforce that. But I do believe before the pandemic, there were some very convincing studies that showed productivity was maximized and improved when you had telecommuting.
Certainly, driving and commuting is America’s biggest climate Achilles heel. And that unless we can address the commuting part, I mean, it’d be great if we all had maglev trains and that zipped us in and out of work, whatever. But what’s the easier fix? Getting a bunch of Americans to stay home in their pajamas or building a ton of maglev trains? What do you think is more likely?
Ross Kenyon: Pajamas. Yeah, it’s hard to argue that one. Yeah, I think that’s fair. And I think I have probably a unique experience where I think Nori is a fun and vibrant, creative place to work and not everyone experiences their job is like that. So having to go and there are many jobs for whom working from home is totally adequate and there is no productivity loss. In fact, may actually bring more joy because you can spend more time with your family.
Paul Greenberg: Do you know the writer Carl Safina? Have you come across his stuff? Yeah, you guys are buds, right? Yeah, yeah. I’m the writer in residence at the Safina Center. So anyway, I was out in Long Island with my electric car and I picked up Carl and we drove around. Actually, we ended up writing an op-ed that should run in the Times in the next couple of days. It was called An Infrastructure Package for Nature. And we were driving around Long Island and it’s like, it’s funny to drive around. Have you ever driven an electric car at all?
Like, have you ever test driven one?
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think so.
Paul Greenberg: It was just a very interesting experience to drive through a service station. Like, whoop, don’t need this. And then you’re driving along the artificially widened Long Island roads that you know started out as a little dirt path and now is four lanes with a slew of traffic lights. All for both commuters and shoppers, both of which are amazing. Now for grabs, right? Like, do we need this many commuters? Do we need this many shoppers? Do we need this many box stores? And so it was like a little like, I don’t know how deep your or which direction your college experience was, but like I read a lot of Latin poetry in school.
And there’s a moment in the Aeneid where Aeneas, if you’ll remember, is the hero of the Trojans and Troy is under siege and Aeneas wants to run out and he knows that he can beat back the Greeks. And then Venus appears and removes the mortal mist from his eyes. And he sees that behind this phalanx of Greek soldiers is Zeus with his thunderbolts. That phalanx is Neptune with his trident. And he’s like, oh, my God, this. Anyway, driving around in an electric car in Long Island is like having the mortal mess removed from your eyes.
And you’re like, why do we have all this? Like, why do we have all these lanes and service stations and box stores? And it’s like, you know, we’re in this funny reset moment where we’re about to get this giant infrastructure package. And, you know, I think some people are like, well, oh, great. And then we’ll build, rebuild the roof so we can go back to normal. But like, maybe we shouldn’t be building towards that normal. Maybe we really need a giant reset. Personally, look, I love people. I love being interacting with people.
But maybe the people I should be interacting with are in my neighborhood, not at the water cooler that I have to drive 60 miles each way to meet. Just a thought.
Ross Kenyon: I find that persuasive and I like the hedging. Maybe not every day, but there are some benefits of it with your colleagues in person. And it doesn’t have to be five days a week, nine to five. That model is clearly for a different sort of like Taylorist kind of economy. It’s not now. Also bonus points for the Virgil. That’s all I’m working on this show.
Paul Greenberg: Well, thank you. Good, good.
Ross Kenyon: I was thinking, I’m like, can I shoehorn unhappy Dido into this now?
Paul Greenberg: I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: Sure. I couldn’t figure out a way to. Yeah. One other thing I like here, too, that I have been thinking about a lot is electrical and gas appliances. Yeah. This one I don’t see spoken about nearly as much. Can you give people a little rundown on that one?
Paul Greenberg: Yeah. So I spent a fair amount of time talking to the people at Natural Resources Defense Council, and I leaned heavily on their research and Their idea is that we need to move to what they call smart electric. It’s not like your old toaster. It’s like using the latest electric technology because if we are using smart electric, that means the way that renewables is going to come into your home is going to be as electricity, right? So unless your home is prepared to receive those renewables, then you have to be the last mile in all of this.
And there is some debate. The thing that I did is I bought a simple two-burner induction electric stovetop. Now, induction electric, what it does is it’s kind of magnetic. Don’t poke me on this one. But it more or less conducts the electricity or the energy from your stove directly into your pot. So you can’t use... If you can’t stick a magnet on your pot, you can’t use it on an induction electric. I love cooking on this thing. It heats up super fast. If you switch over to an ESCO that is a service provider of electricity that’s coming from a renewable source, then you’re pretty much connecting...
The renewable energy to your stove. Now, it gets tricky with ovens because to heat up an entire space is energy expensive. And there is some argument that maybe that’s better done with gas. What I’ve done is actually switched to a toaster, a good toaster, because it’s a smaller space that I’m heating. Interestingly, this doubled back on the electrical vehicle debate. Do you know what one of the most energy intensive things about an electric vehicle is? No, what? The heat. Oh, really? Heating and cooling. Who knew? But your car has an HVAC system.
So the way that electric vehicles solve that problem is they heat your seat and they heat the steering wheel.
Ross Kenyon: Is this because with internal combustion engines, is it just waste heat that is somehow being reused? But for electric, there isn’t as much? Oh, okay. Interesting.
Paul Greenberg: That’s right. Yeah. You have to actually generate the electricity. So if you heat your ass and heat your hands, you’re like, I’m sitting there like my hands are toasty. My butt is warm. What else do I need? This is great. Do I need like blowing in my face? Then interestingly enough, and what’s cool, what’s bizarre, when you change, when you put on the heat in your electric car, like there’s a readout that says how many miles of range you have. So the other day I put on heat. It went from I had 220 miles of range to like 195.
So like I could either drive 220 miles with no heat or 100. I mean, yeah, or 195 with heat around. You make the choice.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. At some point, I’d like to switch over from internal combustion engine over to something electric. And I think one of the other is the same as that Bitcoin point I was making, too, is people fight over electric vehicles with regard to the grid in which it charges. Is that one of the nuances you’ve seen, too?
Paul Greenberg: Sure. And also the rare minerals that are needed to make the battery. That to me is the much more convincing argument. I think that one drives the other as far as supply is concerned. Like if we switch to an electrical system, I think eventually there’s going to be a lot of pressure, especially now that we have this infrastructure package hopefully happening. The idea that you could have rooftop solar everywhere, that you could have offshore wind everywhere. That’s a pretty convincing argument. There’s also something kind of amazing about like, even though it takes a while, like it took me 36 hours to fully charge my car, but all I had to do was plug it in.
Ross Kenyon: Well, do they kick you out of Whole Foods?
Paul Greenberg: Well, no, no. So that’s if you’re just plugging into an outlet at home. Now there are these superchargers that like charge your car in like 40 minutes. It’s going to be five minutes anytime soon. Although I like the 40 minute because I was saying to my friend, my friend and I are both like huge Italy Italo files going all the way back to Virgil. But have you spent time in Italy before?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’ve been there a couple times.
Paul Greenberg: Have you ever been to an auto grill?
Ross Kenyon: No, this is like a roadhouse.
Paul Greenberg: Autogrill, it’s a chain of gas stations that has delicious restaurants. And so the idea that you might mandatorily have to stop for 40 minutes while you charge, instead of having a shitty bag of chips, you have a delicious grilled, mixed grill and blah, blah, blah, organic, da, da, da. Your car is charging and you come out and you feel satisfied. Maybe you even have a glass of wine and the buzz wears off by the time you get back behind the wheel. That to me is civilization.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think that in general, you’re optimistic about climate change in your work? I choose to be.
Paul Greenberg: Like, as I say, there are the Farhad Manjus of the world who would forever move the goalpost another trillion dollars down the line. The Farhad Manjus of the New York Times, you know, who writes the he’s he’s like their columnist. And I feel like No matter what gets proposed, Farhad says it’s not enough. You know, like, oh, we’re doomed. Fair enough, Farhad. You know, whatever. That’s fine. Go for it. But I can’t live in that world. You know, I have to feel like I have agency and maybe it’s self-delusion, but I would rather know that I was trying to live a better life and that I was having some effect, maybe just on my son, you know, in terms of as a sphere of influence.
But I remain a I’m an intentional optimist because to be a passive pessimist, it’s just not a kind of world I choose to live in.
Ross Kenyon: It’s good to hear because some of the episodes we’ve had recently have been a bit on the door side. So I’m happy you’re bringing optimism back. Also, I want to hear more about this podcast that you’re doing now that we’re getting close to wrapping this show up. You’re a goofball. I would listen to you talk. Yeah.
Paul Greenberg: Well, we’re trying. It’s, you know, this is going to be a show that looks at fisheries and aquaculture, but mostly fisheries from both a sustainability point of view and from a culinary point of view. And I guess it’s funny, me and my co-host, a professor named Nick Mink, we’re kind of trying to decide what our on-air personalities are going to be. And I think he’s going to take the more sort of Pro-commercial fishing angle, because he looks at, you know, the aspects of community sport. And I’m going to be the sort of slightly environmental scold, you know, sometimes vegan.
I am going to cover Seaspiracy in it. I am going to do a deep dive on the octopus. I find, I don’t know how you found the experience of being a podcast host, but I do find after being, you know, I’ve spent a lot of time on the radio and stuff like that. There is something freeing about talking versus writing. Writing people can really, as you know, can really nail you to the wall. So I’m looking to just have a little bit of fun with my writing.
Ross Kenyon: It’s definitely fun. And one of the reasons I like doing it is the same reason that, well, we started it with this, with being able to speak with people that maybe you don’t always see eye to eye on everything, but there’s something about text that is alien to us and our sympathy. And being able to speak is oftentimes you see the glimmer in their eye, you’re having fun. A lot of value happens here that’s hard to quantify. I like talking to people too that Yeah, maybe we aren’t on the same page, but I try to meet people where they are and just have a good conversation no matter what.
I think that’s valuable. I don’t have proof of it. I think it is.
Paul Greenberg: I completely agree. I mean, and I think to tell you the truth, it’s one of the reasons we’ve hardened into the political positions that we’ve hardened into because, you know, and again, I say this more in my iPhone book. But online speech is declarative and it’s not collaborative. And I always think of like the best conversations are like music and they’re like chamber music where there’s a leitmotif and you hand it off to the violins and the violins take it and they hand it over to the oboe. Beautiful. The worst are when some piggy man sits at the head of the table and just like mansplains the whole dinner to death and that’s the end of it.
Ross Kenyon: No, that’s pretty bad. No, I think that’s true. I think being able to just have an open-ended curious, I think curiosity is the key. Is that for you too? Yeah.
Paul Greenberg: Absolutely. No. And as you say, it’s like, even if you have somebody who’s opposed to your point, whatever your quote unquote point of view is, it’s kind of like, okay, take me to your weird place. I’m ready to go.
Ross Kenyon: Actually, I really respected your response to me in the beginning. I’m like, oh, there’s a couple of things in here that I want to poke you over. And you’re just like, yeah, okay, it’s fine. Let’s do it. I was like resigned, but also pretty chummy.
Paul Greenberg: No, but you know, in my class at NYU, I assign everybody a contemporary book to review. And it’s like, I want you to review this. This is not a book report. I want you to review it because I think too often we look at books as this like edifice. Like somebody wrote this book. And who am I to disagree with it? And I think a book should be inviting and I think it should be warm and it should be human, you know, because that’s that’s all we got.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s a beautiful sentiment. I think all of your books achieve this, too. They all strike me as you’re very curious and having fun. It seems like you love your job. You kind of lucked into it, I think, a bit.
Paul Greenberg: I do feel lucky, you know, certainly, you know, speak to my partner about it. Like there’s many dark moments, but, you know, that’s part of the journey as well.
Ross Kenyon: Just staring at the blank page, trying to get it done.
Paul Greenberg: I have a lot of anxiety about the thing not done yet. So, like, I remember for Omega Principle, I had to go to Antarctica. You know what I mean? And, like, that’s a pretty heavy... Yeah, but, you know, like, you say that, you know, like, oh, I wish I’d go to Antarctica. I guarantee you, if I handed you a ticket to Antarctica and said, okay, and you’re going to have to come up with 50 pages on this... Right?
Ross Kenyon: Well taken, yeah.
Paul Greenberg: So yeah, stuff like that, which of course makes you feel doubly bad about yourself because I’m complaining about a free trip to Antarctica.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s hard to break out of the smugosphere on that one. You’re going to get no sympathetic ears.
Paul Greenberg: Nope. Sorry, sorry. But anyway.
Ross Kenyon: Well, for people who want more of you, for whom more than an hour was not nearly enough, Paul Greenberg, where can they get more? Where do you want them to read? What do you want them to read? Is it the climate diet? Is that you want your publishers to, this is the first one and there are others.
Paul Greenberg: Yes, please read The Climate Diet. And then, you know, if you ever show the video, this is the other one I have out, Goodbye Phone, Hello World, which allows you to peek through the cover. It’s actually exactly iPhone sized. But go to paulgreenberg. org. I’m an org, not a com. Good job. And there’s links to everything, including actually I did a frontline a few years ago called The Fish on My Plate. You could look at that. I’ve got a bunch of other various interviews and TV stuff. I was on Dr.
Oz a few times this year. So that’s that’s always fun. But yeah, start with Paul Greenberg dot org and then we’ll go from there.
Ross Kenyon: You eat fish, then I think you should definitely. What’s the best one? I think is for fish where you typically steer people who are interested in fish. Is that the first part of all?
Paul Greenberg: That’s the one that’s the most selling. So I assume that must be the best. The shortest is American catch. It sort of depends. Like, are you interested in aquaculture? Are you interested in local? Are you interested in sort of biological evolutionary? Like each one of four fish is the, you know, probably most approachable. The local is more of the American catch and the deep dive into biology and chemistry is Omega.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we talked about this a little bit, the omega principle. I did not expect to be nearly as fascinated by the omega-3 supplement industry as it turns out. I guess I really am. That’s a wild world. Yeah. Well, links to all of those things are in the show notes. Thanks so much for being here, Paul.
Paul Greenberg: My pleasure, Ross. It was really a lot of fun.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, for me too. 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. com slash noripodcasts if you’d like more content, engagement, and community. And thank you so much for your support.
