Podcasts about Kyoto Protocol

retiring from a career teaching physics, chemistry and biology, Lynne Balzer began organizing extensive notes from a decade-long investigation of the climate change issue. Considering all the facts and looking at the connection between the science, history and politics of this issue, Lynne reached the inevitable conclusion that “human-caused global warming” is one of the greatest hoaxes ever visited upon mankind. Working with Faraday Science Institute, a nonprofit organization, she has researched the topic of global climate change for thirteen years, sorting out fact from fiction.00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction01:19 The Rise of Climate Science and Funding03:19 Cap and Trade Explained05:11 The Acid Rain Scare and Its Aftermath07:43 The Birth of Global Warming Hysteria15:17 Enron's Role in Climate Policy20:57 The Kyoto Protocol and Its Implications24:25 The Carbon Offset Industry31:12 Subsidies and Their Impact on Green Energy38:47 The Economic and Social Costs of Climate Policies46:00 The Role of Big Finance in Climate Initiatives01:01:45 Conclusion and Final ThoughtsSlides for this podcast, along with AI summaries of all of my podcasts: https://tomn.substack.com/p/podcast-summariesExposing the Great Climate Change Lie (2023): https://a.co/d/i6iRW1yHere's Why Using Biofuels for Energy is Unsustainable and Must Stop NOW:  https://joehoft.com/heres-why-using-biofuels-for-energy-is-unsustainable-and-must-stop-now/=========My Linktree: https://linktr.ee/tomanelson1

What did it take to get nearly 200 nations to agree on tackling climate change in 1997? And what have we learned in the decades since?In this episode, we reflect on the drama, the impact and the legacy of the Kyoto Protocol, and go behind the scenes of the Royal Shakespeare Company's powerful and acclaimed production of Kyoto, currently playing in London's West End.After watching a performance of the play this week, Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac and Paul Dickinson introduced a live event at The Conduit, bringing together those who were in the room at COP3 in Kyoto with those now shaping the path to COP30 in Belém and beyond.First, we hear from a panel of seasoned voices from the world of international climate diplomacy, moderated by climate journalist Ed King. Farhana Yamin, longtime negotiator for small island states, speaks of how Kyoto helped amplify the voices of vulnerable nations for the first time. Nick Mabey, co-founder of E3G, reflects on Kyoto's economic impact, arguing that it sparked a global clean tech revolution by making climate action economically viable. And Richard Kinley, former Deputy Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, offered rare insights into the diplomacy that shaped Kyoto. Together, they paint a vivid picture of Kyoto's legacy and what it still offers to today's climate movement.Later, we hear from the playwrights behind Kyoto, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, about how they turned bureaucratic negotiations into riveting on-stage drama.So, what's changed since 1997? Are we in a better place thanks to Kyoto? And is multilateralism still fit for purpose in today's world?Follow us on social media for behind the scenes moments and to watch our videos:Instagram @outrageoptimism LinkedIn @outrageoptimismOr get in touch with us via this form.Producer: Ben Weaver-HincksVideo Producer: Caitlin HanrahanExec Producers: Ellie Clifford and Dino SofosCommissioning Editor: Sarah Thomas This is a Persephonica production for Global Optimism and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode together with our guest Klaus M. Schmidt, we explore the economic challenges behind global climate agreements. We discuss why past agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement struggled to deliver the desired results and examine how a new negotiation design centered on a uniform CO₂ price could lead to better outcomes. Klaus also shares insights from experimental studies testing this approach in practice.   Klaus M. Schmidt is an economics professor at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and an expert in social preferences and contract theory, among others.  

This week, the Prospect podcast meets Kyoto, the new West End play dramatising the high-stakes negotiations behind the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, the play brings to life the power struggles, disruptors, and unexpected alliances that shaped the first major international climate treaty.Prospect's Isabel Hilton sits down with the playwrights and former UK negotiator Peter Unwin to discuss the real-life drama behind the diplomacy, whether multilateralism still works, and what Kyoto's legacy means for today's climate crisis.Plus, Ellen and Alona mull over whether musicals are a “banger” or a “dud”.Kyoto is playing at London's Soho Place Theatre until 3rd May 2025.To read Isabel's writing on geopolitics and climate, head to prospectmagazine.co.uk. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every year world leaders gather at the United Nation's COP (the Conference of Parties) to discuss how to work together on solutions to tackle climate change. And every year the wrangling lasts into the night as it becomes clear how difficult it is to achieve consensus. In Kyoto the playwrights Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson have recreated the drama, intrigue and power plays that resulted in one of COP's greatest successes, the Kyoto Protocol from 1997. Kyoto is on at the Soho Place Theatre until May 2025.Professor Mike Berners-Lee is an expert on the impact and footprint of carbon and has watched as countries see-saw on commitments to reduce the use of fossil fuels. In his latest book, A Climate of Truth he argues that we already have the technology to combat many of the problems, but what we're lacking is the honesty – in our politics, our media, and our businesses – to make a real difference.But how to save the planet is not necessarily straightforward. In The Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on my Father's Islands, Marianne Brown returns home after the death of her father. She finds the islanders at loggerheads over the construction of a huge windfarm: while some celebrate the production of sustainable energy, others argue the costs are too high for the environment and local wildlife.Producer: Katy Hickman

Episode Overview: In this episode, Tracy speaks with Bill Wirtz, Senior Policy Analyst at the Consumer Choice Center, to unpack the current state of European agricultural policies, the rise and recent decline of the "green agenda," and its impact on agriculture, trade, and food systems. We explore Europe's experience and discuss how similar trends may start to impact North America. Key Topics Covered: European Agricultural Policy Landscape European Farmers Pushing Back Against Policies Why Europe Is Ahead of North America on Green Policies The United States' Agricultural Policy under the Trump Administration gricultural Policy in Canada and Recent Resignation of Prime Minister The Impact of Green Policies on Food Choices Advice for North American Farmers Watching European Trends What to Watch for in the Coming Years Tune in to this episode for a deep dive into Europe's green agricultural policies, the growing backlash from farmers, and what North American farmers and consumers need to know as these trends begin to cross the Atlantic. Detailed Show Notes: European Agricultural Policy Landscape: Tracy asks Bill to give our audience an overview on European agricultural policy, starting with the Paris Accord, while tracing its roots back to the Kyoto Protocol. With so many terms floating around—Green Agenda, Green New Deal, Agenda 2030, Farm to Fork, and more—Tracy asks Bill to break them down and help connect the dots, offering a clearer picture of the environmental movement and its origins, which are shaping Europe's agricultural policies with a focus on sustainability and climate goals. European Farmers Pushing Back Against Policies: Bill talks about the increasing backlash from European farmers against restrictive policies, including product bans, land set-aside programs, Dutch farm buybacks, fuel and farm insurance hikes, and the latest farm inheritance tax. These policies have sparked widespread protests across the continent, and while farm protests have always been common in Europe, they have become increasingly more prevalent in recent years. Why Europe Is Ahead of North America on Green Policies: Bill explores why Europe is implementing green agricultural policies faster than North America and whether similar policies will emerge in the U.S. and Canada. The United States' Agricultural Policy under the Trump Administration: Bill provides insights into how Trump's agricultural policies may affect U.S. farmers, particularly regarding regulation, trade, and environmental standards. He also discusses the growing concerns around the Trump administration's agricultural policies, particularly regarding regulatory shifts and the potential impact on U.S. farming practices. He also touches on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s push to ban agricultural chemicals and anything he deems unhealthy. RFK Jr.'s position has sparked debate, as his proposals could significantly alter farming practices by restricting the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals, raising questions about their long-term impact on food production and farmer livelihoods. Agricultural Policy in Canada: Tracy and Bill discuss Canada's agricultural policies, including the government's receptiveness to pro-trade and innovation arguments, the resignation of Prime Minister Trudeau, and the recent withdrawal of six national crop organizations from Canada's sustainable agriculture strategy. The Impact of Green Policies on Food Choices: Bill highlights how Europe's green policies affect consumer food choices, comparing the differences in food systems, prices, and availability between Europe and North America. Advice for North American Farmers Watching European Trends: Bill shares key advice for North American farmers on how to avoid the regulatory pitfalls seen in European agriculture. What to Watch for in the Coming Years: Bill offers insights on the future of agriculture and green policies, identifying key developments North American farmers should be watching in the next few years. Tune in to this episode for a deep dive into Europe's green agricultural policies, the growing backlash from farmers, and what North American farmers and consumers need to know as these trends begin to cross the Atlantic. ............................... Bill's Winter 2025 Canadian Speaking Engagements: CrossRoads: Alberta's Crop Conference

In Hot Mess Part Six: Snowballs, Skepticism, and Climate Lies, we uncover the deliberate tactics used to mislead the public about climate change, highlighting key players like the Koch brothers and Senator James Inhofe, alongside truth-tellers like former Representative Bob Inglis. The episode examines how misinformation campaigns, economic fearmongering, and symbolic stunts, such as Senator Inhofe's infamous snowball moment, undermined climate science and bipartisan efforts for climate solutions. Featuring insights from guests Chelsea Henderson and Katie Zakrzewski, the episode delves into the emotional and cultural barriers to climate action and explores how understanding these dynamics can foster a path toward bipartisan collaboration and meaningful solutions.   Guest Profiles Chelsea Henderson Host of EcoRight Speaks Podcast and author of The Inside Story of Climate Politics. Chelsea provides in-depth analysis of how the Koch brothers funded a web of organizations to sow doubt about climate science and resist regulatory action. Katie Zakrzewski Co-host of Green Tea Party Radio. Katie critiques how Senator Inhofe's snowball stunt became a rallying cry for climate denial and explores the emotional resonance of his rhetoric with conservative audiences. Representative Bob Inglis Former Republican Congressman from South Carolina and Executive Director of RepublicEn. Bob shares his personal journey from climate skeptic to advocate, emphasizing how conservative values align with environmental stewardship. Compelling Quotes Chelsea Henderson: "The Koch brothers conned millions into believing polluters shouldn't be held accountable for their pollution while everyday Americans pick up the tab." Katie Zakrzewski: "He sure did undo 30 to 50 years of science by throwing a snowball. It's the equivalent of saying world hunger isn't real because I just ate lunch." Representative Bob Inglis: "Protecting the vulnerable is loving God and loving people. Surely, that's what climate action is about." Groups, Resources, and Historical Moments Referenced Organizations: RepublicEn Green Tea Party Radio Citizens Climate Lobby Action Page Union of Concerned Scientists Historical Moments: Senator James Inhofe's snowball stunt (2015) The Koch brothers' influence from the Kyoto Protocol (1997) to the present Media: C-SPAN for archival footage of Senator Inhofe's snowball incident Michelle Malkin's Hot Air show for Inhofe's comments on Al Gore and climate change

Topic I: The Kyoto Protocol: 27 Years of Climate Diplomacy and Its Legacy Topic II: Universal Human Rights Month: The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, A Champion of Human Rights Introduction and NEWS Presenter(s): Noorudeen Jahangeer Sharjeel Ahmad Guest(s): Kevin Collins Professor Priti Parikh Attaur Rahman Khalid Raza Ahmed Producer(s): Zanib Khan, Sahar Tahir, and Hania Yaqub Researcher(s): Maleeha Qamar, Sarah Choudhry, Nurah Owusuaah-Mensah, Jazeeba Khan

On Monday 2 December 2024, the mother of all climate lawsuits began at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Unprecedented, it's also the largest ever case seen by the world court, with a record number of 97 States and 11 international organizations speaking in the oral proceedings. The ICJ is being asked to provide clarity on international law with respect to climate change.The Angry Clean Energy Guy on why what the ICJ says could change the world.

In this episode of the 2Tokens Podcast, our host Erich Schnoeckel sits down with industry leaders Jan Dijkstra from Greenivity and Robert van Mölken of ExoBlock to discuss the potential of tokenizing renewable energy certificates (RECs). Together, they explore how blockchain and decentralized technology can bring new levels of transparency, trust, and efficiency to the renewable energy market while empowering global communities.Key topics covered include:

Send us a textThis week in 2004 NASA cranked up the speed dial to an astonishing Mach 9.6—that's 7,000 mph—thanks to the experimental X-43A scramjet aircraft. Unlike traditional rockets, this futuristic wonder didn't rely on onboard oxygen; it sucked in atmospheric air as fuel, reaching record-breaking speeds and paving the way for some thrilling possibilities. We're talking hypersonic missiles that can outmaneuver anything in sight, a cost-effective boost for space access, and one day, maybe even hypersonic passenger flights (NYC to Tokyo in under two hours, anyone?). We're ready, but we might want to strap in.

Bertie speaks to Sherri Goodman about her new book, Threat Multiplier:Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security. From 1993-2001, Sherri Goodman served as the first US Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security, making her the Pentagon's Chief Environmental Officer. She then went on to help deliver influential reports that helped to establish climate change as a national security threat in the US.  Threat Multiplier documents key environmental and climatic challenges during her career, such as negotiations around the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, and managing geopolitical risk in the Arctic as melting permafrost changes the ocean landscape.Goodman is now Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security, and a Senior Fellow at the Wilson Center.  Further reading: Click here to buy Threat Multiplier from Island Press. 'A career spent trying to make the military care about climate change', The Washington Post, August 2024'The US Department of Defense's Role in Integrating Climate Change into Security Planning', New Security Beat, May 2024'Changing climates for Arctic security', The Wilson Quaterly, 2017National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, 2007Click here to read our investigation into the UK biomass supply chain, or watch a clip from the BBC Newsnight documentary.

ON PODCAST 166DONATE: PAYPAL.ME/JAPANWUTAsia is going through a dynamic shift in power, with the rise of China on one side, and pull of America on the other. Looking forward, what does this mean economically, technologically, and culturally? Joining the podcast from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is Fuad Alabaster, the Executive Director at Halogen Capital, which offers secure and innovative crypto investment solutions. Fuad is also the lead vocalist for the band, Kyoto Protocol. Fuad and Matt discuss how Malaysia and Japan are dealing with tides of change, which we are most definitely in. Follow Fuad: @FuadKyoto, @HalogenCapital, @KyotoBandFollow the Podcast: Twitter / Facebook Page / InstagramOfficial Website, please share: matthewpmbigelow.com

As Liberal poll numbers continue to drag, a new Globe and Mail story cites sources in Justin Trudeau's office putting the blame on Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland for "not being effective in delivering an upbeat economic message." The story also reports that the PMO has considered recruiting Mark Carney as finance minister. It was just a few years ago that Freeland's predecessor, Bill Morneau, was similarly knifed through PMO leaks, True North's Andrew Lawton asks if we are about to see one of Trudeau's most loyal foot soldiers thrown under the bus. Also, universities have become "exasperating" with hateful rhetoric getting a pass while discussions about free speech, EDI, and gender are censored. A new essay in The Hub from Concordia professor Zachary Patterson says there's still hope to purge universities of their "extreme leftist ideology." He joins the show to explain how. Plus, fossil fuel consumption has increased since the Kyoto Protocol and greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise following the Paris climate accord. So why are we inflicting economic harm on our country in support of net-zero measures that clearly aren't working? Fraser Institute senior fellow Dr. Kenneth Green joins the show to weigh in.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello Interactors,We're fully into Summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and as the earth tilts toward the sun, Interplace tilts toward the environment. And what a crucial moment to do so. Just last week, the Supreme Court made sweeping decisions that could unravel over fifty years of environmental legislation, threatening to plunge us into chaos. This upheaval comes precisely when our world's natural boundaries desperately need regulatory stability and security to make any meaningful progress in combating global warming.Let's dig in…POLLEN, POLLUTING, AND POLITICSI recently returned from the Midwest visiting family. I like looking out of the airplane window at the various crop patterns from state to state. Trying to discern which state I was over; I was reminded of a corny Midwest joke.Why do Iowa corn stalks lean to the east? Because Illinois sucks and Nebraska blows. Folks in Illinois tell the same joke, but it's Ohio that sucks and Iowa that blows. You get the idea.The truth is the wind does commonly blow from west to east oblivious to state borders. It sends whatever it wants across the border — clouds, dust, seeds, pollen…pollution. And if there's money to be made, borders become porous or disappear altogether.Those rivalrous corn jokes mirror an economic reality. Bordering states all compete for federal subsidies and access to markets — mostly across international borders. Access to these markets can be impacted by corn pollen drifting from one state to another.With the widespread adoption of genetically modified (GMO) corn varieties, there's potential for contamination of non-GMO corn fields by pollen from GMO corn fields on state lines. One study suggest cross-pollination could be detected up to 600 feet away from the source, although counts dropped off rapidly beyond 150 feet.But the more pressing concern isn't pollen drift, but pollution drift. As part of the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a “Good Neighbor” rule designed to reduce air pollution that crosses state lines. It requires "upwind" states to reduce emissions that affect air quality in "downwind" states which can cause significant health problems.Last week, on June 27, 2024, the Supreme Court's ruling in Ohio v. EPA temporarily blocked this rule.Fossil fuel companies and industry associations celebrated the decision as a win, viewing it as a check on the EPA's regulatory power. Meanwhile humans with a heart and lungs worry the decision leaves upwind states free to contribute to their neighbors' ozone problems for years.It's worth noting that this is a temporary stay, not a final ruling on the merits of the case. The legal challenge will continue in lower courts, with the possibility of oral arguments as soon as this fall. But this ruling can also be seen as part of a pattern of the Supreme Court's conservative majority expressing skepticism towards federal regulatory authority, especially in environmental matters.Take, for example, the ruling that came the very next day on June 28, 2024. The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, curtailed EPA, and other executive agencies', power by overturning the Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council precedent. This shift endangers numerous regulations and transfers authority from the executive branch to Congress and the courts. Chevron has been a cornerstone in American law, cited in 70 Supreme Court and 17,000 lower court decisions.The case began with fishermen challenging two similar rulings, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce. These involved a 1976 law requiring herring boats to carry federal observers to prevent overfishing. A 2020 regulation mandated boat owners to pay $700 daily for the observers. Fishermen from New Jersey and Rhode Island, supported by conservative groups opposing the "administrative state," sued, arguing the law didn't authorize the National Marine Fisheries Service to impose the fee.Adam Liptak of the New York Times reported the fisherman case was brought “by Cause of Action Institute, which says its mission is ‘to limit the power of the administrative state,' and the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which says it aims ‘to protect constitutional freedoms from violations from the administrative state.'” Liptak also reports these institutions are funded by Charles Koch, the climate change denying billionaire who has long supported conservative and libertarian causes.It's curious how the Environmental Protection Agency came from a conservative libertarian and the first most dishonest president in my lifetime, Richard Nixon. The EPA will likely be obliterated should the least trusted former president get reelected — Felonious Trump.GORSUCH'S GRIM GREEN GUTTINGI wrote about the formation of the EPA in July of 2021.

In 2005, countries around the world ratified the Kyoto Protocol. It was the first big, legally-binding international climate policy, but there was a big drawback: The United States, the world's richest country and second-highest emitter, didn't ratify it.In response, American mayors took action. Even if the US wouldn't commit to cutting climate emissions, their cities would. It was the classic “think global, act local” move.It started with mayoral resolutions—a bunch of “whereases” laying out the reasons cities needed their own climate targets. Whereas manmade climate change is happening. Whereas cities are responsible for 70% of the world's emissions. Whereas more than half the world's people live in cities. Whereas cities are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.Therefore? Our city is going to do something about it. Mayors proclaimed, city councils adopted, and gavels cracked on podiums across the country as city climate plans were created, along with a new job to manage it all: the chief sustainability officer.Twenty years later, hundreds of US cities have climate plans. Their chief sustainability officers are responsible for aggressive decarbonization goals that require deep cuts to emissions, and fast. But are cities actually meeting their targets? And do city sustainability officers have what they need to meet them?Read the rest of this story at sciencefriday.com.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

As a new play depicts the landmark global climate change agreement, the Kyoto protocol, Jordan Dunbar has a front row seat. He heads to the historic English town of Stratford-Upon-Avon to watch the opening night of the play, Kyoto, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. He hears why the writers, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson decided to dramatize the seemingly slow and tedious action of a global climate change conference. And the duo explain their goal to highlight Kyoto as a ‘parable of agreement' in a world full of disagreement.The programme also hears from two veterans of many real world climate change negotiations, including the Kyoto Protocol, the first global agreement to set legally binding targets. Christiana Figueres was responsible for leading climate negotiations as the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and Farhana Yamin provided legal and strategy advice to the leaders of AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States at Kyoto and nearly every UN climate summit since.Got a question, comment or experience you'd like to share? Email: TheClimateQuestion@BBC.comPresenter: Jordan Dunbar Producers: Phoebe Keane and Octavia Woodward Editor: Simon Watts Sound mix: Tom Brignell

Have you ever stopped to think how we're treating biodiversity like it's free to use? Our planet's biodiversity does a great service for all humankind, and it's time we give it the financial value it deserves.This is the core of natural capital investing, and today's guest, Martin Berg, is here to share its inner workings.He is the CEO of Climate Asset Management, and he made his way into climate finance at the UN's first Climate Change Conference following the Kyoto Protocol. Martin's commitment to climate and nature-based solutions has led him through several leadership and strategy positions over the past two decades, integrating natural capital investing and carbon finance across both private and public sectors at organizations like the European Investment Bank, Merrill Lynch, RNK Capital, and the OECD.Martin shares how Climate Asset Management started off as a joint venture between HSBC and Pollination. With $650 million of AUM raised after just 18 months, the company has become a global asset management leader in the field of natural capital investing, carbon offsets, and innovative financial vehicles that bridge the two. The company is now investing across all asset classes, themes, and geographies, and even managing capital on behalf of high profile corporates such as Apple, among other large institutional investors.In this episode, Martin shares his thoughts on how natural capital investing not only addresses climate change but also offers significant, long-term financial returns. He emphasizes the importance of moving large amounts of capital to this space for our planet's future, and delivers a comprehensive view of the challenges and opportunities in natural capital and carbon finance.Tune in to learn how nature's value can turn into real financial gains that drive positive environmental impact. —Show notes—About the SRI 360° Podcast: The SRI 360° Podcast is focused exclusively on sustainable & responsible investing. In each episode, I interview a world-class investor who is an accomplished practitioner from all asset classes. In my interviews, I cover everything from their early personal journeys to insights into how they developed and executed their investment strategies and what challenges they face today. Each episode is a chance to go way below the surface with these impressive people and gain additional insights and useful lessons from professional investors.—Connect with SRI360°: Sign up for the free weekly email update.Visit the SRI360° PODCAST.Visit the SRI360° WEBSITE.Follow SRI360° on X.Follow SRI360° on FACEBOOK. —Key TakeawaysMeet Martin Berg & his early experiences at the UN & OECD (00:00)Becoming a Carbon Finance Specialist at RNK Capital in New York (13:15)Martin's time at Merrill Lynch, the European Investment Bank, & Pollination (21:26)An overview of Climate Asset Management (42:19)Martin defines what natural capital investment is (48:50)Climate Asset Management's theory of change & investment examples (53:35)What makes a strong nature-based investment? (01:02:45)The investment process at Climate Asset Management (01:10:00)Apple's Restore Fund  & The Future of Natural Capital Investing (01:23:53)Rapid fire questions (01:32:14)—Additional ResourcesListen to the episode about Tammy Newmark & her Eco Enterprises Fund.Learn more about Climate Asset Managemen

Become a patron at https://www.patreon.com/bionicplanet In Episode 100 of Bionic Planet, part of the Tribes of the Climate Realm vertical, we delve into the origins of the voluntary carbon market -- a story that has never been told before. Today's show is the first of many offering a truer, completer, and more accurate glimpse into the origins of the Voluntary Carbon Market than you've probably ever heard before. The episode draws on a 2022 discussion with environmental economists Marc Stuart and Mark Kenber, who were instrumental in creating the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) in 2005 to meet two core objectives: first, to accelerate emission reductions in the wake of failed government policy and, second, to test new approaches to meeting the climate challenge. We offer a brief history of climate negotiations leading up to 2005 and the exclusion of forest protection and sustainable farming from the Kyoto Protocol and the Marrakesh Accords. The discussion touches on the complexities of integrating these crucial elements into the market, emphasizing the importance of balancing environmental integrity with development-focused activities. Join me, Steve Zwick, in this insightful journey through the history and evolution of the voluntary carbon market, as we strive to create a more sustainable future for our planet. Thank you for tuning in to Episode 100 of Bionic Planet. Related Links 049 | Forests in the Paris Climate Agreement, Part 1: The Birth of Forest Carbon https://bionic-planet.com/podcast-episode/049-forests-in-the-paris-climate-agreement-part-1-the-birth-of-forest-carbon/  064 | Race to Zero: Meet the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon https://bionic-planet.com/podcast-episode/064-race-to-zero-meet-the-taskforce-on-scaling-voluntary-carbon/  75 l Coverage of Climate Solutions Suffer the Same Fate as Coverage of Climate Science? https://bionic-planet.com/podcast-episode/75-l-coverage-of-climate-solutions-suffer-the-same-fate-as-coverage-of-climate-science/   Timestamps Introduction to the History of the Voluntary Carbon Market The Origins of the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) The Role of Carbon Markets in Addressing Climate Change The Failure of Governments to Address Climate Change The Evolution of Voluntary Carbon Standards The Importance of Ending Deforestation The Emergence of Voluntary Carbon Markets in the 1980s The Kyoto Protocol and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) The Exclusion of Forest Protection from the Kyoto Protocol The Creation of the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) Challenges in Implementing Standards for Forest Protection The Need for Unified Rules in Carbon Markets The Involvement of NGOs, Businesses, and Organizations in Developing Standards The Controversy Surrounding Inclusion of Forest Conservation The Importance of Addressing Permanence and Fungibility The Collaboration Between NGOs and Businesses in Developing Standards The Importance of Including Forest Conservation in Carbon Markets The Role of NGOs in Advocating for Inclusion of Forest Conservation The Significance of Learning from Past Lessons Call to Action for Support and Sponsorship

Episode Summary In this episode of the Solar Maverick Podcast, Benoy speaks with Annika Colston who is the President and Founder of AC Power.  AC Power is an award winning NYC certified (“Women Business Enterprise”) WBE focused on converting low value land into revenue-generating solar energy sites.  Annika speaks about many interesting topics like the complexities of developing on disturbed land, the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act, and her suggestions to start a clean energy compnay.   Benoy Thanjan Benoy Thanjan is the Founder and CEO of Reneu Energy and he is also an advisor for several solar startup companies.  He has extensive project origination, development, and financial experience in the renewable energy industry and in the environmental commodities market.   This includes initial site evaluation, permitting, financing, sourcing equipment, and negotiating the long-term energy and environmental commodities off-take agreements. He manages due diligence processes on land, permitting, and utility interconnection and is in charge of financing and structuring through Note to Proceed (“NTP”) to Commercial Operation Date (“COD”). Benoy composes teams suitable for all project development and construction tasks. He is also involved in project planning and pipeline financial modeling. He has been part of all sides of the transaction and this allows him to provide unique perspectives and value. Benoy has extensive experience in financial engineering to make solar projects profitable. Before founding Reneu Energy, he was the SREC Trader in the Project Finance Group for SolarCity which merged with Tesla in 2016.  He originated SREC trades with buyers and co-developed their SREC monetization and hedging strategy with the senior management of SolarCity to move into the east coast markets.  Benoy was the Vice President at Vanguard Energy Partners which is a national solar installer where he focused on project finance solutions for commercial scale solar projects.  He also worked for Ridgewood Renewable Power, a private equity fund, where he analyzed potential investments in renewable energy projects and worked on maximizing the financial return of the projects in the portfolio.  Benoy also worked on the sale of all of the renewable energy projects in Ridgewood's portfolio.   He was in the Energy Structured Finance practice for Deloitte & Touche and in Financial Advisory Services practice at Ernst & Young.  Benoy received his first experience in Finance as an intern at D.E. Shaw & Co., which is a global investment firm with 37 billion dollars in investment capital. He has a MBA in Finance from Rutgers University and a BS in Finance and Economics from the Stern School of Business at New York University.  Benoy was an Alumni Scholar at the Stern School of Business.    Annika Colston Annika Colston founded AC Power to bring a unique vision to solar PV project development and management on landfill and brownfield sites. Annika has been developing alternative energy projects for nearly two decades and has experience across all aspects of project development. She has worked with all stakeholders needed to make alternative energy projects successful. These stakeholders include governments, local municipalities, Fortune 500 companies, landowners, utilities, and more. The breadth of her experience makes her capable of solving conflicts and bringing teams together to ensure success. Annika has a unique ability to bring projects to operation on time and within budget. Ms. Colston has been a senior manager of four start-up companies that sourced private and public capital to drive investment in environmentally and socially beneficial projects. Annika has a long track record of successfully taking projects through the entire development process including origination, contract negotiations, due diligence, financing and investor approvals, permitting, structuring off-take agreements, equipment procurement, construction contracting, and operations. Prior to AC Power, Annika was Vice President at PV Navigator where she originated and developed over 50 MW of solar projects on landfills and brownfields. From 2011 to 2014, Ms. Colston was President of C2i Methane where she developed and sold a portfolio of landfill gas to energy projects. Ms. Colston's work experience includes entities that were market leaders such as E+Co, which invested seed capital in sustainable development projects in Africa using innovative investment structures; EcoSecurities, a first of its kind company marketing Kyoto Protocol projects globally; and Blue Source, the largest carbon credit portfolio in the US.   Stay Connected: Benoy Thanjan Email: info@reneuenergy.com  LinkedIn: Benoy Thanjan Website: https://www.reneuenergy.com   Annika Colston Website:  https://www.acpowerllc.com/ Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/annika-colston-9681624/

The role of militaries, and conflicts, in driving global warming can no longer be ignored. Synopsis: Every first and third Sunday of the month, The Straits Times analyses the beat of the changing environment, from biodiversity conservation to climate change. Even in peace times, militaries are huge emitters of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming. The US military with its global network of bases, has a particularly large carbon footprint - and outsources it to host countries who must account for it under their own reports to the United Nations.  Humanity is at war in two places currently - Ukraine and the Middle East - with several other low-level conflicts in different parts of the globe, and military expenditure on the rise. Historical data shows that past wars produced staggering amounts of greenhouse gasses. The destruction of forests in Vietnam in the 1960s by the US's use of the chemical herbicide Agent Orange is estimated to have generated emissions in the range of 300-400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) - about seven to eight times the annual emissions of the country of Switzerland.  The burning of oil wells by then-dictator Saddam Hussein's army in 1990 as western coalition forces drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, generated probably more than 400 million tonnes.  Until recently however, the carbon emissions of wars and militaries were not seriously considered. When the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997, the United States pushed for the exclusion of bunker fuels - essentially transport fuel for ships and airplanes, much of which is used by its military.  That is slowly changing. While militaries' carbon footprints are trending downwards in line with other economic sectors, as economies broadly become more fuel efficient, conflicts sharply spike CO2 emissions, and any increase in geopolitical conflict risks diverting taxpayer funding from climate adaptation and mitigation programmes.  There is now a clear view in the United Nations, that this dilemma must be addressed, says University of Zurich climate policy expert and senior founding partner of Perspectives Climate Group Dr Axel Michaelowa, in conversation with Straits Times Global Contributor Nirmal Ghosh in this episode of the Green Pulse podcast.  Highlights of conversation (click/tap above): 3:30 Impact of Agent Orange on forest destruction during the Vietnam War; carbon emissions in the range of 300 to 400 million tons  4:57 Conflict in Gaza - the destruction of buildings and emissions of 30 to 40 million tons  6:10 How 10 to 15 years of opportunity for mitigation was lost due to the United States advocating to exempt the need to report and cover emissions from ships and planes - driven mainly by military.  9:05 With US bases outside of its country, these substantial emissions would be accounted under the country where the base is located.  11:25 The indirect consequence of geopolitical conflicts on increased carbon emission 14:13 International recognition that carbon emissions from militaries and conflicts need to be accounted for.  Produced by: Nirmal Ghosh (nirmal@sph.com.sg), Ernest Luis, Hadyu Rahim & Amirul Karim Edited by: Amirul Karim Follow Green Pulse Podcast here and rate us: Channel: https://str.sg/JWaf Apple Podcasts: https://str.sg/JWaY Spotify: https://str.sg/JWag SPH Awedio app: https://www.awedio.sg/ Website: http://str.sg/stpodcasts Feedback to: podcast@sph.com.sg Read ST's Climate Change microsite: https://www.straitstimes.com/climate-change --- Discover more ST podcast channels: COE Watch: https://str.sg/iTtE In Your Opinion: https://str.sg/w7Qt Asian Insider: https://str.sg/JWa7 Health Check: https://str.sg/JWaN Green Pulse: https://str.sg/JWaf Your Money & Career: https://str.sg/wB2m ST Sports Talk: https://str.sg/JWRE #PopVultures: https://str.sg/JWad Music Lab: https://str.sg/w9TX Discover ST Podcasts: http://str.sg/stpodcasts --- Special edition series: True Crimes Of Asia (6 eps): https://str.sg/i44T The Unsolved Mysteries of South-east Asia (5 eps): https://str.sg/wuZ2 Invisible Asia (9 eps): https://str.sg/wuZn Stop Scams (10 eps): https://str.sg/wuZB Singapore's War On Covid (5 eps): https://str.sg/wuJa --- Follow our shows then, if you like short, practical podcasts! #greenpulseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The role of militaries, and conflicts, in driving global warming can no longer be ignored. Synopsis: Every first and third Sunday of the month, The Straits Times analyses the beat of the changing environment, from biodiversity conservation to climate change. Even in peace times, militaries are huge emitters of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming. The US military with its global network of bases, has a particularly large carbon footprint - and outsources it to host countries who must account for it under their own reports to the United Nations.  Humanity is at war in two places currently - Ukraine and the Middle East - with several other low-level conflicts in different parts of the globe, and military expenditure on the rise. Historical data shows that past wars produced staggering amounts of greenhouse gasses. The destruction of forests in Vietnam in the 1960s by the US's use of the chemical herbicide Agent Orange is estimated to have generated emissions in the range of 300-400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) - about seven to eight times the annual emissions of the country of Switzerland.  The burning of oil wells by then-dictator Saddam Hussein's army in 1990 as western coalition forces drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, generated probably more than 400 million tonnes.  Until recently however, the carbon emissions of wars and militaries were not seriously considered. When the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997, the United States pushed for the exclusion of bunker fuels - essentially transport fuel for ships and airplanes, much of which is used by its military.  That is slowly changing. While militaries' carbon footprints are trending downwards in line with other economic sectors, as economies broadly become more fuel efficient, conflicts sharply spike CO2 emissions, and any increase in geopolitical conflict risks diverting taxpayer funding from climate adaptation and mitigation programmes.  There is now a clear view in the United Nations, that this dilemma must be addressed, says University of Zurich climate policy expert and senior founding partner of Perspectives Climate Group Dr Axel Michaelowa, in conversation with Straits Times Global Contributor Nirmal Ghosh in this episode of the Green Pulse podcast.  Highlights of conversation (click/tap above): 3:30 Impact of Agent Orange on forest destruction during the Vietnam War; carbon emissions in the range of 300 to 400 million tons  4:57 Conflict in Gaza - the destruction of buildings and emissions of 30 to 40 million tons  6:10 How 10 to 15 years of opportunity for mitigation was lost due to the United States advocating to exempt the need to report and cover emissions from ships and planes - driven mainly by military.  9:05 With US bases outside of its country, these substantial emissions would be accounted under the country where the base is located.  11:25 The indirect consequence of geopolitical conflicts on increased carbon emission 14:13 International recognition that carbon emissions from militaries and conflicts need to be accounted for.  Produced by: Nirmal Ghosh (nirmal@sph.com.sg), Ernest Luis, Hadyu Rahim & Amirul Karim Edited by: Amirul Karim Follow Green Pulse Podcast here and rate us: Channel: https://str.sg/JWaf Apple Podcasts: https://str.sg/JWaY Spotify: https://str.sg/JWag SPH Awedio app: https://www.awedio.sg/ Website: http://str.sg/stpodcasts Feedback to: podcast@sph.com.sg Read ST's Climate Change microsite: https://www.straitstimes.com/climate-change --- Discover more ST podcast channels: COE Watch: https://str.sg/iTtE In Your Opinion: https://str.sg/w7Qt Asian Insider: https://str.sg/JWa7 Health Check: https://str.sg/JWaN Green Pulse: https://str.sg/JWaf Your Money & Career: https://str.sg/wB2m ST Sports Talk: https://str.sg/JWRE #PopVultures: https://str.sg/JWad Music Lab: https://str.sg/w9TX Discover ST Podcasts: http://str.sg/stpodcasts --- Special edition series: True Crimes Of Asia (6 eps): https://str.sg/i44T The Unsolved Mysteries of South-east Asia (5 eps): https://str.sg/wuZ2 Invisible Asia (9 eps): https://str.sg/wuZn Stop Scams (10 eps): https://str.sg/wuZB Singapore's War On Covid (5 eps): https://str.sg/wuJa --- Follow our shows then, if you like short, practical podcasts! #greenpulseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Please enjoy this re-air of our listeners' favorite topical show of 2023! On this topical show re-air, Crystal chats with former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and his former Senior Communications Advisor Robert Cruickshank about the missed opportunity for generational impact through how decisions were made about Seattle's waterfront and the SR99 tunnel. Mike and Robert review how the vision of the scrappy People's Waterfront Coalition, centered around making a prized public space accessible for all while taking the climate crisis on by transforming our transportation system, nearly won the fight against those who prioritized maintaining highway capacity and those who prioritized increasing Downtown property values.  The conversation then highlights how those with power and money used their outsized influence to make backroom decisions - despite flawed arguments and little public enthusiasm for their proposal - leaving Seattle with an underutilized deep bore tunnel and a car-centric waterfront. Some of the decision makers are still active in local politics - including current Mayor Bruce Harrell and his current advisor Tim Burgess. With important elections ahead, Crystal, Mike and Robert discuss how political decisions tend to conflict with campaign promises rather than donor rolls, how proven action is a better indicator than value statements, and how today's dense ecosystem of progressive leaders and organizations can take inspiration and win the next fight. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Follow us on Twitter at @HacksWonks. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii, Mike McGinn at @mayormcginn, and Robert Cruickshank at @cruickshank.   Mike McGinn Mike is the Executive Director of national nonprofit America Walks.  He got his start in local politics as a neighborhood activist pushing for walkability. From there he founded a non-profit focused on sustainable and equitable growth, and then became mayor of Seattle. Just before joining America Walks, Mike worked to help Feet First, Washington State's walking advocacy organization, expand their sphere of influence across Washington state. He has worked on numerous public education, legislative, ballot measure and election campaigns – which has given him an abiding faith in the power of organizing and volunteers to create change.   Robert Cruickshank Robert is the Director of Digital Strategy at California YIMBY and Chair of Sierra Club Seattle. A long time communications and political strategist, he was Senior Communications Advisor to Mike McGinn from 2011-2013.   Resources “Seattle Waterfront History Interviews: Cary Moon, Waterfront Coalition” by Dominic Black from HistoryLink   “State Route 99 tunnel - Options and political debate" from Wikipedia   “Remembering broken promises about Bertha” by Josh Cohen from Curbed Seattle   “Fewer drivers in Seattle's Highway 99 tunnel could create need for bailout” by Mike Lindblom from The Seattle Times   “Surface Highway Undermines Seattle's Waterfront Park” by Doug Trumm from The Urbanist   “Seattle Prepares to Open Brand New Elliott Way Highway Connector” by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today, I am very excited to be welcoming Robert Cruickshank and former Mayor Mike McGinn to the show to talk about something that a lot of people have been thinking about, talking about recently - and that is Seattle's new waterfront. We feel like we've spent a decade under construction - from a deep bore tunnel to the tunnel machine getting stuck - that's not even covering all the debate before that, but all of the kind of follies and foibles and challenges that have beset the process of arriving at the waterfront that we have now. And now that we are getting the big reveal, a lot of people have feelings about it. So I thought we would talk about it with one of the people who was at the forefront of criticisms of the tunnel and calling out some red flags that turned out to be a very wise warning - several wise warnings that have come to pass, unfortunately - for not listening to them. But I want to start early on in the beginning, both of you - and I had a short stint in the mayor's office - worked on this, talked about this on the campaign, really got it. But when did you first hear that we needed to replace the viaduct and there were some different opinions about how to make that happen? [00:02:06] Mike McGinn: Okay, so I'm sure I can't pin down a date, but the really important date was, of course, the Nisqually earthquake in 2001. And so it gave the Alaska Way Viaduct a good shake - the decks weren't tied into the columns, the columns were on fill, which could liquefy - and everybody understood that if that quake had been a little stronger and harder, the elevated would come down. Now you might think that that would call for immediately closing the roadway for safety reasons, but what it did call for was for reconstructing it. And you have to remember that highway was really one of the very first limited access highways - it was built long ago and it was just at the end of its useful life anyway. Certainly not built to modern seismic standards or modern engineering standards. So the conversation immediately started and I don't know when everything started to settle into different roles, but the Mayor of Seattle Greg Nickels, was immediately a proponent for a tunnel - and a much larger and more expensive tunnel than what was ultimately built. And it would have been a cut-and-cover tunnel along the waterfront that included a new seawall. So they thought they were solving two things at one time - because the seawall too was rotting away, very old, very unstable. But it would have gone all the way under South Lake Union and emerged onto Aurora Avenue further north, it would have had entrances and exits to Western and Elliott. And I seem to remember the quoted price was like $11 billion. And the state - governor at the time was Christine Gregoire - they were - No, we're replacing the highway. We don't have $11 billion for Seattle. And of course had the support of a lot of lawmakers for obvious reasons - we're not going to give Seattle all that money, we want all that highway money for our districts. And those were immediately presented as the alternatives. And so much of the credit has to go to Cary Moon, who lived on the waterfront and started something called the People's Waterfront Coalition. I think Grant Cogswell, a former City Council candidate - now runs a bookstore down in Mexico City, but wrote a book about the Monorail, worked on the different Monorail campaigns before that - they launched something called the People's Waterfront Coalition. And the basic proposition was - We don't need a highway. This is a great opportunity to get rid of the highway and have a surface street, but if you amp up the transit service - if we invest in transit instead - we can accommodate everyone. And so that was really - as it started - and actually I remember being outside City Hall one day, going to some stakeholder meeting - I went to so many different stakeholder meetings. And I remember Tim Ceis saying to me - he was the Deputy Mayor at the time - You're not supporting that Cary Moon idea - I mean, that's just crazy. I was - Well, actually, Tim. So the Sierra Club was - I was a volunteer leader in the Sierra Club - and the Sierra Club was one of the first organizations - I'm sure there were others, I shouldn't overstate it - but the Sierra Club was persuaded by the wisdom of Cary's idea and supported it in that day. And so that was really how the three different options got launched - no public process, no analysis, no description of what our needs were. The mayor went to a solution, the governor went to a solution - and it was up to members of the public to try to ask them to slow down, stop, and look at something different. [00:05:42] Crystal Fincher: And Robert, how did you first engage with this issue? [00:05:47] Robert Cruickshank: For me, I had just moved to Seattle the first time in the fall of 2001 - so it was about six months after the Nisqually quake - and I came from the Bay Area. And that was where another earthquake had damaged another waterfront highway, the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco. And that was where San Francisco had voted - after that quake had damaged their viaduct beyond repair - they voted to tear it down and replace it with the Embarcadero Waterfront, which is a six-lane arterial but they built a lot more transit there. So they did the - what we might call the surface transit option - and it worked really well. It was beautiful. It still is. And so when I came up here and started to learn a little bit about the place I was living and the legacy of the Nisqually quake, I thought - Oh, why don't you just do the same thing here? It worked so well in San Francisco. Let's just tear down this unsightly monstrosity on the waterfront and replace it with a surface boulevard and put in a bunch of transit - San Francisco's made it work successfully. And the more I learned about Seattle, I realized there's a legacy of that here, too. This is a city where we had a freeway revolt, where activists came together and killed the RH Thomson freeway, which would have destroyed the Arboretum. They killed the Bay Freeway, which would have destroyed Pike Place Market. And so I naturally assumed - as being a relatively new resident - that Seattle would stay in that tradition and welcome the opportunity to tear this down and build a great waterfront for people, not cars. But as we'll talk about in a moment, we have a lot of business interests and freight interests and others who had a different vision - who didn't share that community-rooted vision. And I think at numerous points along the way, though, you see people of Seattle saying - No, this is not what we want for our waterfront. We have an opportunity now with the fact that this viaduct nearly collapsed, as Mike mentioned, in the Nisqually quake - we have an opportunity for something really wonderful here. And so I think Cary Moon and then Mike McGinn and others tapped into that - tapped into a really strong community desire to have a better waterfront. I wasn't that politically engaged at the time in the 2000s - I was just a grad student at UW - but just talking to folks who I knew, anytime this came up - God, wouldn't it be wonderful down there if this was oriented towards people and not cars, and we took that thing down? So I think one of the things you're going to see is this contest between the vision that many of us in Seattle had and still have - this beautiful location, beautiful vista on Elliott Bay, that should be for the people of the city - and those in power who have a very different vision and don't really want to share power or ultimately the right-of-way with We the People. [00:08:05] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, definitely. And I was involved in some things at the time - some curious coalitions - but definitely I was around a lot of people who favored either rebuilding the viaduct or the tunnel. Definitely not this roads and transit option - there's no way that's workable. That's pie-in-the-sky talk from those loony greenies over there. What are you talking about? But as this went on - I think no matter what camp people were in - there was always a clear vision articulated and people really focused on the opportunity that this represented, and I think correctly characterized it as - this is one of these generational decisions that we get to make that is going to impact the next generation or two and beyond. And there's an opportunity - the waterfront felt very disconnected with the way things were constructed - it was not easy just to go from downtown to the waterfront. It wasn't friendly for pedestrians. It wasn't friendly for tourists. It just did not feel like a world-class waterfront in a world-class city, and how we see that in so many other cities. You talk about the decision with the Embarcadero, Robert, and looking at - that definitely seemed like a definitive step forward. This was sold as - yeah, we can absolutely take a step forward and finally fix this waterfront and make it what it should have been the whole time. As you thought about the opportunity that this represented, what was the opportunity to you and what did you hear other people saying that they wanted this to be? [00:09:38] Mike McGinn: Yeah, so I think there are - I think that's really important, because I don't think there was a real discussion of what the vision was. People will say there was, but there really wasn't. Because what was baked in and what you're referring to is - well, of course you have to build automobile capacity to replace the existing automobile capacity, right? In fact, this state is still building more highways across the state in the misguided belief that more highway capacity will somehow or another do some good. So this idea that you have to replace and expand highway capacity is extremely powerful in Washington state and across the country. And there were very few examples of highway removal, so that was just a real challenge in the first place - that somehow or other the first priority has to be moving automobiles. For me, at that time I had become - the issue of climate had really penetrated me at that point. And in fact, when Greg Nickels took office and the Sierra Club endorsed him over Paul Schell - I was a local leader in the Sierra Club and a state leader in the Sierra Club - and my goal was that Mayor Nickels would do more than Paul Schell. And Paul Schell, the prior mayor, had done some good things. He had made Seattle City Light climate neutral - we'd gotten out of coal plants and we didn't purchase power from coal plants. He was really progressive on a number of environmental issues and we wanted Mayor Nickels to do more - and Mayor Nickels had stepped up. So we put on a campaign to urge him to do more. And he had stepped up to start something called the Mayors' Climate Protection Initiative - which was the City of Seattle was going to meet the standards of the Kyoto Protocol, which was like the Paris Agreement of its day. And that was - it set an emissions reduction target by a date in the future. And that was really great - in fact, over a thousand cities around the country signed up to the Mayors' Climate Protection Initiative. And I was appointed to a stakeholder group with other leaders - Denis Hayes from the Bullitt Foundation and others - to develop the first climate action plan for a city. Al Gore showed up at the press conference for it - it was a big - it was a BFD and a lot of excitement. And one of the things that was abundantly clear through that process of cataloging the emissions in the City of Seattle and coming up with a plan to reduce them was that our single largest source of emissions at that time was the transportation sector. We'd already gotten off of coal power under Mayor Schell - we received almost all of our electricity from hydroelectric dams. We had good conservation programs. Unlike other parts of the country, transportation was the biggest. Now what's fascinating is now - I don't know if I want to do the math - almost 20 years later, now what we see is that the whole country is in the same place. We're replacing coal and natural gas power plants. And now nationally, the single largest source of emissions is transportation. So how do you fix that? If we're serious about climate - and I thought we should be - because the scientists were telling us about heat waves. They were telling us about forest fires that would blanket the region in smoke. They were telling us about storms that would be bigger than we'd ever seen before. And flooding like we'd never seen and declining snowpack. And it was all going to happen in our futures. Honestly, I remember those predictions from the scientists because they're in the headlines today, every day. So what do we do to stop that? So I was - I had little kids, man - I had little kids, I had three kids. How are we going to stop this? Well, it's Seattle needs to lead - that's what has to happen. We're the progressive city. We're the first one out with a plan. We're going to show how we're going to do it. And if our biggest source is transportation, we should fix that. Well, it should seem obvious that the first thing you should do is stop building and expanding highways, and maybe even change some of the real estate used for cars and make it real estate for walking, biking, and transit. That's pretty straightforward. You also have to work on more housing. And this all led me to starting a nonprofit around all of these things and led to the Sierra Club - I think at a national level - our chapter was much further forward than any other chapter on upzones and backyard cottages and making the transition. So to me, this was the big - that was the vision. That was the opportunity. We're going to tear this down. We're going to make a massive investment in changing the system, and this in fact could be a really transformative piece. That's what motivated me. That climate argument wasn't landing with a whole bunch of other interests. There was certainly a vision from the Downtown and Downtown property owners and residents that - boy, wouldn't it be great to get rid of that elevated highway because that's terrible. There was also a vision from the people who still believed in highway capacity and that includes some of our major employers at the time and today - Boeing and Microsoft, they have facilities in the suburbs around Seattle - they think we need highway capacity. As well as all of the Port businesses, as well as all the maritime unions - thought that this highway connection here was somehow critical to their survival, the industrial areas. And then they wanted the capacity. So there were very strong competing visions. And I think it's fair to say that highway capacity is a vision - we've seen that one is now fulfilled. The second priority was an enhanced physical environment to enhance the property values of Downtown property owners. And they cut the deal with the highway capacity people - okay, we're here for your highway capacity, but we have to get some amenities. And the climate folks, I'm not seeing it - never a priority of any of the leaders - just wasn't a priority. [00:15:44] Crystal Fincher: How did you see those factions come into play and break down, Robert? [00:15:48] Robert Cruickshank: It was interesting. This all comes to a head in the late 2000s. And remembering back to that time, this is where Seattle is leading the fight to take on the climate and the fight against George W. Bush, who was seen as this avatar of and deeply connected to the oil industry. Someone who - one of his first things when he took office - he did was withdraw the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol, which is the earlier version of what's now known as the Paris Agreement - global agreement to try to lower emissions. And so Seattle, in resisting Bush - that's where Greg Nickels became a national figure by leading the Mayors' Climate Action Group - not just say we're going to take on climate, we're going to do something about really de facto fighting back against Bush. And then Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore comes out with An Inconvenient Truth. And by 2007, people in Seattle are talking a lot about climate and how we need to do something about climate. But then what you see happening is the limits of that - what are people really actually willing to do and willing to support? The other piece that comes together, I think - in the 2000s - is a revival of the City itself. Seattle spends the late 20th century after the Boeing bust - since the 70s "Will the last person out of Seattle turn out the lights," recovering in the 80s somewhat, recovering in the 90s, and then the tech boom. And by the 2000s, Seattle is a destination city for young people coming to live here and living in apartments and working in the tech industry. I think that unsettles a lot of people. One thing that really stood out to me about the discussion about what to do on the waterfront was this vision from old school folks - like Joel Connelly and others - we've got to preserve that working waterfront. And it's very much the sense that blue collar working class labor is under threat - not from corporate power, but from a 20-something millennial with a laptop working at Amazon who comes to Seattle and thinks - Gosh, why is this ugly viaduct here? It's unsafe. Why don't we just tear it down and have a wonderful waterfront view? And those who are offended by this idea - who are so wedded to the 20th century model that we're going to drive everywhere, cars, freedom - this is where you see the limits of willingness to actually do something on climate. People don't actually want to give up their cars. They're afraid they're going to sacrifice their way of life. And you start to see this weird but powerful constellation come together where rather than having a discussion about transportation planning or even a discussion about climate action, we're having this weird discussion about culture. And it becomes a culture war. And the thing about a culture war is people pushing change are never actually trying to fight a war. They're just - This is a good idea. Why don't we do this? We all say these - we care about these values. And the people who don't want it just dig in and get really nasty and fight back. And so you start to see Cary Moon, People's Waterfront Coalition, Mike McGinn, and others get attacked as not wanting working class jobs, not wanting a working waterfront, not caring about how people are going to get to work, not caring about how the freight trucks are going to get around even though you're proposing a tunnel from the Port to Wallingford where - it's not exactly an industrial hub - there are some businesses there. But dumping all these cars out or in South Lake Union, it's like, what is going on here? It doesn't add up. But it became this powerful moment where a competing vision of the City - which those of us who saw a better future for Seattle didn't see any competition as necessary at all - those who are wedded to that model where we're going to drive everywhere, we're going to have trucks everywhere, really saw that under threat for other reasons. And they decided this is where they're going to make their stand. This is where they're going to make that fight. And that turned out to be pretty useful for the Port, the freight groups, the establishment democratic leaders who had already decided for their own reasons this is what they wanted too. [00:19:11] Mike McGinn: It's important to recognize too, in this, is to follow the money. And I think that this is true for highway construction generally. You have a big section of the economy - there's a section of the economy that believes in it, as Robert was saying, right? And I do think the culture war stuff is fully there - that somehow or another a bike lane in an industrial area will cause the failure of business. Although if you went to the bike - outside the industrial building - you'll find a bunch of the workers' bike there, right? Because it's affordable and efficient. So there's this weird belief that just isn't true - that you can't accommodate industry and transit and walking and biking. Of course you can. And in fact, adding all the cars is bad for freight movement because of all the traffic jams. So there's that belief, but there's also a whole bunch of people - I mentioned Downtown property owners - that gets you to your Downtown Seattle Association. The value of their property is going to be dramatically enhanced by burying, by eliminating the waterfront highway. But then you also have all of the people who build highways and all of the people who support the people who build highways. Who's going to float $4 billion in bonds? It's going to be a Downtown law firm. And by the way, the person who worked for that Downtown law firm and did the bond work was the head of the greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at that time. So you have the engineering firms, you have the material providers, and then you have the union jobs that go with it. So really at this point - and this isn't just about the waterfront highway, this could be any highway expansion - you've captured the business community because a big chunk of the business community will get direct dollars from the government to them. And you've actually captured a significant chunk of the labor community as well, because labor fights for labor jobs. In the big picture, service workers are taking transit, service workers need housing in town, and you can start to see a split - like in my ultimate run for mayor, I won some service worker unions, never won any construction trades. In fact, they held a rally my first year in office to denounce me, right? Because I was standing in the way of jobs. So that's a really powerful coalition. And I think what you see today in the country as a whole - as you know, I'm the ED of America Walks, so I get to see a lot more - this is a pattern. Highways aren't really supported by the public. They don't go to the public for public votes on highways anymore - the public wouldn't support it. And in fact, the data suggests the public gets that building more highway lanes won't solve everything. But you've got a big, big chunk of the economy that's gotten extremely used to billions and billions of dollars flowing into their pockets. And they need to protect that in every year. So you get that level of intensity around - Look, we're talking about $4 billion on the waterfront and a bunch of that money's coming to us. Better believe it's a good idea, and what are you talking about, climate? [00:22:03] Robert Cruickshank: You talk about public votes, and I think there are three crucial public votes we got to talk about. One is 2007, when these advisory votes are on the ballot - and they're not binding, but they're advisory. Do you want to rebuild the viaduct or build a tunnel? They both get rejected. And then the next big vote is 2009, the mayoral election, where Mike McGinn becomes mayor - in part by channeling public frustration at this giant boondoggle. And then ultimately, the last public vote on this, 2011 - in June, I believe it was, it was in August - about whether we go forward or not and the public by this point, fatigued and beaten down by The Seattle Times, decides let's just move on from this. [00:22:43] Mike McGinn: There's no other alternative. And it is worth returning to that early vote, because it was such a fascinating moment, because - I think the mayor's office didn't want to put his expansive tunnel option in a direct vote against the new elevated, fearing it would lose. So they engineered an agreement with the governor that each one would get a separate up or down vote. And by the way, Tim Ceis, the Deputy Mayor at the time, called in the Sierra Club, briefed us on it, and one of our members said - What would happen if they both got voted down? And Deputy Mayor Ceis said - by the way, Tim Ceis has got a big contract right now from Mayor Harrell, longtime tunnel supporter. Tim Ceis is the consultant for most of the business side candidates. Tim Burgess, another big supporter of the tunnel, now works for Mayor Harrell. Oh, and Christine Gregoire has been hired by the biggest corporations in the region to do their work for them as well. So there's a pretty good payoff if you stick around and support the right side of this stuff. But anyway, Mayor Ceis, Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis, when said, What happens if they're both voted down? He goes - Well, that would be chaos. You don't want that, do you? And I remember all of us just kind of looked at each other - and we all went out on the sidewalk, there were like six of us. And we went - We want that, right? And so we joined in and supported the No and No campaign. And The Stranger came in really hard. And I think Erica Barnett wrote the articles. And Cary Moon was in on it. And the defeat of that, for the first time, opened up the possibility - Well, let's think about something else. And so a stakeholder group was formed. Cary Moon was appointed. Mike O'Brien was appointed. The waterfront guys were appointed. And the Downtown folks were appointed. And the labor folks were appointed. And I think a really important part of the story here is that it was advisory - they weren't making the decisions, it was advisory. But they got to a point at which the head of the State DOT, the head of the Seattle DOT, and the head of the King County DOT all expressed to their respective executives that surface transit worked and was worth it. And this was extremely distressing to the business community. So they mounted a big lobbying push and went straight to Gregoire. And Gregoire, for the first time, became a tunnel supporter. And they were promised that this new tunneling technology - the deep bore tunnel - would solve the cost issues of the deep bore tunnel. And not only that, the state's commitment, which to date was $2.4 billion - they had committed $2.4 billion to a rebuild - the state wouldn't have to pay anymore, because the Port would put in $300 million and they would raise $400 million from tolling. And coincidentally, the amount they thought they could raise from tolling was the exact amount needed to meet the projected cost of using the deep bore tunnel boring machine. So the deal was cut and announced. And the whole stakeholder group and the recommendations from the DOT heads were abandoned. And that occurred, basically, late 2008, early 2009 - the deal was made. And that was about the time that I was contemplating - well, I think I'd already decided to run, but I had not yet announced. [00:26:14] Crystal Fincher: And this was an interesting time, especially during that vote. Because at that time, I had an eye into what the business community was doing and thinking, and it was clear that their numbers didn't add up. [00:26:26] Mike McGinn: Oh my God - no. [00:26:28] Crystal Fincher: But they just did not want to face that. And what they knew is they had enough money and resources to throw at this issue and to throw at a marketing effort to obfuscate that, that they wouldn't have to worry about it. And there was this sense of offense, of indignation that - Who are these people trying to come up and tell us that we don't need freight capacity, that we don't need - that this extra highway capacity, don't they understand how important these freeways are? Who are these people who just don't understand how our economy works? [00:27:02] Mike McGinn: They were the grownups who really understood how things worked. And we were the upstarts who didn't understand anything. But there's a great line from Willie Brown talking about - I think the Transbay Bridge, and Robert can correct the name, in California, which was way over budget. And people were lamenting that the early estimates had been made up. And he goes - Look, this is how it works. You just need to dig a hole in the ground so deep that the only way to fill it up is with money. I think that's pretty much the quote. So that's the strategy. You get it started. Of course you have rosy estimates. And then you just have that commitment, and it's the job of legislators to come up with the cost overruns, dollars later. [00:27:43] Robert Cruickshank: And I think it's so key to understand this moment here in the late 2000s, where the public had already weighed in. I remember voting - it was the last thing I voted on before I moved to California for four years. I'm like no - I was No and No. And that's where the Seattle voters were. They rejected both options. And then you start to hear, coming out of the stakeholder group - Okay, we can make the surface transit option work. And I left town thinking - Alright, that's what's going to happen, just like the Embarcadero in San Francisco and done. And the next thing I hear in late 2008, early 2009, there's this deal that's been cut and all of a sudden a deep bore tunnel is on the table. And this is Seattle politics in a nutshell. I think people look back and think that because we are this smart, progressive technocratic city - those people who live here are - we think that our government works the same way. And it doesn't. This is - time and time again, the public will make its expression felt. They'll weigh in with opinion poll or protest or vote. And the powers that be will say - Well, actually, we want to do this thing instead. We'll cook it up in a backroom. We're going to jam it on all of you, and you're going to like it. And if you don't like it, then we're going to start marshaling resources. We're gonna throw a bunch of money at it. We'll get The Seattle Times to weigh in and pound away at the enemy. And that's how politics works here - that's how so much of our transportation system is built and managed. And so people today, in 2023, looking at this monstrosity on the waterfront that we have now think - How did we get here? Who planned this? It was planned in a backroom without public involvement. And I think that's a thing that has to be understood because that, as we just heard, was baked in from the very start. [00:29:11] Mike McGinn: Well, Robert, the idea of a deep bore tunnel was brought forward by a representative of the Discovery Institute, who you may know as the folks that believe in creationism. [00:29:21] Robert Cruickshank: Well, and not only that, the Discovery Institute is responsible for turning Christopher Rufo from a failed Seattle City Council candidate in 2019 into a national figure. [00:29:31] Mike McGinn: The Discovery Institute, with money from local donors - major, very wealthy local folks - they actually had a long-term plan to turn all of 99 into a limited access freeway. It's like - we need to get rid of that First Avenue South and Highway 99 and Aurora Avenue stuff - all of that should be a freeway. So they were the architects of the idea of - Hey, this deep bore tunnel is the solution. But Robert's point is just right on - transportation policy was driven by power and money, not by transportation needs, or climate needs, or equity needs, or even local economy needs really. When you get right down to it, our city runs on transit - that's what really matters. Our city runs on the fact that it's a city where people can walk from place to place. The idea that our economic future was tied to a highway that would skip Downtown - the most valuable place in the Pacific Northwest, Downtown Seattle. No, that's not really what powers our economy. But it certainly worked for the people that were going to get the dollars that flowed from folks and for the people who own Downtown property. [00:30:42] Crystal Fincher: And I want to talk about money and power with this. Who were the people in power? What was the Council at that time? Who made these decisions? [00:30:50] Mike McGinn: The Council at the time was elected citywide. And I think some people have concerns about district representation, but one of the things that citywide elections meant at the time was that you had to run a citywide campaign, and that's expensive. There's no way to knock on enough doors citywide. I did not have a lot of money when I ran for mayor, but at least I had the media attention that would go to a mayoral candidate. A City Council candidate would kind of flow under the radar. So you had people come from different places, right? They might come from the business side, they might come from the labor side. But ultimately, they would tend to make peace with the other major players - because only business and only labor could finance a campaign. They were the only ones with the resources to do that. So the other interests - the environmentalists, the social service folks, neighborhood advocates of whatever stripe - we chose from amongst the candidates that were elevated by, they would unify - in some cases, the business and labor folks would unify around a candidate. In fact, that's what we saw in the last two mayoral elections as well, where they pick a candidate. And so this doesn't leave much room. So when I was mayor, almost the entire council was aligned with the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at that time, either endorsed by them or had made their peace with them so the challenger was not being financed. So Robert said something about those outsiders - I went under the radar screen as a candidate at the beginning of my campaign. When I entered the race, nobody was running because everybody thought that Greg Nickels had the institutional support locked down. [00:32:33] Crystal Fincher: But then a snowstorm happened. [00:32:35] Mike McGinn: Well, it was even before that - honestly, everybody thought that he could win. And long before the snowstorm, I was like - We're getting a new mayor. And I was actually looking around to try to figure out who it was going to be - because I wanted a mayor who actually believed in climate, who had my values. But nobody - I was looking through who the people were that might run, and it dawned on me - Well, nobody's going to run. But we're going to get a new mayor and I have my values - and I've actually run ballot measure campaigns and had a very modest base of support. So I was really the first one in the race that got any attention. So I got some great media attention off that. Then my opponent in the general, Joe Mallahan - whatever else you may think about Joe Mallahan - he actually saw it too. He saw that there was an opening. And then we were joined by a long-time City Councilmember, Jan Drago. And I remember the headline from The Seattle Times or the comments at the time was - Okay, now it's a real race. But it just really wasn't. So I was really under the radar screen in that race because they were disregarding me. But there was in fact a lot of anger about the tunnel. There was a lot of just - Greg, for whatever his positives or negatives that history will deal with - and by the way, I actually think Greg did a lot of good. I just was disappointed in his highway policies and his climate policies at the end of the day - I have a lot of respect for Greg Nickels, but he wasn't going to win that race. And I came out of the primary against Joe Mallahan. And all of a sudden we had these two outsiders and the business community's freaking out. All of it - I remember watching it - all of the support, the business support shifted to Joe. It took about a month, it took a few weeks. But all of a sudden - there was actually one week where I think I raised more money than he did, that was pretty unusual - and then all of a sudden all the money was pouring in. And boy, did Joe believe in that tunnel. And did Joe believe in what the Chamber of Commerce wanted to do. In fact, he believed in it so much that he believed that Seattle should pay cost overruns if there were cost overruns on the tunnel - an admission I got from him during the televised debate, I was shocked he admitted to it. [00:34:41] Crystal Fincher: I remember that debate. [00:34:43] Mike McGinn: Yeah. So you were kind of asking about how politics worked. It was really something. Yeah - here's another memory. About two weeks before the election, the City Council took - three weeks before the, two, three weeks, four weeks - they took a vote to say that the tunnel was their choice. Even though there's a mayoral election in which the tunnel is on the ballot, so to speak - in terms of the issues of the candidates - they took a vote for no reason to say it was a done deal. And then WSDOT released a video of the elevated collapsing in a highway, which is the first time a public disclosure request from a third party was ever given straight to a TV station, I think, in my experience in Seattle. I had Gregoire and the DOT folks down there working on that campaign too - their tunnel was threatened. So it really was something how - I indeed was kind of shocked at - it was such a learning experience for me - how much the ranks closed around this. I didn't appreciate it. I had my own nonprofit, I had been on stakeholder committees, I'd worked with a lot of people that weren't just Sierra Club members and neighborhood types. I'd worked with a lot of business people, many of whom had supported my nonprofit because they liked its vision. But they were very clear with me that as long as I supported the surface transit option, there was no way they could be associated with my run for mayor in any way, shape, or form - even if they liked me. It was a complete lockdown - right after the primary where Greg lost the primary and it was me and Joe, I was - Okay, open field running. I can now reach out to these people. There's no incumbent - maybe some of them can support me now. And they were abundantly clear on all of those phone calls that - Nope, can't do it. Until you change your position on the tunnel, we just can't do it. We have business in this town, Mike. We have relationships in this town. We cannot do that. So it was a real lockdown - politically. [00:36:38] Crystal Fincher: That was also a big learning experience for me - watching that consolidation, watching how not only were they fighting for the tunnel against you and making the fight against you a fight about the tunnel, but the enforcement to those third parties that you were talking about that - Hey, if you play ball with him, you're cut off. And those kinds of threats and that kind of dealing - watching that happen was very formative for me. I'm like - Okay, I see how this works, and this is kind of insidious. And if you are branded as an outsider, if you don't play ball, if you don't kiss the ring of the adults in the room - which is definitely what they considered themselves - then you're on the outs and they're at war. And it was really a war footing against you and the campaign. Who was on the Council at that time? [00:37:30] Mike McGinn: Oh my God. Let me see if I can go through the list. No, and it really, it was - your point about it was a war footing was not something that I fully, that I did not appreciate until actually going through that experience - how unified that would be. Excuse me. The City Council chair was Tim Burgess at the time. Bruce Harrell was on the Council. Sally Clark, Richard Conlin, Nick Licata. Mike O'Brien was running on the same platform as me with regard to the tunnel and he'd just been elected. Jean Godden, Sally Bagshaw. I hope I'm not leaving anything out - because - [00:38:04] Robert Cruickshank: Tom Rasmussen will forgive you. [00:38:06] Mike McGinn: Tom Rasmussen. Yeah - because City Councilmembers would get really offended if you didn't thank them publicly - that was another thing I had to learn. You have to publicly thank any other politician on stage with you or they held a grudge. Yeah. So I had - I didn't know all the politicians' rules when I started. [00:38:25] Crystal Fincher: There are so many rules. [00:38:27] Mike McGinn: There are so many, there's so many rules. But really what you saw then was that the Council tended to move in lockstep on many issues - because if they all voted together and they all worked citywide, there was protection. None of them could be singled out. So it was very - and it's not to say that some of them didn't take principled votes and would find themselves on an 8-1 position sometimes, but for the most part, it was much, much safer to be - it was much, much safer to vote as a group. And they tended to do that. And they had coalesced around the tunnel, except for O'Brien. And that could not be shaken by anything we brought to bear. [00:39:04] Robert Cruickshank: And this is wrapped up in not just the electoral politics, but the power politics. Because Mike McGinn comes in - mayor leading the 7th floor of City Hall, the head of City government - and smart guy, nice guy, willing to talk to anybody. But is not from their crew, is not from that group. And as Crystal and Mike said, the ranks were closed from the start. This is - again, 2009, 2010 - when nationally Mitch McConnell is quoted as saying, It's his ambition to make Obama a one-term president. I don't know if he's ever caught on record, but I would be quite certain that Tim Burgess would have said the exact same thing - that his ambition was to make Mike McGinn a one-term mayor. As it turned out in 2013, Tim Burgess wanted his job - one of the candidates running for it. So these are all people who have a reason to close ranks against Mike McGinn and to use a tunnel as a bludgeon against him to do so. [00:39:58] Mike McGinn: There were other bludgeons. After I won the general election and before I took office, they passed their annual budget - they cut the mayor's office budget by a third before I even took office. Just boom - I know - they were determined, they were determined. And so that was when the planning - that council then and with WSDOT - that was when basically the contours of the waterfront were locked into place, including what we now see as that very wide surface road. That was that Council. So if you're wondering, if you're looking at that going - Okay, wow, who decided that and where did it come from? Again, our current mayor and his current advisor and others - they've always been for that. Building that big surface road has always been the plan to go along with the tunnel, because highway capacity was their highest priority. And the park on the waterfront, along with a lot of money into the aquarium and into these new structures - that's their signature thing for so many other people. But the idea that you should, that there was an opportunity to transform our transportation system and transform our city to make it more equitable and climate friendly was never a priority in this process. Just wasn't. [00:41:20] Crystal Fincher: It was never a priority. It was never seriously considered. And to me, through this process - lots of people know, have talked about it on the show before - I actually didn't start off Team McGinn. I wound up Team McGinn - didn't start off that way. But through that - and you won me over with logic - it was you being proven right on several things. You pointed out that their projections, their traffic projections were just so far out of left field that there was no way that they were going to come close. And they even had to come down on their projections before we even saw the traffic - the actual traffic turned out to be lower. You were right on that one - the laughable - [00:41:59] Mike McGinn: They're under 40,000 cars a day - for a highway that was carrying 110,000 cars a day beforehand. So even as a traffic solution - to put that into context, 40,000 cars a day is like the Ballard Bridge. And I can guarantee you the replacement costs of the Ballard Bridge is not $4 billion or $3.1 billion. The E Line, I think, carries 15,000 people a day. Metro carries 220,000 people a day. What you could do with that $3.1 billion or $4 billion in terms of bus lanes, bike lanes, rolling stock for Metro, maybe pay raises for bus drivers so that we could actually have service - you could do so much with those billions of dollars. And we put it all into moving 40,000 cars a day? It's just pathetic. That's three Rapid Ride lines we could have had for a 10th of the cost, or even less. I think the investments in Rapid Ride lines are about $50-100 million a line to make the capital investments to make it work. So the waste - even if you don't care about climate, the waste of dollars - and who's paying those taxes? To a great degree, we have the most regressive state and local tax system in the nation. And we'll have a ballot measure soon, and I know a lot of environmentalists will be out there if the package spends for the right thing saying - Hey, we need money for local streets. Imagine if we'd taken that gas tax money and the Legislature had allowed cities and towns to use it to improve their streets - which they can do. I know that the constitution says highway purposes, but when you read highway purposes, it says roads and bridges. It includes everything. You can use gas taxes for anything that improves the road. And they do. WSDOT has used gas taxes to pay for bike lanes and sidewalks. It's legal. That's a choice. So we're driving around potholed streets. We have - we're putting up little plastic dividers because we care more about the car getting hurt than the bicyclist on the other side of that plastic divider. We're watching our transit service melt away because we can't pay bus drivers enough. But hey, man, somebody's got a really rapid - 3,000 people a day get to skip Downtown in their private vehicles. Where are our priorities for equity? Where are the priorities for economy, or even just plain old-fashioned fiscal prudence? None of that was there - because all of those dollars were going to fund the needs of the most powerful people in the City. And they captured those dollars - and all of us will pay the taxes, all of us will breathe the smoky air, and all of us will watch our streets deteriorate and our transit service evaporate. [00:44:52] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. And to me, it was such a foundational lesson that the people that we have making decisions really matter - and that we have to really explore their records, their donors, their histories - because over and over again, we look at the decisions that wind up being made that frequently conflict with campaign promises, but that very, very rarely conflict with their donor rolls. [00:45:16] Mike McGinn: And yes - and every one of them knows how to make the value statements. So if I had any advice for people in this year's election - everyone is going to say they care about housing, everyone's going to say they think biking safe. I don't - one of the things that I came away with - I don't care about the goals you put into some policy anymore. Show me the hard physical action you will take that might piss somebody off, but you're willing to do it because it's right. And if you can't do that, then your value statements are meaningless. So take a look - who actually, and that's the question I always ask candidates for office - Tell me about a time you did something hard that might've caused you criticism, but you did it because it was right. Or that you made somebody who was an ally or friend upset, but you did it because it was right. Tell me about that time. [00:46:04] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, it's a challenge. And to your point and learning through just watching how people operated through that and some other processes - but that certainly was a big learning for me - is the role of coalitions, the role of accountability, and understanding. You have always had your finger on the pulse of Seattle, really - you're extraordinarily good at that. You're actually - both of you - are great strategists. But our political class is so detached from that sometimes - certainly I'm feeling frustration at some recent actions by our Legislature - we just had our special session day where they increased criminalization of substances, personal possession of substances - just reflecting on legislation to provide school, kids with free meals at school, things that seem like really basic and foundational that we should be able to land this. If we can call a special session to hand Boeing billions of dollars, we should be able to feed kids, right? [00:47:00] Mike McGinn: At the time we were cutting school budgets - when we found money for that. But I don't want to be too gloomy. And then I want to turn it over to Robert to get a last word in here, 'cause I just loved - his analysis is so awesome. I don't want to be too gloomy because - I look at what happened in the Legislature this year on housing, that we're finally going to allow housing, people to build more housing in places so people can actually live closer to their jobs and live more affordably. 10 years ago, we would have thought that was impossible. There's a lot of hard organizing that did it. At America Walks, we're the host of the Freeway Fighters Networks - there are people in 40 cities or more around the country that are organizing to remove highways. And while it's just a small amount of money compared to the amount going to highway expansion, there's actually federal funds to study and remove highways. So it's a long, hard slog. What felt for us - for Robert and me and Cary Moon and others fighting this - which felt like an impossible fight at the time is a fight that is now winning in places. Not winning enough - we're not winning fast enough - but it can change. And so that's - I don't want to be too negative. They got money, but organizing and people - and we actually have the public with us on this, just like we have the public with us on housing. So we just have to do more. We just got to keep at it, folks - got to keep at it. We can win this one. Don't allow this story of how hard it was to deal with the unified political class in the City of Seattle for their climate arson - should not deter you. It should inspire you, 'cause I actually won the mayor's office and we actually did do a lot of good. And the next fight is right in front of us again today, so get in it people. We need you. [00:48:46] Robert Cruickshank: I think that's spot on. And I remember coming to work in your office at the very beginning of 2011, when it seemed like the tunnel was just dominating discussion, but not in the mayor's office, right? When I joined, I fully expected to be like - roll my sleeves up to take on that tunnel. Instead, I'm working on the mayor's jobs plan, the Families and Education Levy, on transit. That's the stuff that was really getting done, and I think McGinn left a really great legacy on that. But we didn't win the tunnel fight. And I think we've diagnosed many of the reasons why, but one thing that really stands out to me as I look back from 12, 13 years distance is we didn't have the same density of genuinely progressive and social democratic organizations and people and leaders in Seattle that we have now. I think that matters because Mike's been talking about what's the next fight. I think one of the big fights coming up next year - when it comes time to renew that Move Seattle Levy - that's nearly a billion dollars that's going to be on the table. And we keep getting promised - when we are asked to approve these massive levies - that a lot of that money is going to go to safe streets, it's going to go to protect vulnerable users, we're going to do something to finally get towards Vision Zero. And instead it all gets taken away to build more car infrastructure. At what point do we finally stand - literally in the road - and say, No more. Do we look at the broken promises on the waterfront where we were promised a beautiful pedestrian-friendly waterfront and got another car sewer? We're going to have to organize and come together. We have many more groups now and many more leaders who are willing to stand up and say - We're not passing this levy unless it actually focuses on safe streets, unless it focuses on pedestrians and cyclists and transit users, and gives iron-clad promises to make sure stuff gets built so that some future mayor can't just walk in and start canceling projects left and right that we were promised. That's the lesson I take from this is - we're better organized now, we have more resources now, but it's still going to be a slog, and we're going to have to stand our ground - otherwise we get rolled. [00:50:34] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I thank you both for this conversation today - reflections on the tunnel fight, how it came to be, what it was like in the middle of it, and the lessons that we take moving forward in these elections that we have coming up this year, next year, and beyond. Thanks so much for the conversation. [00:50:50] Mike McGinn: Thank you, Crystal. [00:50:51] Robert Cruickshank: Thank you - it's been wonderful. [00:50:52] Crystal Fincher: Thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks, which is co-produced by Shannon Cheng and Bryce Cannatelli. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.

CO2 may be the main culprit of climate warming activities - but there are other greenhouse gases out there even more potent. Twenty thousand times more potent, in fact. And controlling these gases is just as important to meeting our climate ambitions as reducing carbon emissions is.Paul unpacks the Kyoto protocol and the seven gases identified to have significant global warming implications on our planet. And Paul discusses where these gases are coming from and what we're doing to address and control these super gases.For further research:What is the Kyoto Protocol?EPA - Importance of MethaneBiden-Harris Administration Announces Proposed Rule to Reduce Wasteful Methane Emissions ... Inside Climate News - What is Nitrous Oxide and Why is it a Climate Threat?Follow Paul on LinkedIn.

Here are some historical events that happened on December 16:1773: The Boston Tea Party took place, where American colonists, disguised as Mohawk Indians, dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor to protest against the Tea Act.1777: The United States celebrated its first national Thanksgiving Day.1838: The Battle of Blood River took place in South Africa between the Zulu nation and Voortrekkers (Dutch pioneers), resulting in a decisive Voortrekker victory.1907: The Great White Fleet, a group of United States Navy battleships, departed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, on a 14-month circumnavigation of the globe.1944: The Battle of the Bulge began during World War II as German forces launched a surprise counter-offensive against Allied forces in Belgium.1971: The United Nations General Assembly voted to establish the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).1985: Mafia boss Paul Castellano was assassinated outside Sparks Steak House in New York City, marking a significant event in the Mafia's history.1989: The Romanian Revolution began as protests erupted against the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. The revolution ultimately led to Ceaușescu's overthrow and execution.1991: Kazakhstan declared its independence from the Soviet Union.1997: The Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, was adopted.These are just a few examples of historical events that occurred on December 16. Podcast Website:https://atozenglishpodcast.com/a-to-z-this-day-in-world-history-december-16th/Social Media:WeChat account ID: atozenglishpodcastFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/671098974684413/Tik Tok:@atozenglish1Instagram:@atozenglish22Twitter:@atozenglish22A to Z Facebook Page:https://www.facebook.com/theatozenglishpodcastCheck out our You Tube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCds7JR-5dbarBfas4Ve4h8ADonate to the show: https://app.redcircle.com/shows/9472af5c-8580-45e1-b0dd-ff211db08a90/donationsRobin and Jack started a new You Tube channel called English Word Master. You can check it out here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2aXaXaMY4P2VhVaEre5w7ABecome a member of Podchaser and leave a positive review!https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-a-to-z-english-podcast-4779670Join our Whatsapp group: https://forms.gle/zKCS8y1t9jwv2KTn7Intro/Outro Music: Daybird by Broke for Freehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Broke_For_Free/Directionless_EP/Broke_For_Free_-_Directionless_EP_-_03_Day_Bird/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcodehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Joplin/Piano_Rolls_from_archiveorg/ScottJoplin-RagtimeDance1906/https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-a-to-z-english-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Here are a few significant events that happened on December 11:1936: King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom abdicated the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée.1941: The United States entered World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.1972: Apollo 17, the final mission of NASA's Apollo program, became the sixth and last Apollo mission to land on the Moon. Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the lunar surface.1997: The Kyoto Protocol was adopted by a conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The protocol set binding targets for industrialized countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.Remember that historical events can be subjective, and what is considered "major" can vary depending on cultural, regional, or individual perspectives.Podcast Website:https://atozenglishpodcast.com/a-to-z-this-day-in-world-history-december-11th/Social Media:WeChat account ID: atozenglishpodcastFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/671098974684413/Tik Tok:@atozenglish1Instagram:@atozenglish22Twitter:@atozenglish22A to Z Facebook Page:https://www.facebook.com/theatozenglishpodcastCheck out our You Tube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCds7JR-5dbarBfas4Ve4h8ADonate to the show: https://app.redcircle.com/shows/9472af5c-8580-45e1-b0dd-ff211db08a90/donationsRobin and Jack started a new You Tube channel called English Word Master. You can check it out here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2aXaXaMY4P2VhVaEre5w7ABecome a member of Podchaser and leave a positive review!https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-a-to-z-english-podcast-4779670Join our Whatsapp group: https://forms.gle/zKCS8y1t9jwv2KTn7Intro/Outro Music: Daybird by Broke for Freehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Broke_For_Free/Directionless_EP/Broke_For_Free_-_Directionless_EP_-_03_Day_Bird/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcodehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Joplin/Piano_Rolls_from_archiveorg/ScottJoplin-RagtimeDance1906/https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-a-to-z-english-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Here are some historical events that happened on or around December 12:2000: The United States Supreme Court releases its decision in Bush v. Gore, effectively ending the recount of presidential votes in Florida and settling the disputed 2000 U.S. presidential election in favor of George W. Bush.1917: Father Edward J. Flanagan founded Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska, as a home for orphans and other troubled children. The community eventually became known for its innovative approach to child and youth care.1787: Pennsylvania becomes the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.1901: Italian physicist and inventor Guglielmo Marconi receives the first transatlantic radio signal, transmitted from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland.1946: A United Nations committee recommends the partition of Palestine, leading to the creation of the state of Israel.1963: Kenya gains independence from British colonial rule.2005: The Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, comes into force.These are just a few examples, and there may be other significant events on December 12th in different years.Podcast Website:https://atozenglishpodcast.com/a-to-z-this-day-in-world-history-december-12th/Social Media:WeChat account ID: atozenglishpodcastFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/671098974684413/Tik Tok:@atozenglish1Instagram:@atozenglish22Twitter:@atozenglish22A to Z Facebook Page:https://www.facebook.com/theatozenglishpodcastCheck out our You Tube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCds7JR-5dbarBfas4Ve4h8ADonate to the show: https://app.redcircle.com/shows/9472af5c-8580-45e1-b0dd-ff211db08a90/donationsRobin and Jack started a new You Tube channel called English Word Master. You can check it out here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2aXaXaMY4P2VhVaEre5w7ABecome a member of Podchaser and leave a positive review!https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-a-to-z-english-podcast-4779670Join our Whatsapp group: https://forms.gle/zKCS8y1t9jwv2KTn7Intro/Outro Music: Daybird by Broke for Freehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Broke_For_Free/Directionless_EP/Broke_For_Free_-_Directionless_EP_-_03_Day_Bird/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcodehttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Joplin/Piano_Rolls_from_archiveorg/ScottJoplin-RagtimeDance1906/https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-a-to-z-english-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Robert Logan has to make NOAPOLOGIES for today's crossword, a fine Friday, challenging but accessible, with  some shorter toeholds conveniently located everywhere in the grid. There were a lot of fascinating factoids in today's puzzle, such as 30A, Artist of "La Maja Desnuda" and "La Maja Vestida", GOYA;  48A, ____________ Amendment (2010s extension of the Kyoto Protocol), DOHA; and 47D, Entertainment reference that began as a Usenet group, IMDB. There were many more educational and entertaining clues, and to hear all about 'em , you know the drill: download, listen up, and enjoy!Today's show notes image: La Maja vestida, by GOYAContact Info:We love listener mail! Drop us a line, crosswordpodcast@icloud.com.Also, we're on FaceBook, so feel free to drop by there and strike up a conversation!

It's Hump Day! Sam speaks with Kate Aronoff, staff writer focusing on climate at the New Republic, to discuss the upcoming COP28 climate summit. First, Sam runs through updates on Israel and Hamas' tenuous truce, Saudi Arabia-Iran relations, growing aid for Gaza, the potential for the US conditioning aid to Israel, the martyrdom of George Santos, Nikki Haley's big Koch endorsement, and challenges to Iowa's right-wing legislation, before diving into the absurdity of the GOP now refusing to hold public testimony over the Biden Crime Family investigation. Kate Aranoff and Sam then dive into the UN's Conference of Parties (COP), an international meet and greet on climate change with both state and private actors invited, which has seen the signing of documents like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, and its problematic (and unsurprising) relationship with major state and private actors involved in the production of fossil fuels. After parsing through some major examples – and why they genuinely represent the UN's goals in “solving” climate change – Aranoff wraps up by assessing the future (and future corruption) of the Conference of Parties. And in the Fun Half: Sam discusses the Senate's growing drive for conditioning aid to Israel amid the IDF's losing PR battle (due to outrageous war crimes), Ryan from Wisconsin helps Sam parse through the USDA's official updates on fruit hardiness, a Canadian caller tackles Canada's role in thwarting Maine's Pine Tree Power initiative, and Mike Johnson and Fox try to speak for the facts of the Hunter Biden case. Sam also parses through the recent discourse around Joe Biden's economy, Jeremy Boering and Tim Pool try to solve racism via a purge-like catharsis, and Tom from Chicago brings the Daily Wire's newest film into the conversation. Robbie from St. Louis pitches a potential media literacy campaign, plus, your calls and IMs! Check out Kate's work here: https://newrepublic.com/authors/kate-aronoff Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! http://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: http://majority.fm/app Check out today's sponsors: Nutrafol: Take the first step to visibly thicker, healthier hair. For a limited time, Nutrafol is offering our listeners ten dollars off your first month's subscription and free shipping when you go to https://nutrafol.com/men and enter the promo code TMR. Manukora Honey: Head to https://manukora.com/majority to get 3 FREE Gifts with your Starter Kit - a $25 value! Henson Shaving: Henson Shaving is giving my audience a 2-year supply of blades for FREE. Just go to https://hensonshaving.com/MAJORITY.  Add a razor and 100-pack of blades to your cart, then enter code MAJORITY to get the blades for free.  Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

In this 1372nd episode of Toronto Mike'd, Mike chats with Peter Kent about his fascinating career as a journalist, covering the Vietnam War from South East Asia, replacing Lloyd Robertson as The National anchor at CBC, writing a letter to the CRTC regarding interference from the PMO, anchoring Global News's First National, entering politics, being Environment Minister under Stephen Harper, abandoning the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, getting called a "piece of shit" by Justin Trudeau, and more. Toronto Mike'd is proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, Palma Pasta, Ridley Funeral Home, Electronic Products Recycling Association, Raymond James Canada and Moneris. If you would like to support the show, we do have partner opportunities available. Please email Toronto Mike at mike@torontomike.com

This week we talk about methane, the UAE, and organizational capture.We also discuss climate change, broken governmental promises, and Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber.Recommended Book: Raw Dog by Jamie LoftusTranscriptThe United Nations Climate Change Conferences, often referred to as COP meetings, short for "Conference of the Parties," are formal, annual meetings where issues related to climate change are discussed by attendees.These meetings have been occurring at their yearly cadence since 1995—though the November 2020 meeting was put off till November 2021, because of the COVID pandemic that almost entirely dominated international attention and governmental efforts, that year.COP meetings are held in different locations around the world, with host countries chosen from among those that offer to provide the requisite facilities and services for all attendees, which can represent a who's who of governments and businesses; so this isn't quite an Olympics level of commitment and expense, but it is quite an undertaking, as those host countries need to provide security for all those leaders, translation services for six different working languages, and they also need to help engage stakeholders, ranging from diplomats to the CEOs of the world's biggest companies, flogging support for the meetings themselves, but also the core themes of each meeting, which vary from year to year.These themes are important, as they've historically led to some of the most vital agreements we've seen between nations and other stakeholders, including the Kyoto Protocol, which was an early, 1990s-era emissions-reduction agreement between wealthy nations, and the Paris Agreement, which expounded upon that same general concept, though with much more aggressive targets and a wider scope of things the signatories had to take into consideration.On November 30 through December 12 of 2023, signatory nations and other entities will meet for the COP28 meeting, this time hosted in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.This is interesting for several reasons, but the most prominent—and the reason this choice was controversial—is that the UAE, like many other nations in the region, is a huge fossil fuel producer, about 30% of its total economy reliant on oil and gas exports.What's more, the President-Designate for COP28—the person who was put in charge of running things, but also getting those aforementioned stakeholders in line, making commitments, showing support, doing all the things they need to do to make this a successful COP meeting with something to show for their efforts—is Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber: the Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology for the UAE, the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, also called Masdar, and the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company—the first CEO to serve as a COP President, and, well, definitely the first oil company CEO to head up a meeting meant to help the world deal with climate change that's being amplified by the products his company is producing and selling.What I'd like to talk about today is COP28 and what we might expect to emerge from this very unusual, but also quite significant, get together.—Al Jaber's appointment as the COP president for this year's meeting was a controversial choice, to say the least.Dubai being selected as the host-city was one thing, but an oil executive running the show? This reeked, to some commentators and analysts, at least, as a sort of organizational capture: the United Nations either overrun by financial interests to the point that those interests were able to insert themselves even into this increasingly vital annual summit, or—maybe—the organization overcome by a naive sort of optimistic earnestness, wanting to get everyone involved, including those in some ways most responsible for the climate-related issues we face, to the point that the reins were ultimately handed over to one of those people, to do with as he and his ilk please.It's unclear which of these, or other possibilities explain this, again quite controversial choice of host city and president, but there has already been some more obvious, scandalous behavior arising from this meeting, beyond the jarring dissonance of having oil people run a climate change-focused meeting.Back in June of 2023, it was reported that the UAE's state oil company, Adnoc, was able to read emails to and from the official COP28 summit office, despite claims that the latter's email system was kept separate from the former's.The concern was that this state oil company, which would seem to have immense financial interest in slowing or stopping the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, as the longer they can keep legally and profitably pumping and selling, the more profit they can wring from their existing assets, they could see what was being said by and to the folks behind this climate summit, which is ostensibly at least meant to help speed up that transition away from fossil fuels.Those concerns were confirmed by The Guardian, and though the COP28 office altered their digital setup after the reporting was done, this added fuel to the concern-fire that was already burning because the UAE and Al Jaber were in charge of things; it seemed like they would have every reason in the world to put their thumbs on the scale and nudge the meeting in favor of the fossil fuel industry, given the chance, and this email issue seemed to confirm that notion.There have also been concerns that the UAE authorities will weaponize their already widespread digital surveillance apparatus—which is generally used to stifle religious and political freedoms in-country—to target COP meeting attendees with the same, tracking their actions and communications with spyware, among other violations.A letter was written to the UN by a bunch of politicians from the EU and US, asking the body behind the COP meetings to remove Al Jaber, and a slew of organizations and activists have separately done the same.The counterpoint presented by the UAE and Al Jaber himself, though, alongside supporters of how this meeting is coming together, including, at times at least, the US climate envoy John Kerry and EU climate chief Frans Timmermans, is that alongside his role running a state-owned fossil fuel company, Al Jaber also founded and runs Masdar, which invests heavily in renewable energy, and which is meant to serve as a foot in the door for the UAE as they attempt to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels; Masdar has invested in renewable projects in 40 countries, so far, and have targeted builting 100GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030.Under Al Jaber, Abu Dhabi's National Oil Company has invested in carbon capture and green hydrogen projects, and has been investing in nuclear and solar power, as well.None of these efforts compare to the investments that have been made, under his leadership, in fossil fuel capacity; it's night a day.But the argument in his favor is that he's a skilled energy world executive, and one that is actually making practical moves to transition to renewables: he's not doing it overnight, but he's actually doing something, and that makes him a credible source for usable ideas as to how other companies can do the same, while also putting someone at the reins who knows how to talk to and deal with energy executives—many of whom couldn't care less about investing in renewables—and that means it's possible he might be able to get them to make these sorts of iterative changes, as well.He's a choice that doesn't preach to the choir, basically; he's meant to preach to those who aren't yet convinced.And this will be a COP meeting with a LOT of oil industry higher-ups in attendance; which theoretically at least supports the assertion made by critics that the meeting has been captured, serving as a safe space for fossil fuel industry representatives who want to paint themselves as eco-friendly and thus, empowered to play a role in determining how quickly, or slowly, the transition to renewables occurs.But the counterpoint to this regulatory capture theory is that having true-believers at the helm—folks who see the oil industry as villains, in many cases—having them running things, hasn't historically served to get these oil companies to do anything except deny deny deny and do what they can to further entrench themselves in their existing energy source and business models; so maybe this, putting one of their own at the front of the room, and one of them who seems to be comfortable keeping a foot in both worlds, maybe that will help shift their collective stance a bit.Beyond the hubbub over who's hosting the show, there are also a few other interesting things to watch as this year's COP meeting unfolds.The first is that the US and China recently came to a new agreement to dramatically increase the production of renewable energy, tripling global capacity by 2030 in order to reduce their emissions and displace fossil fuels.The US and China's emissions, combined, account for something like 38% of the world's total, so anything these countries do in this space is already a big deal.But the last time the US and China landed on this sort of agreement, back in 2015, the language they used ended up informing the Paris Agreement that was made real at that year's COP meeting—an agreement meant to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius; so it could be that this new agreement also feeds into a larger, more international and inclusive agreement, once again.That said, there's a lot of arguably justified concern that this year's COP, like many previous COPs, will be a lot of talk without much or any action.It's easy to make commitments in a context in which one's words will net one's country a lot of goodwill in the press, but a lot more difficult to actually live up to those commitments—as governments around the world have discovered time and time again with climate-related issues.Our newest climate data indicate we'll likely fly right by the 1.5 degrees C average warming milestone this decade: much earlier than was previously estimated, and early enough that many experts are saying that goal, keeping temperature increases below that level, which has become a bit of a rallying cry for environmentalists and entities shifting to renewable energy, in recent years, they say it's probably out of reach.It's still important that we reduce emissions and halt heating as soon as possible, in other words, but the number we've held up as being an aggressive, optimistic goal that is nonetheless achievable might not be realistic, anymore.That new report is far from the last word on this, but a seeming inability to live up to climate commitments, combined with ever-bettering data-collection and computational resources has left us with a much higher-resolution understanding of how bad the situation is, and a much steeper mountain to climb if we want to accomplish even the relatively less-impressive goals that are still within reach; which makes the whole concept a tougher sell, especially when it seems easier to just throw up one's hands in frustration or disbelief, rather than making the sacrifices that might be necessary to get where we ostensibly need to be.And that's the second main, interesting thing to be watching here: the impact that better tools and data from those tools, and research done with that better data, will have on these discussions and the overall timber and tone of what people are saying.These new talks are arriving in the wake of some significant new developments in methane-tracking capabilities: satellites that allow researchers to pinpoint methane emissions hotspots, which in turn tells them which governments are failing to cap emitting wells, or which businesses are, as was the case in Kazakhstan recently, a local mining company allowing methane to flow freely from their infrastructure, causing untold damage that can be relatively inexpensively remedied once the emitting entities know what's happening and if the right kind of pressure is applied, to force their hand—two variables that are increasingly likely to align, appropriately, because of these new tools and techniques.Satellites capable of providing other sorts of high-resolution data, like where CO2 emissions are the worst, for instance, down to the level of an individual power plant, can also help us figure out where our problems are centralized, but they also allow us to name-and-shame, with receipts, if necessary, to force entities that would otherwise try to deny and sweep this kind of thing under the rug to acknowledge their failure in this regard, making issues that they currently might record as externalities, internal, in turn making it more likely something will be done, rather than these issues being ignored and compounding over time.And third, one of the many commitments countries—especially wealthy countries—have made over the course of previous COP meetings, is to provide a bunch of money to less-wealthy countries meant to help pay climate-related reparations, and for a transition to renewables, helping them bypass the emissions-related excesses today's wealthy countries have indulged in.Those already wealthy countries are the source of the vast, vast majority of today's emissions, and the idea is to help not-yet-wealthy countries scale-up and become richer without also creating more emissions as a consequence: a reasonable-sounding ambition, but that kind of pivot is not cheap or easy.The aid many countries have been told they would get as part of this effort hasn't yet materialized, though—$100 billion was promised by wealthy countries for poorer countries by 2020, to kick things off, to help them move toward renewables, and for losses and damages caused by existing climate change impacts.And that was meant to be just the initial round of funding that would eventually lead to trillions a year.Even that initial $100 billion didn't arrive, though, and while you could argue that some other, fairly immediate concerns reared their heads in 2020 that necessitated the rerouting of those funds toward other, pandemic-related issues, this is often touted of an example of just how untrustworthy these wealthier countries and their promises are; even the initial promise was a lie, so why shouldn't these countries that were lied to pursue whichever path is best for them and their immediate fortunes, whatever the consequences, like those wealthier countries were able to do in previous decades and centuries?Those are big questions, but probably the biggest one is whether those attending COP28 will be able to get an actual commitment to phase-out fossil fuels on the table, and then adopted by those participating.Many nations, including the most powerful and emitting in the world, have been unwilling to do this, consisting adopting weaker language, making smaller, pseudo-promises, not quite stepping up to the plate on a firm commitment to that kind of transition, instead opting for language that allows wiggle-room and doesn't upset any of the existing fossil fuel-related global systems, including existing energy businesses, but also countries—like the UAE and the US—that are major fossil fuel exporters.Most analysts don't expect that language to arrive at this meeting, either, and the general consensus is that we'll probably see another relatively, iterative step in the right direction across many metrics at COP28; maybe something based on all that new data with a little more enforcement-related teeth, but likely not a big enough step to close the gap between where we thought we were, and where we now realize, because of the most up-to-date climate findings, we actually are.Show Noteshttps://www.axios.com/2023/11/13/environment-co2-pollution-satellitehttps://archive.ph/ODvEKhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/07/uae-oil-firm-cop28-climate-summit-emails-sultan-al-jaber-adnochttps://archive.ph/Ta5hkhttps://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/uae-concerns-around-authorities-use-of-digital-surveillance-during-cop28/https://www.energyvoice.com/renewables-energy-transition/380412/masdar-renewable-energy-hydrogen/https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/global-warming-will-reach-15c-threshold-this-decade-report-2023-11-02/https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/18/us-china-agreement-sets-the-tone-for-cop28/https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/17/cop28-host-uae-breaking-its-own-ban-on-routine-gas-flaring-data-showshttps://insideclimatenews.org/news/17112023/harder-to-kick-climate-can-from-cop28/https://grist.org/international/international-climate-finance-adaptation/https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/what-the-eu-and-us-want-to-get-done-at-cop28/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/climate/us-china-climate-agreement.htmlhttps://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/10/cop28-host-uae-pushes-oil-producers-for-climate-pledges-00126619https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/15/un-climate-cop26-pledges/?stream=tophttps://www.ghgsat.com/en/newsroom/worlds-first-commercial-co2-sensor-in-orbit/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-15/exxon-ceo-says-making-big-oil-villains-harms-net-zero-drive?stream=top#xj4y7vzkghttps://www.politico.eu/article/eu-promises-substantial-climate-damage-funding-pledge/https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67143989https://archive.ph/KHWOLhttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-11-13/gulf-nations-must-overhaul-everything-to-meet-climate-goals?cmpid=BBD111523_GREENDAILYhttps://www.semafor.com/article/11/10/2023/the-battle-lines-to-watch-at-cop28https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-04/the-bankers-are-back-finance-industry-plans-for-cop28?cmpid=BBD111523_GREENDAILY#xj4y7vzkghttps://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/cma2023_12.pdfhttps://www.wri.org/research/state-climate-action-2023https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/un-climate-change-emissions-gap?stream=tophttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Climate_Change_conferencehttps://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/conferences/the-big-picture/what-are-united-nations-climate-change-conferences/how-cops-are-organized-questions-and-answershttps://www.uae-embassy.org/discover-uae/climate-and-energy/uae-energy-diversification This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

Title: Breaking Down COP28: The Critical Climate ConferenceWelcome to a special episode of the Sustainability Solved Podcast!In this episode, we introduce a brand-new co-host, Charlie Luxton, an architectural designer and TV presenter well-known for his passion for the built environmental and sustainability, as seen on Homes By The Sea and Building The Dream. With COP28 just around the corner, we've invited guests with strong opinions to discuss one of the most significant events in the sustainability calendar. Our first guest is Georgia Elliot-Smith, environmental activist and the founder and managing director of sustainability consultancy Element Four. Joining us is Emma Littlewood, Strategy Director at Green Element Group, and creator of the comprehensive carbon footprinting platform, Compare Your Footprint. Tune in as we dive deep into the inner workings of COP28, explore the impact of industry and capitalism, and discuss the prospects of revitalising this pivotal event for a sustainable future.This episode of Sustainability Solved is sponsored by Business Declares, a not-for-profit business network who inspire, encourage, and accelerate action within businesses to address the climate, ecological, and social emergency.They are an active network of 100+ businesses who back our commitments to reach net-zero, restore and protect nature, and advocate for regulatory change.Join Business Declares as a member to get help on accelerating your action on net-zero targets and on nature targets for your business from the network. Find out more here: Business DeclaresHighlights: COP28 ExplainedOur guests delve into what COP is, its evolution, how the agenda is developed, and key sustainability milestones like the Rio Summit in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. Georgia shares her experience as an observer at COP, telling all about the ‘green zone' for businesses and public, and the ‘blue zone' – the heart of negotiations. Oil and Gas at COP28:Emma exposes the staggering subsidies offered to the oil and gas industry and their involvement in COP28. Concerns are raised about this year's COP28 host, the UAE, and their connections to the oil and gas industry. Georgia reveals that the UK have given £20 billion more to fossil fuels than renewables post Paris Agreement. Reviving COP:We discuss how the merging of industry and governments is problematic in climate discussions, with our guests pushing for strict rules to limit corporate influence at COP. The guest's desire for COP28 to fail to pave the way for a more effective future is...

In this episode of our Women in Sustainability series, we are talking about the evolution and underpinnings of China's climate diplomacy. Our guest is Taylah Bland, Schwarzman Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis. She specializes in China's domestic climate politics and international environmental law. She is a graduate of New York University, Shanghai and Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar. In this episode we cover: China's tendency to boost domestic policy first, before making climate commitments. China's signing on to climate agreements in the early phases, such as the Kyoto Protocol and Clean Development Mechanism The importance of China's domestic policy leading up to its Paris commitment Whether China's climate diplomacy commitments lag domestic trends so much, such as on renewables, that they are more for splashy announcements and soft power What further domestic policy steps are needed before China can enhance its ambitions for the next round of climate talks Further reading: Taylah Bland, "Key Factors Shaping China's Engagement With International Environmental Law," Asia Society Policy Institute, April 2023, at https://asiasociety.org/policy-institute/key-factors-shaping-chinas-engagement-international-environmental-law.  Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/EnvironmentChina Episode produced by: Anders Hove

On this re-air, Crystal chats with former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and his former Senior Communications Advisor Robert Cruickshank about the missed opportunity for generational impact through how decisions were made about Seattle's waterfront and the SR99 tunnel. Mike and Robert review how the vision of the scrappy People's Waterfront Coalition, centered around making a prized public space accessible for all while taking the climate crisis on by transforming our transportation system, nearly won the fight against those who prioritized maintaining highway capacity and those who prioritized increasing Downtown property values.  The conversation then highlights how those with power and money used their outsized influence to make backroom decisions - despite flawed arguments and little public enthusiasm for their proposal - leaving Seattle with an underutilized deep bore tunnel and a car-centric waterfront. Some of the decision makers are still active in local politics - including current Mayor Bruce Harrell and his current advisor Tim Burgess. With important elections ahead, Crystal, Mike and Robert discuss how political decisions tend to conflict with campaign promises rather than donor rolls, how proven action is a better indicator than value statements, and how today's dense ecosystem of progressive leaders and organizations can take inspiration and win the next fight. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Follow us on Twitter at @HacksWonks. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii, Mike McGinn at @mayormcginn, and Robert Cruickshank at @cruickshank.   Mike McGinn Mike is the Executive Director of national nonprofit America Walks.  He got his start in local politics as a neighborhood activist pushing for walkability. From there he founded a non-profit focused on sustainable and equitable growth, and then became mayor of Seattle. Just before joining America Walks, Mike worked to help Feet First, Washington State's walking advocacy organization, expand their sphere of influence across Washington state. He has worked on numerous public education, legislative, ballot measure and election campaigns – which has given him an abiding faith in the power of organizing and volunteers to create change.   Robert Cruickshank Robert is the Director of Digital Strategy at California YIMBY and Chair of Sierra Club Seattle. A long time communications and political strategist, he was Senior Communications Advisor to Mike McGinn from 2011-2013.   Resources “Seattle Waterfront History Interviews: Cary Moon, Waterfront Coalition” by Dominic Black from HistoryLink   “State Route 99 tunnel - Options and political debate" from Wikipedia   “Remembering broken promises about Bertha” by Josh Cohen from Curbed Seattle   “Fewer drivers in Seattle's Highway 99 tunnel could create need for bailout” by Mike Lindblom from The Seattle Times   “Surface Highway Undermines Seattle's Waterfront Park” by Doug Trumm from The Urbanist   “Seattle Prepares to Open Brand New Elliott Way Highway Connector” by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today, I am very excited to be welcoming Robert Cruickshank and former Mayor Mike McGinn to the show to talk about something that a lot of people have been thinking about, talking about recently - and that is Seattle's new waterfront. We feel like we've spent a decade under construction - from a deep bore tunnel to the tunnel machine getting stuck - that's not even covering all the debate before that, but all of the kind of follies and foibles and challenges that have beset the process of arriving at the waterfront that we have now. And now that we are getting the big reveal, a lot of people have feelings about it. So I thought we would talk about it with one of the people who was at the forefront of criticisms of the tunnel and calling out some red flags that turned out to be a very wise warning - several wise warnings that have come to pass, unfortunately - for not listening to them. But I want to start early on in the beginning, both of you - and I had a short stint in the mayor's office - worked on this, talked about this on the campaign, really got it. But when did you first hear that we needed to replace the viaduct and there were some different opinions about how to make that happen? [00:02:06] Mike McGinn: Okay, so I'm sure I can't pin down a date, but the really important date was, of course, the Nisqually earthquake in 2001. And so it gave the Alaska Way Viaduct a good shake - the decks weren't tied into the columns, the columns were on fill, which could liquefy - and everybody understood that if that quake had been a little stronger and harder, the elevated would come down. Now you might think that that would call for immediately closing the roadway for safety reasons, but what it did call for was for reconstructing it. And you have to remember that highway was really one of the very first limited access highways - it was built long ago and it was just at the end of its useful life anyway. Certainly not built to modern seismic standards or modern engineering standards. So the conversation immediately started and I don't know when everything started to settle into different roles, but the Mayor of Seattle Greg Nickels, was immediately a proponent for a tunnel - and a much larger and more expensive tunnel than what was ultimately built. And it would have been a cut-and-cover tunnel along the waterfront that included a new seawall. So they thought they were solving two things at one time - because the seawall too was rotting away, very old, very unstable. But it would have gone all the way under South Lake Union and emerged onto Aurora Avenue further north, it would have had entrances and exits to Western and Elliott. And I seem to remember the quoted price was like $11 billion. And the state - governor at the time was Christine Gregoire - they were - No, we're replacing the highway. We don't have $11 billion for Seattle. And of course had the support of a lot of lawmakers for obvious reasons - we're not going to give Seattle all that money, we want all that highway money for our districts. And those were immediately presented as the alternatives. And so much of the credit has to go to Cary Moon, who lived on the waterfront and started something called the People's Waterfront Coalition. I think Grant Cogswell, a former City Council candidate - now runs a bookstore down in Mexico City, but wrote a book about the Monorail, worked on the different Monorail campaigns before that - they launched something called the People's Waterfront Coalition. And the basic proposition was - We don't need a highway. This is a great opportunity to get rid of the highway and have a surface street, but if you amp up the transit service - if we invest in transit instead - we can accommodate everyone. And so that was really - as it started - and actually I remember being outside City Hall one day, going to some stakeholder meeting - I went to so many different stakeholder meetings. And I remember Tim Ceis saying to me - he was the Deputy Mayor at the time - You're not supporting that Cary Moon idea - I mean, that's just crazy. I was - Well, actually, Tim. So the Sierra Club was - I was a volunteer leader in the Sierra Club - and the Sierra Club was one of the first organizations - I'm sure there were others, I shouldn't overstate it - but the Sierra Club was persuaded by the wisdom of Cary's idea and supported it in that day. And so that was really how the three different options got launched - no public process, no analysis, no description of what our needs were. The mayor went to a solution, the governor went to a solution - and it was up to members of the public to try to ask them to slow down, stop, and look at something different. [00:05:42] Crystal Fincher: And Robert, how did you first engage with this issue? [00:05:47] Robert Cruickshank: For me, I had just moved to Seattle the first time in the fall of 2001 - so it was about six months after the Nisqually quake - and I came from the Bay Area. And that was where another earthquake had damaged another waterfront highway, the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco. And that was where San Francisco had voted - after that quake had damaged their viaduct beyond repair - they voted to tear it down and replace it with the Embarcadero Waterfront, which is a six-lane arterial but they built a lot more transit there. So they did the - what we might call the surface transit option - and it worked really well. It was beautiful. It still is. And so when I came up here and started to learn a little bit about the place I was living and the legacy of the Nisqually quake, I thought - Oh, why don't you just do the same thing here? It worked so well in San Francisco. Let's just tear down this unsightly monstrosity on the waterfront and replace it with a surface boulevard and put in a bunch of transit - San Francisco's made it work successfully. And the more I learned about Seattle, I realized there's a legacy of that here, too. This is a city where we had a freeway revolt, where activists came together and killed the RH Thomson freeway, which would have destroyed the Arboretum. They killed the Bay Freeway, which would have destroyed Pike Place Market. And so I naturally assumed - as being a relatively new resident - that Seattle would stay in that tradition and welcome the opportunity to tear this down and build a great waterfront for people, not cars. But as we'll talk about in a moment, we have a lot of business interests and freight interests and others who had a different vision - who didn't share that community-rooted vision. And I think at numerous points along the way, though, you see people of Seattle saying - No, this is not what we want for our waterfront. We have an opportunity now with the fact that this viaduct nearly collapsed, as Mike mentioned, in the Nisqually quake - we have an opportunity for something really wonderful here. And so I think Cary Moon and then Mike McGinn and others tapped into that - tapped into a really strong community desire to have a better waterfront. I wasn't that politically engaged at the time in the 2000s - I was just a grad student at UW - but just talking to folks who I knew, anytime this came up - God, wouldn't it be wonderful down there if this was oriented towards people and not cars, and we took that thing down? So I think one of the things you're going to see is this contest between the vision that many of us in Seattle had and still have - this beautiful location, beautiful vista on Elliott Bay, that should be for the people of the city - and those in power who have a very different vision and don't really want to share power or ultimately the right-of-way with We the People. [00:08:05] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, definitely. And I was involved in some things at the time - some curious coalitions - but definitely I was around a lot of people who favored either rebuilding the viaduct or the tunnel. Definitely not this roads and transit option - there's no way that's workable. That's pie-in-the-sky talk from those loony greenies over there. What are you talking about? But as this went on - I think no matter what camp people were in - there was always a clear vision articulated and people really focused on the opportunity that this represented, and I think correctly characterized it as - this is one of these generational decisions that we get to make that is going to impact the next generation or two and beyond. And there's an opportunity - the waterfront felt very disconnected with the way things were constructed - it was not easy just to go from downtown to the waterfront. It wasn't friendly for pedestrians. It wasn't friendly for tourists. It just did not feel like a world-class waterfront in a world-class city, and how we see that in so many other cities. You talk about the decision with the Embarcadero, Robert, and looking at - that definitely seemed like a definitive step forward. This was sold as - yeah, we can absolutely take a step forward and finally fix this waterfront and make it what it should have been the whole time. As you thought about the opportunity that this represented, what was the opportunity to you and what did you hear other people saying that they wanted this to be? [00:09:38] Mike McGinn: Yeah, so I think there are - I think that's really important, because I don't think there was a real discussion of what the vision was. People will say there was, but there really wasn't. Because what was baked in and what you're referring to is - well, of course you have to build automobile capacity to replace the existing automobile capacity, right? In fact, this state is still building more highways across the state in the misguided belief that more highway capacity will somehow or another do some good. So this idea that you have to replace and expand highway capacity is extremely powerful in Washington state and across the country. And there were very few examples of highway removal, so that was just a real challenge in the first place - that somehow or other the first priority has to be moving automobiles. For me, at that time I had become - the issue of climate had really penetrated me at that point. And in fact, when Greg Nickels took office and the Sierra Club endorsed him over Paul Schell - I was a local leader in the Sierra Club and a state leader in the Sierra Club - and my goal was that Mayor Nickels would do more than Paul Schell. And Paul Schell, the prior mayor, had done some good things. He had made Seattle City Light climate neutral - we'd gotten out of coal plants and we didn't purchase power from coal plants. He was really progressive on a number of environmental issues and we wanted Mayor Nickels to do more - and Mayor Nickels had stepped up. So we put on a campaign to urge him to do more. And he had stepped up to start something called the Mayors' Climate Protection Initiative - which was the City of Seattle was going to meet the standards of the Kyoto Protocol, which was like the Paris Agreement of its day. And that was - it set an emissions reduction target by a date in the future. And that was really great - in fact, over a thousand cities around the country signed up to the Mayors' Climate Protection Initiative. And I was appointed to a stakeholder group with other leaders - Denis Hayes from the Bullitt Foundation and others - to develop the first climate action plan for a city. Al Gore showed up at the press conference for it - it was a big - it was a BFD and a lot of excitement. And one of the things that was abundantly clear through that process of cataloging the emissions in the City of Seattle and coming up with a plan to reduce them was that our single largest source of emissions at that time was the transportation sector. We'd already gotten off of coal power under Mayor Schell - we received almost all of our electricity from hydroelectric dams. We had good conservation programs. Unlike other parts of the country, transportation was the biggest. Now what's fascinating is now - I don't know if I want to do the math - almost 20 years later, now what we see is that the whole country is in the same place. We're replacing coal and natural gas power plants. And now nationally, the single largest source of emissions is transportation. So how do you fix that? If we're serious about climate - and I thought we should be - because the scientists were telling us about heat waves. They were telling us about forest fires that would blanket the region in smoke. They were telling us about storms that would be bigger than we'd ever seen before. And flooding like we'd never seen and declining snowpack. And it was all going to happen in our futures. Honestly, I remember those predictions from the scientists because they're in the headlines today, every day. So what do we do to stop that? So I was - I had little kids, man - I had little kids, I had three kids. How are we going to stop this? Well, it's Seattle needs to lead - that's what has to happen. We're the progressive city. We're the first one out with a plan. We're going to show how we're going to do it. And if our biggest source is transportation, we should fix that. Well, it should seem obvious that the first thing you should do is stop building and expanding highways, and maybe even change some of the real estate used for cars and make it real estate for walking, biking, and transit. That's pretty straightforward. You also have to work on more housing. And this all led me to starting a nonprofit around all of these things and led to the Sierra Club - I think at a national level - our chapter was much further forward than any other chapter on upzones and backyard cottages and making the transition. So to me, this was the big - that was the vision. That was the opportunity. We're going to tear this down. We're going to make a massive investment in changing the system, and this in fact could be a really transformative piece. That's what motivated me. That climate argument wasn't landing with a whole bunch of other interests. There was certainly a vision from the Downtown and Downtown property owners and residents that - boy, wouldn't it be great to get rid of that elevated highway because that's terrible. There was also a vision from the people who still believed in highway capacity and that includes some of our major employers at the time and today - Boeing and Microsoft, they have facilities in the suburbs around Seattle - they think we need highway capacity. As well as all of the Port businesses, as well as all the maritime unions - thought that this highway connection here was somehow critical to their survival, the industrial areas. And then they wanted the capacity. So there were very strong competing visions. And I think it's fair to say that highway capacity is a vision - we've seen that one is now fulfilled. The second priority was an enhanced physical environment to enhance the property values of Downtown property owners. And they cut the deal with the highway capacity people - okay, we're here for your highway capacity, but we have to get some amenities. And the climate folks, I'm not seeing it - never a priority of any of the leaders - just wasn't a priority. [00:15:44] Crystal Fincher: How did you see those factions come into play and break down, Robert? [00:15:48] Robert Cruickshank: It was interesting. This all comes to a head in the late 2000s. And remembering back to that time, this is where Seattle is leading the fight to take on the climate and the fight against George W. Bush, who was seen as this avatar of and deeply connected to the oil industry. Someone who - one of his first things when he took office - he did was withdraw the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol, which is the earlier version of what's now known as the Paris Agreement - global agreement to try to lower emissions. And so Seattle, in resisting Bush - that's where Greg Nickels became a national figure by leading the Mayors' Climate Action Group - not just say we're going to take on climate, we're going to do something about really de facto fighting back against Bush. And then Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore comes out with An Inconvenient Truth. And by 2007, people in Seattle are talking a lot about climate and how we need to do something about climate. But then what you see happening is the limits of that - what are people really actually willing to do and willing to support? The other piece that comes together, I think - in the 2000s - is a revival of the City itself. Seattle spends the late 20th century after the Boeing bust - since the 70s "Will the last person out of Seattle turn out the lights," recovering in the 80s somewhat, recovering in the 90s, and then the tech boom. And by the 2000s, Seattle is a destination city for young people coming to live here and living in apartments and working in the tech industry. I think that unsettles a lot of people. One thing that really stood out to me about the discussion about what to do on the waterfront was this vision from old school folks - like Joel Connelly and others - we've got to preserve that working waterfront. And it's very much the sense that blue collar working class labor is under threat - not from corporate power, but from a 20-something millennial with a laptop working at Amazon who comes to Seattle and thinks - Gosh, why is this ugly viaduct here? It's unsafe. Why don't we just tear it down and have a wonderful waterfront view? And those who are offended by this idea - who are so wedded to the 20th century model that we're going to drive everywhere, cars, freedom - this is where you see the limits of willingness to actually do something on climate. People don't actually want to give up their cars. They're afraid they're going to sacrifice their way of life. And you start to see this weird but powerful constellation come together where rather than having a discussion about transportation planning or even a discussion about climate action, we're having this weird discussion about culture. And it becomes a culture war. And the thing about a culture war is people pushing change are never actually trying to fight a war. They're just - This is a good idea. Why don't we do this? We all say these - we care about these values. And the people who don't want it just dig in and get really nasty and fight back. And so you start to see Cary Moon, People's Waterfront Coalition, Mike McGinn, and others get attacked as not wanting working class jobs, not wanting a working waterfront, not caring about how people are going to get to work, not caring about how the freight trucks are going to get around even though you're proposing a tunnel from the Port to Wallingford where - it's not exactly an industrial hub - there are some businesses there. But dumping all these cars out or in South Lake Union, it's like, what is going on here? It doesn't add up. But it became this powerful moment where a competing vision of the City - which those of us who saw a better future for Seattle didn't see any competition as necessary at all - those who are wedded to that model where we're going to drive everywhere, we're going to have trucks everywhere, really saw that under threat for other reasons. And they decided this is where they're going to make their stand. This is where they're going to make that fight. And that turned out to be pretty useful for the Port, the freight groups, the establishment democratic leaders who had already decided for their own reasons this is what they wanted too. [00:19:11] Mike McGinn: It's important to recognize too, in this, is to follow the money. And I think that this is true for highway construction generally. You have a big section of the economy - there's a section of the economy that believes in it, as Robert was saying, right? And I do think the culture war stuff is fully there - that somehow or another a bike lane in an industrial area will cause the failure of business. Although if you went to the bike - outside the industrial building - you'll find a bunch of the workers' bike there, right? Because it's affordable and efficient. So there's this weird belief that just isn't true - that you can't accommodate industry and transit and walking and biking. Of course you can. And in fact, adding all the cars is bad for freight movement because of all the traffic jams. So there's that belief, but there's also a whole bunch of people - I mentioned Downtown property owners - that gets you to your Downtown Seattle Association. The value of their property is going to be dramatically enhanced by burying, by eliminating the waterfront highway. But then you also have all of the people who build highways and all of the people who support the people who build highways. Who's going to float $4 billion in bonds? It's going to be a Downtown law firm. And by the way, the person who worked for that Downtown law firm and did the bond work was the head of the greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at that time. So you have the engineering firms, you have the material providers, and then you have the union jobs that go with it. So really at this point - and this isn't just about the waterfront highway, this could be any highway expansion - you've captured the business community because a big chunk of the business community will get direct dollars from the government to them. And you've actually captured a significant chunk of the labor community as well, because labor fights for labor jobs. In the big picture, service workers are taking transit, service workers need housing in town, and you can start to see a split - like in my ultimate run for mayor, I won some service worker unions, never won any construction trades. In fact, they held a rally my first year in office to denounce me, right? Because I was standing in the way of jobs. So that's a really powerful coalition. And I think what you see today in the country as a whole - as you know, I'm the ED of America Walks, so I get to see a lot more - this is a pattern. Highways aren't really supported by the public. They don't go to the public for public votes on highways anymore - the public wouldn't support it. And in fact, the data suggests the public gets that building more highway lanes won't solve everything. But you've got a big, big chunk of the economy that's gotten extremely used to billions and billions of dollars flowing into their pockets. And they need to protect that in every year. So you get that level of intensity around - Look, we're talking about $4 billion on the waterfront and a bunch of that money's coming to us. Better believe it's a good idea, and what are you talking about, climate? [00:22:03] Robert Cruickshank: You talk about public votes, and I think there are three crucial public votes we got to talk about. One is 2007, when these advisory votes are on the ballot - and they're not binding, but they're advisory. Do you want to rebuild the viaduct or build a tunnel? They both get rejected. And then the next big vote is 2009, the mayoral election, where Mike McGinn becomes mayor - in part by channeling public frustration at this giant boondoggle. And then ultimately, the last public vote on this, 2011 - in June, I believe it was, it was in August - about whether we go forward or not and the public by this point, fatigued and beaten down by The Seattle Times, decides let's just move on from this. [00:22:43] Mike McGinn: There's no other alternative. And it is worth returning to that early vote, because it was such a fascinating moment, because - I think the mayor's office didn't want to put his expansive tunnel option in a direct vote against the new elevated, fearing it would lose. So they engineered an agreement with the governor that each one would get a separate up or down vote. And by the way, Tim Ceis, the Deputy Mayor at the time, called in the Sierra Club, briefed us on it, and one of our members said - What would happen if they both got voted down? And Deputy Mayor Ceis said - by the way, Tim Ceis has got a big contract right now from Mayor Harrell, longtime tunnel supporter. Tim Ceis is the consultant for most of the business side candidates. Tim Burgess, another big supporter of the tunnel, now works for Mayor Harrell. Oh, and Christine Gregoire has been hired by the biggest corporations in the region to do their work for them as well. So there's a pretty good payoff if you stick around and support the right side of this stuff. But anyway, Mayor Ceis, Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis, when said, What happens if they're both voted down? He goes - Well, that would be chaos. You don't want that, do you? And I remember all of us just kind of looked at each other - and we all went out on the sidewalk, there were like six of us. And we went - We want that, right? And so we joined in and supported the No and No campaign. And The Stranger came in really hard. And I think Erica Barnett wrote the articles. And Cary Moon was in on it. And the defeat of that, for the first time, opened up the possibility - Well, let's think about something else. And so a stakeholder group was formed. Cary Moon was appointed. Mike O'Brien was appointed. The waterfront guys were appointed. And the Downtown folks were appointed. And the labor folks were appointed. And I think a really important part of the story here is that it was advisory - they weren't making the decisions, it was advisory. But they got to a point at which the head of the State DOT, the head of the Seattle DOT, and the head of the King County DOT all expressed to their respective executives that surface transit worked and was worth it. And this was extremely distressing to the business community. So they mounted a big lobbying push and went straight to Gregoire. And Gregoire, for the first time, became a tunnel supporter. And they were promised that this new tunneling technology - the deep bore tunnel - would solve the cost issues of the deep bore tunnel. And not only that, the state's commitment, which to date was $2.4 billion - they had committed $2.4 billion to a rebuild - the state wouldn't have to pay anymore, because the Port would put in $300 million and they would raise $400 million from tolling. And coincidentally, the amount they thought they could raise from tolling was the exact amount needed to meet the projected cost of using the deep bore tunnel boring machine. So the deal was cut and announced. And the whole stakeholder group and the recommendations from the DOT heads were abandoned. And that occurred, basically, late 2008, early 2009 - the deal was made. And that was about the time that I was contemplating - well, I think I'd already decided to run, but I had not yet announced. [00:26:14] Crystal Fincher: And this was an interesting time, especially during that vote. Because at that time, I had an eye into what the business community was doing and thinking, and it was clear that their numbers didn't add up. [00:26:26] Mike McGinn: Oh my God - no. [00:26:28] Crystal Fincher: But they just did not want to face that. And what they knew is they had enough money and resources to throw at this issue and to throw at a marketing effort to obfuscate that, that they wouldn't have to worry about it. And there was this sense of offense, of indignation that - Who are these people trying to come up and tell us that we don't need freight capacity, that we don't need - that this extra highway capacity, don't they understand how important these freeways are? Who are these people who just don't understand how our economy works? [00:27:02] Mike McGinn: They were the grownups who really understood how things worked. And we were the upstarts who didn't understand anything. But there's a great line from Willie Brown talking about - I think the Transbay Bridge, and Robert can correct the name, in California, which was way over budget. And people were lamenting that the early estimates had been made up. And he goes - Look, this is how it works. You just need to dig a hole in the ground so deep that the only way to fill it up is with money. I think that's pretty much the quote. So that's the strategy. You get it started. Of course you have rosy estimates. And then you just have that commitment, and it's the job of legislators to come up with the cost overruns, dollars later. [00:27:43] Robert Cruickshank: And I think it's so key to understand this moment here in the late 2000s, where the public had already weighed in. I remember voting - it was the last thing I voted on before I moved to California for four years. I'm like no - I was No and No. And that's where the Seattle voters were. They rejected both options. And then you start to hear, coming out of the stakeholder group - Okay, we can make the surface transit option work. And I left town thinking - Alright, that's what's going to happen, just like the Embarcadero in San Francisco and done. And the next thing I hear in late 2008, early 2009, there's this deal that's been cut and all of a sudden a deep bore tunnel is on the table. And this is Seattle politics in a nutshell. I think people look back and think that because we are this smart, progressive technocratic city - those people who live here are - we think that our government works the same way. And it doesn't. This is - time and time again, the public will make its expression felt. They'll weigh in with opinion poll or protest or vote. And the powers that be will say - Well, actually, we want to do this thing instead. We'll cook it up in a backroom. We're going to jam it on all of you, and you're going to like it. And if you don't like it, then we're going to start marshaling resources. We're gonna throw a bunch of money at it. We'll get The Seattle Times to weigh in and pound away at the enemy. And that's how politics works here - that's how so much of our transportation system is built and managed. And so people today, in 2023, looking at this monstrosity on the waterfront that we have now think - How did we get here? Who planned this? It was planned in a backroom without public involvement. And I think that's a thing that has to be understood because that, as we just heard, was baked in from the very start. [00:29:11] Mike McGinn: Well, Robert, the idea of a deep bore tunnel was brought forward by a representative of the Discovery Institute, who you may know as the folks that believe in creationism. [00:29:21] Robert Cruickshank: Well, and not only that, the Discovery Institute is responsible for turning Christopher Rufo from a failed Seattle City Council candidate in 2019 into a national figure. [00:29:31] Mike McGinn: The Discovery Institute, with money from local donors - major, very wealthy local folks - they actually had a long-term plan to turn all of 99 into a limited access freeway. It's like - we need to get rid of that First Avenue South and Highway 99 and Aurora Avenue stuff - all of that should be a freeway. So they were the architects of the idea of - Hey, this deep bore tunnel is the solution. But Robert's point is just right on - transportation policy was driven by power and money, not by transportation needs, or climate needs, or equity needs, or even local economy needs really. When you get right down to it, our city runs on transit - that's what really matters. Our city runs on the fact that it's a city where people can walk from place to place. The idea that our economic future was tied to a highway that would skip Downtown - the most valuable place in the Pacific Northwest, Downtown Seattle. No, that's not really what powers our economy. But it certainly worked for the people that were going to get the dollars that flowed from folks and for the people who own Downtown property. [00:30:42] Crystal Fincher: And I want to talk about money and power with this. Who were the people in power? What was the Council at that time? Who made these decisions? [00:30:50] Mike McGinn: The Council at the time was elected citywide. And I think some people have concerns about district representation, but one of the things that citywide elections meant at the time was that you had to run a citywide campaign, and that's expensive. There's no way to knock on enough doors citywide. I did not have a lot of money when I ran for mayor, but at least I had the media attention that would go to a mayoral candidate. A City Council candidate would kind of flow under the radar. So you had people come from different places, right? They might come from the business side, they might come from the labor side. But ultimately, they would tend to make peace with the other major players - because only business and only labor could finance a campaign. They were the only ones with the resources to do that. So the other interests - the environmentalists, the social service folks, neighborhood advocates of whatever stripe - we chose from amongst the candidates that were elevated by, they would unify - in some cases, the business and labor folks would unify around a candidate. In fact, that's what we saw in the last two mayoral elections as well, where they pick a candidate. And so this doesn't leave much room. So when I was mayor, almost the entire council was aligned with the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at that time, either endorsed by them or had made their peace with them so the challenger was not being financed. So Robert said something about those outsiders - I went under the radar screen as a candidate at the beginning of my campaign. When I entered the race, nobody was running because everybody thought that Greg Nickels had the institutional support locked down. [00:32:33] Crystal Fincher: But then a snowstorm happened. [00:32:35] Mike McGinn: Well, it was even before that - honestly, everybody thought that he could win. And long before the snowstorm, I was like - We're getting a new mayor. And I was actually looking around to try to figure out who it was going to be - because I wanted a mayor who actually believed in climate, who had my values. But nobody - I was looking through who the people were that might run, and it dawned on me - Well, nobody's going to run. But we're going to get a new mayor and I have my values - and I've actually run ballot measure campaigns and had a very modest base of support. So I was really the first one in the race that got any attention. So I got some great media attention off that. Then my opponent in the general, Joe Mallahan - whatever else you may think about Joe Mallahan - he actually saw it too. He saw that there was an opening. And then we were joined by a long-time City Councilmember, Jan Drago. And I remember the headline from The Seattle Times or the comments at the time was - Okay, now it's a real race. But it just really wasn't. So I was really under the radar screen in that race because they were disregarding me. But there was in fact a lot of anger about the tunnel. There was a lot of just - Greg, for whatever his positives or negatives that history will deal with - and by the way, I actually think Greg did a lot of good. I just was disappointed in his highway policies and his climate policies at the end of the day - I have a lot of respect for Greg Nickels, but he wasn't going to win that race. And I came out of the primary against Joe Mallahan. And all of a sudden we had these two outsiders and the business community's freaking out. All of it - I remember watching it - all of the support, the business support shifted to Joe. It took about a month, it took a few weeks. But all of a sudden - there was actually one week where I think I raised more money than he did, that was pretty unusual - and then all of a sudden all the money was pouring in. And boy, did Joe believe in that tunnel. And did Joe believe in what the Chamber of Commerce wanted to do. In fact, he believed in it so much that he believed that Seattle should pay cost overruns if there were cost overruns on the tunnel - an admission I got from him during the televised debate, I was shocked he admitted to it. [00:34:41] Crystal Fincher: I remember that debate. [00:34:43] Mike McGinn: Yeah. So you were kind of asking about how politics worked. It was really something. Yeah - here's another memory. About two weeks before the election, the City Council took - three weeks before the, two, three weeks, four weeks - they took a vote to say that the tunnel was their choice. Even though there's a mayoral election in which the tunnel is on the ballot, so to speak - in terms of the issues of the candidates - they took a vote for no reason to say it was a done deal. And then WSDOT released a video of the elevated collapsing in a highway, which is the first time a public disclosure request from a third party was ever given straight to a TV station, I think, in my experience in Seattle. I had Gregoire and the DOT folks down there working on that campaign too - their tunnel was threatened. So it really was something how - I indeed was kind of shocked at - it was such a learning experience for me - how much the ranks closed around this. I didn't appreciate it. I had my own nonprofit, I had been on stakeholder committees, I'd worked with a lot of people that weren't just Sierra Club members and neighborhood types. I'd worked with a lot of business people, many of whom had supported my nonprofit because they liked its vision. But they were very clear with me that as long as I supported the surface transit option, there was no way they could be associated with my run for mayor in any way, shape, or form - even if they liked me. It was a complete lockdown - right after the primary where Greg lost the primary and it was me and Joe, I was - Okay, open field running. I can now reach out to these people. There's no incumbent - maybe some of them can support me now. And they were abundantly clear on all of those phone calls that - Nope, can't do it. Until you change your position on the tunnel, we just can't do it. We have business in this town, Mike. We have relationships in this town. We cannot do that. So it was a real lockdown - politically. [00:36:38] Crystal Fincher: That was also a big learning experience for me - watching that consolidation, watching how not only were they fighting for the tunnel against you and making the fight against you a fight about the tunnel, but the enforcement to those third parties that you were talking about that - Hey, if you play ball with him, you're cut off. And those kinds of threats and that kind of dealing - watching that happen was very formative for me. I'm like - Okay, I see how this works, and this is kind of insidious. And if you are branded as an outsider, if you don't play ball, if you don't kiss the ring of the adults in the room - which is definitely what they considered themselves - then you're on the outs and they're at war. And it was really a war footing against you and the campaign. Who was on the Council at that time? [00:37:30] Mike McGinn: Oh my God. Let me see if I can go through the list. No, and it really, it was - your point about it was a war footing was not something that I fully, that I did not appreciate until actually going through that experience - how unified that would be. Excuse me. The City Council chair was Tim Burgess at the time. Bruce Harrell was on the Council. Sally Clark, Richard Conlin, Nick Licata. Mike O'Brien was running on the same platform as me with regard to the tunnel and he'd just been elected. Jean Godden, Sally Bagshaw. I hope I'm not leaving anything out - because - [00:38:04] Robert Cruickshank: Tom Rasmussen will forgive you. [00:38:06] Mike McGinn: Tom Rasmussen. Yeah - because City Councilmembers would get really offended if you didn't thank them publicly - that was another thing I had to learn. You have to publicly thank any other politician on stage with you or they held a grudge. Yeah. So I had - I didn't know all the politicians' rules when I started. [00:38:25] Crystal Fincher: There are so many rules. [00:38:27] Mike McGinn: There are so many, there's so many rules. But really what you saw then was that the Council tended to move in lockstep on many issues - because if they all voted together and they all worked citywide, there was protection. None of them could be singled out. So it was very - and it's not to say that some of them didn't take principled votes and would find themselves on an 8-1 position sometimes, but for the most part, it was much, much safer to be - it was much, much safer to vote as a group. And they tended to do that. And they had coalesced around the tunnel, except for O'Brien. And that could not be shaken by anything we brought to bear. [00:39:04] Robert Cruickshank: And this is wrapped up in not just the electoral politics, but the power politics. Because Mike McGinn comes in - mayor leading the 7th floor of City Hall, the head of City government - and smart guy, nice guy, willing to talk to anybody. But is not from their crew, is not from that group. And as Crystal and Mike said, the ranks were closed from the start. This is - again, 2009, 2010 - when nationally Mitch McConnell is quoted as saying, It's his ambition to make Obama a one-term president. I don't know if he's ever caught on record, but I would be quite certain that Tim Burgess would have said the exact same thing - that his ambition was to make Mike McGinn a one-term mayor. As it turned out in 2013, Tim Burgess wanted his job - one of the candidates running for it. So these are all people who have a reason to close ranks against Mike McGinn and to use a tunnel as a bludgeon against him to do so. [00:39:58] Mike McGinn: There were other bludgeons. After I won the general election and before I took office, they passed their annual budget - they cut the mayor's office budget by a third before I even took office. Just boom - I know - they were determined, they were determined. And so that was when the planning - that council then and with WSDOT - that was when basically the contours of the waterfront were locked into place, including what we now see as that very wide surface road. That was that Council. So if you're wondering, if you're looking at that going - Okay, wow, who decided that and where did it come from? Again, our current mayor and his current advisor and others - they've always been for that. Building that big surface road has always been the plan to go along with the tunnel, because highway capacity was their highest priority. And the park on the waterfront, along with a lot of money into the aquarium and into these new structures - that's their signature thing for so many other people. But the idea that you should, that there was an opportunity to transform our transportation system and transform our city to make it more equitable and climate friendly was never a priority in this process. Just wasn't. [00:41:20] Crystal Fincher: It was never a priority. It was never seriously considered. And to me, through this process - lots of people know, have talked about it on the show before - I actually didn't start off Team McGinn. I wound up Team McGinn - didn't start off that way. But through that - and you won me over with logic - it was you being proven right on several things. You pointed out that their projections, their traffic projections were just so far out of left field that there was no way that they were going to come close. And they even had to come down on their projections before we even saw the traffic - the actual traffic turned out to be lower. You were right on that one - the laughable - [00:41:59] Mike McGinn: They're under 40,000 cars a day - for a highway that was carrying 110,000 cars a day beforehand. So even as a traffic solution - to put that into context, 40,000 cars a day is like the Ballard Bridge. And I can guarantee you the replacement costs of the Ballard Bridge is not $4 billion or $3.1 billion. The E Line, I think, carries 15,000 people a day. Metro carries 220,000 people a day. What you could do with that $3.1 billion or $4 billion in terms of bus lanes, bike lanes, rolling stock for Metro, maybe pay raises for bus drivers so that we could actually have service - you could do so much with those billions of dollars. And we put it all into moving 40,000 cars a day? It's just pathetic. That's three Rapid Ride lines we could have had for a 10th of the cost, or even less. I think the investments in Rapid Ride lines are about $50-100 million a line to make the capital investments to make it work. So the waste - even if you don't care about climate, the waste of dollars - and who's paying those taxes? To a great degree, we have the most regressive state and local tax system in the nation. And we'll have a ballot measure soon, and I know a lot of environmentalists will be out there if the package spends for the right thing saying - Hey, we need money for local streets. Imagine if we'd taken that gas tax money and the Legislature had allowed cities and towns to use it to improve their streets - which they can do. I know that the constitution says highway purposes, but when you read highway purposes, it says roads and bridges. It includes everything. You can use gas taxes for anything that improves the road. And they do. WSDOT has used gas taxes to pay for bike lanes and sidewalks. It's legal. That's a choice. So we're driving around potholed streets. We have - we're putting up little plastic dividers because we care more about the car getting hurt than the bicyclist on the other side of that plastic divider. We're watching our transit service melt away because we can't pay bus drivers enough. But hey, man, somebody's got a really rapid - 3,000 people a day get to skip Downtown in their private vehicles. Where are our priorities for equity? Where are the priorities for economy, or even just plain old-fashioned fiscal prudence? None of that was there - because all of those dollars were going to fund the needs of the most powerful people in the City. And they captured those dollars - and all of us will pay the taxes, all of us will breathe the smoky air, and all of us will watch our streets deteriorate and our transit service evaporate. [00:44:52] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. And to me, it was such a foundational lesson that the people that we have making decisions really matter - and that we have to really explore their records, their donors, their histories - because over and over again, we look at the decisions that wind up being made that frequently conflict with campaign promises, but that very, very rarely conflict with their donor rolls. [00:45:16] Mike McGinn: And yes - and every one of them knows how to make the value statements. So if I had any advice for people in this year's election - everyone is going to say they care about housing, everyone's going to say they think biking safe. I don't - one of the things that I came away with - I don't care about the goals you put into some policy anymore. Show me the hard physical action you will take that might piss somebody off, but you're willing to do it because it's right. And if you can't do that, then your value statements are meaningless. So take a look - who actually, and that's the question I always ask candidates for office - Tell me about a time you did something hard that might've caused you criticism, but you did it because it was right. Or that you made somebody who was an ally or friend upset, but you did it because it was right. Tell me about that time. [00:46:04] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, it's a challenge. And to your point and learning through just watching how people operated through that and some other processes - but that certainly was a big learning for me - is the role of coalitions, the role of accountability, and understanding. You have always had your finger on the pulse of Seattle, really - you're extraordinarily good at that. You're actually - both of you - are great strategists. But our political class is so detached from that sometimes - certainly I'm feeling frustration at some recent actions by our Legislature - we just had our special session day where they increased criminalization of substances, personal possession of substances - just reflecting on legislation to provide school, kids with free meals at school, things that seem like really basic and foundational that we should be able to land this. If we can call a special session to hand Boeing billions of dollars, we should be able to feed kids, right? [00:47:00] Mike McGinn: At the time we were cutting school budgets - when we found money for that. But I don't want to be too gloomy. And then I want to turn it over to Robert to get a last word in here, 'cause I just loved - his analysis is so awesome. I don't want to be too gloomy because - I look at what happened in the Legislature this year on housing, that we're finally going to allow housing, people to build more housing in places so people can actually live closer to their jobs and live more affordably. 10 years ago, we would have thought that was impossible. There's a lot of hard organizing that did it. At America Walks, we're the host of the Freeway Fighters Networks - there are people in 40 cities or more around the country that are organizing to remove highways. And while it's just a small amount of money compared to the amount going to highway expansion, there's actually federal funds to study and remove highways. So it's a long, hard slog. What felt for us - for Robert and me and Cary Moon and others fighting this - which felt like an impossible fight at the time is a fight that is now winning in places. Not winning enough - we're not winning fast enough - but it can change. And so that's - I don't want to be too negative. They got money, but organizing and people - and we actually have the public with us on this, just like we have the public with us on housing. So we just have to do more. We just got to keep at it, folks - got to keep at it. We can win this one. Don't allow this story of how hard it was to deal with the unified political class in the City of Seattle for their climate arson - should not deter you. It should inspire you, 'cause I actually won the mayor's office and we actually did do a lot of good. And the next fight is right in front of us again today, so get in it people. We need you. [00:48:46] Robert Cruickshank: I think that's spot on. And I remember coming to work in your office at the very beginning of 2011, when it seemed like the tunnel was just dominating discussion, but not in the mayor's office, right? When I joined, I fully expected to be like - roll my sleeves up to take on that tunnel. Instead, I'm working on the mayor's jobs plan, the Families and Education Levy, on transit. That's the stuff that was really getting done, and I think McGinn left a really great legacy on that. But we didn't win the tunnel fight. And I think we've diagnosed many of the reasons why, but one thing that really stands out to me as I look back from 12, 13 years distance is we didn't have the same density of genuinely progressive and social democratic organizations and people and leaders in Seattle that we have now. I think that matters because Mike's been talking about what's the next fight. I think one of the big fights coming up next year - when it comes time to renew that Move Seattle Levy - that's nearly a billion dollars that's going to be on the table. And we keep getting promised - when we are asked to approve these massive levies - that a lot of that money is going to go to safe streets, it's going to go to protect vulnerable users, we're going to do something to finally get towards Vision Zero. And instead it all gets taken away to build more car infrastructure. At what point do we finally stand - literally in the road - and say, No more. Do we look at the broken promises on the waterfront where we were promised a beautiful pedestrian-friendly waterfront and got another car sewer? We're going to have to organize and come together. We have many more groups now and many more leaders who are willing to stand up and say - We're not passing this levy unless it actually focuses on safe streets, unless it focuses on pedestrians and cyclists and transit users, and gives iron-clad promises to make sure stuff gets built so that some future mayor can't just walk in and start canceling projects left and right that we were promised. That's the lesson I take from this is - we're better organized now, we have more resources now, but it's still going to be a slog, and we're going to have to stand our ground - otherwise we get rolled. [00:50:34] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I thank you both for this conversation today - reflections on the tunnel fight, how it came to be, what it was like in the middle of it, and the lessons that we take moving forward in these elections that we have coming up this year, next year, and beyond. Thanks so much for the conversation. [00:50:50] Mike McGinn: Thank you, Crystal. [00:50:51] Robert Cruickshank: Thank you - it's been wonderful. [00:50:52] Crystal Fincher: Thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks, which is co-produced by Shannon Cheng and Bryce Cannatelli. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.

This episode originally aired June 2, 2023.   Guest: David Suzuki, world-renowned geneticist and environmentalist Before the Paris Agreement, before the Kyoto Protocol, before even the UN Climate Convention was signed in Rio, world-renowned geneticist and environmentalist David Suzuki was ringing the alarm bell and saying that climate change is a “matter of survival.” In this episode, Suzuki joins “This Matters” guest host and climate reporter Marco Chown Oved to discuss the state of today's environmental movement and where it needs to go. Audio sources: CBC This episode was produced by Alexis Green, Marco Chown-Oved and Paulo Marques

Guest: David Suzuki, world-renowned geneticist and environmentalist Before the Paris Agreement, before the Kyoto Protocol, before even the UN Climate Convention was signed in Rio, world-renowned geneticist and environmentalist David Suzuki was ringing the alarm bell and saying that climate change is a “matter of survival.” In this episode, Suzuki joins “This Matters” guest host and climate reporter Marco Chown Oved to discuss the state of today's environmental movement and where it needs to go. Audio sources: CBC This episode was produced by Alexis Green, Marco Chown-Oved and Paulo Marques

On this midweek show, Crystal chats with former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and his former Senior Communications Advisor Robert Cruickshank about the missed opportunity for generational impact through how decisions were made about Seattle's waterfront and the SR99 tunnel. Mike and Robert review how the vision of the scrappy People's Waterfront Coalition, centered around making a prized public space accessible for all while taking the climate crisis on by transforming our transportation system, nearly won the fight against those who prioritized maintaining highway capacity and those who prioritized increasing Downtown property values.  The conversation then highlights how those with power and money used their outsized influence to make backroom decisions - despite flawed arguments and little public enthusiasm for their proposal - leaving Seattle with an underutilized deep bore tunnel and a car-centric waterfront. Some of the decision makers are still active in local politics - including current Mayor Bruce Harrell and his current advisor Tim Burgess. With important elections ahead, Crystal, Mike and Robert discuss how political decisions tend to conflict with campaign promises rather than donor rolls, how proven action is a better indicator than value statements, and how today's dense ecosystem of progressive leaders and organizations can take inspiration and win the next fight. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Follow us on Twitter at @HacksWonks. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii, Mike McGinn at @mayormcginn, and Robert Cruickshank at @cruickshank.   Mike McGinn Mike is the Executive Director of national nonprofit America Walks.  He got his start in local politics as a neighborhood activist pushing for walkability. From there he founded a non-profit focused on sustainable and equitable growth, and then became mayor of Seattle. Just before joining America Walks, Mike worked to help Feet First, Washington State's walking advocacy organization, expand their sphere of influence across Washington state. He has worked on numerous public education, legislative, ballot measure and election campaigns – which has given him an abiding faith in the power of organizing and volunteers to create change.   Robert Cruickshank Robert is the Director of Digital Strategy at California YIMBY and Chair of Sierra Club Seattle. A long time communications and political strategist, he was Senior Communications Advisor to Mike McGinn from 2011-2013.   Resources “Seattle Waterfront History Interviews: Cary Moon, Waterfront Coalition” by Dominic Black from HistoryLink   “State Route 99 tunnel - Options and political debate" from Wikipedia   “Remembering broken promises about Bertha” by Josh Cohen from Curbed Seattle   “Fewer drivers in Seattle's Highway 99 tunnel could create need for bailout” by Mike Lindblom from The Seattle Times   “Surface Highway Undermines Seattle's Waterfront Park” by Doug Trumm from The Urbanist   “Seattle Prepares to Open Brand New Elliott Way Highway Connector” by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today, I am very excited to be welcoming Robert Cruickshank and former Mayor Mike McGinn to the show to talk about something that a lot of people have been thinking about, talking about recently - and that is Seattle's new waterfront. We feel like we've spent a decade under construction - from a deep bore tunnel to the tunnel machine getting stuck - that's not even covering all the debate before that, but all of the kind of follies and foibles and challenges that have beset the process of arriving at the waterfront that we have now. And now that we are getting the big reveal, a lot of people have feelings about it. So I thought we would talk about it with one of the people who was at the forefront of criticisms of the tunnel and calling out some red flags that turned out to be a very wise warning - several wise warnings that have come to pass, unfortunately - for not listening to them. But I want to start early on in the beginning, both of you - and I had a short stint in the mayor's office - worked on this, talked about this on the campaign, really got it. But when did you first hear that we needed to replace the viaduct and there were some different opinions about how to make that happen? [00:02:06] Mike McGinn: Okay, so I'm sure I can't pin down a date, but the really important date was, of course, the Nisqually earthquake in 2001. And so it gave the Alaska Way Viaduct a good shake - the decks weren't tied into the columns, the columns were on fill, which could liquefy - and everybody understood that if that quake had been a little stronger and harder, the elevated would come down. Now you might think that that would call for immediately closing the roadway for safety reasons, but what it did call for was for reconstructing it. And you have to remember that highway was really one of the very first limited access highways - it was built long ago and it was just at the end of its useful life anyway. Certainly not built to modern seismic standards or modern engineering standards. So the conversation immediately started and I don't know when everything started to settle into different roles, but the Mayor of Seattle Greg Nickels, was immediately a proponent for a tunnel - and a much larger and more expensive tunnel than what was ultimately built. And it would have been a cut-and-cover tunnel along the waterfront that included a new seawall. So they thought they were solving two things at one time - because the seawall too was rotting away, very old, very unstable. But it would have gone all the way under South Lake Union and emerged onto Aurora Avenue further north, it would have had entrances and exits to Western and Elliott. And I seem to remember the quoted price was like $11 billion. And the state - governor at the time was Christine Gregoire - they were - No, we're replacing the highway. We don't have $11 billion for Seattle. And of course had the support of a lot of lawmakers for obvious reasons - we're not going to give Seattle all that money, we want all that highway money for our districts. And those were immediately presented as the alternatives. And so much of the credit has to go to Cary Moon, who lived on the waterfront and started something called the People's Waterfront Coalition. I think Grant Cogswell, a former City Council candidate - now runs a bookstore down in Mexico City, but wrote a book about the Monorail, worked on the different Monorail campaigns before that - they launched something called the People's Waterfront Coalition. And the basic proposition was - We don't need a highway. This is a great opportunity to get rid of the highway and have a surface street, but if you amp up the transit service - if we invest in transit instead - we can accommodate everyone. And so that was really - as it started - and actually I remember being outside City Hall one day, going to some stakeholder meeting - I went to so many different stakeholder meetings. And I remember Tim Ceis saying to me - he was the Deputy Mayor at the time - You're not supporting that Cary Moon idea - I mean, that's just crazy. I was - Well, actually, Tim. So the Sierra Club was - I was a volunteer leader in the Sierra Club - and the Sierra Club was one of the first organizations - I'm sure there were others, I shouldn't overstate it - but the Sierra Club was persuaded by the wisdom of Cary's idea and supported it in that day. And so that was really how the three different options got launched - no public process, no analysis, no description of what our needs were. The mayor went to a solution, the governor went to a solution - and it was up to members of the public to try to ask them to slow down, stop, and look at something different. [00:05:42] Crystal Fincher: And Robert, how did you first engage with this issue? [00:05:47] Robert Cruickshank: For me, I had just moved to Seattle the first time in the fall of 2001 - so it was about six months after the Nisqually quake - and I came from the Bay Area. And that was where another earthquake had damaged another waterfront highway, the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco. And that was where San Francisco had voted - after that quake had damaged their viaduct beyond repair - they voted to tear it down and replace it with the Embarcadero Waterfront, which is a six-lane arterial but they built a lot more transit there. So they did the - what we might call the surface transit option - and it worked really well. It was beautiful. It still is. And so when I came up here and started to learn a little bit about the place I was living and the legacy of the Nisqually quake, I thought - Oh, why don't you just do the same thing here? It worked so well in San Francisco. Let's just tear down this unsightly monstrosity on the waterfront and replace it with a surface boulevard and put in a bunch of transit - San Francisco's made it work successfully. And the more I learned about Seattle, I realized there's a legacy of that here, too. This is a city where we had a freeway revolt, where activists came together and killed the RH Thomson freeway, which would have destroyed the Arboretum. They killed the Bay Freeway, which would have destroyed Pike Place Market. And so I naturally assumed - as being a relatively new resident - that Seattle would stay in that tradition and welcome the opportunity to tear this down and build a great waterfront for people, not cars. But as we'll talk about in a moment, we have a lot of business interests and freight interests and others who had a different vision - who didn't share that community-rooted vision. And I think at numerous points along the way, though, you see people of Seattle saying - No, this is not what we want for our waterfront. We have an opportunity now with the fact that this viaduct nearly collapsed, as Mike mentioned, in the Nisqually quake - we have an opportunity for something really wonderful here. And so I think Cary Moon and then Mike McGinn and others tapped into that - tapped into a really strong community desire to have a better waterfront. I wasn't that politically engaged at the time in the 2000s - I was just a grad student at UW - but just talking to folks who I knew, anytime this came up - God, wouldn't it be wonderful down there if this was oriented towards people and not cars, and we took that thing down? So I think one of the things you're going to see is this contest between the vision that many of us in Seattle had and still have - this beautiful location, beautiful vista on Elliott Bay, that should be for the people of the city - and those in power who have a very different vision and don't really want to share power or ultimately the right-of-way with We the People. [00:08:05] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, definitely. And I was involved in some things at the time - some curious coalitions - but definitely I was around a lot of people who favored either rebuilding the viaduct or the tunnel. Definitely not this roads and transit option - there's no way that's workable. That's pie-in-the-sky talk from those loony greenies over there. What are you talking about? But as this went on - I think no matter what camp people were in - there was always a clear vision articulated and people really focused on the opportunity that this represented, and I think correctly characterized it as - this is one of these generational decisions that we get to make that is going to impact the next generation or two and beyond. And there's an opportunity - the waterfront felt very disconnected with the way things were constructed - it was not easy just to go from downtown to the waterfront. It wasn't friendly for pedestrians. It wasn't friendly for tourists. It just did not feel like a world-class waterfront in a world-class city, and how we see that in so many other cities. You talk about the decision with the Embarcadero, Robert, and looking at - that definitely seemed like a definitive step forward. This was sold as - yeah, we can absolutely take a step forward and finally fix this waterfront and make it what it should have been the whole time. As you thought about the opportunity that this represented, what was the opportunity to you and what did you hear other people saying that they wanted this to be? [00:09:38] Mike McGinn: Yeah, so I think there are - I think that's really important, because I don't think there was a real discussion of what the vision was. People will say there was, but there really wasn't. Because what was baked in and what you're referring to is - well, of course you have to build automobile capacity to replace the existing automobile capacity, right? In fact, this state is still building more highways across the state in the misguided belief that more highway capacity will somehow or another do some good. So this idea that you have to replace and expand highway capacity is extremely powerful in Washington state and across the country. And there were very few examples of highway removal, so that was just a real challenge in the first place - that somehow or other the first priority has to be moving automobiles. For me, at that time I had become - the issue of climate had really penetrated me at that point. And in fact, when Greg Nickels took office and the Sierra Club endorsed him over Paul Schell - I was a local leader in the Sierra Club and a state leader in the Sierra Club - and my goal was that Mayor Nickels would do more than Paul Schell. And Paul Schell, the prior mayor, had done some good things. He had made Seattle City Light climate neutral - we'd gotten out of coal plants and we didn't purchase power from coal plants. He was really progressive on a number of environmental issues and we wanted Mayor Nickels to do more - and Mayor Nickels had stepped up. So we put on a campaign to urge him to do more. And he had stepped up to start something called the Mayors' Climate Protection Initiative - which was the City of Seattle was going to meet the standards of the Kyoto Protocol, which was like the Paris Agreement of its day. And that was - it set an emissions reduction target by a date in the future. And that was really great - in fact, over a thousand cities around the country signed up to the Mayors' Climate Protection Initiative. And I was appointed to a stakeholder group with other leaders - Denis Hayes from the Bullitt Foundation and others - to develop the first climate action plan for a city. Al Gore showed up at the press conference for it - it was a big - it was a BFD and a lot of excitement. And one of the things that was abundantly clear through that process of cataloging the emissions in the City of Seattle and coming up with a plan to reduce them was that our single largest source of emissions at that time was the transportation sector. We'd already gotten off of coal power under Mayor Schell - we received almost all of our electricity from hydroelectric dams. We had good conservation programs. Unlike other parts of the country, transportation was the biggest. Now what's fascinating is now - I don't know if I want to do the math - almost 20 years later, now what we see is that the whole country is in the same place. We're replacing coal and natural gas power plants. And now nationally, the single largest source of emissions is transportation. So how do you fix that? If we're serious about climate - and I thought we should be - because the scientists were telling us about heat waves. They were telling us about forest fires that would blanket the region in smoke. They were telling us about storms that would be bigger than we'd ever seen before. And flooding like we'd never seen and declining snowpack. And it was all going to happen in our futures. Honestly, I remember those predictions from the scientists because they're in the headlines today, every day. So what do we do to stop that? So I was - I had little kids, man - I had little kids, I had three kids. How are we going to stop this? Well, it's Seattle needs to lead - that's what has to happen. We're the progressive city. We're the first one out with a plan. We're going to show how we're going to do it. And if our biggest source is transportation, we should fix that. Well, it should seem obvious that the first thing you should do is stop building and expanding highways, and maybe even change some of the real estate used for cars and make it real estate for walking, biking, and transit. That's pretty straightforward. You also have to work on more housing. And this all led me to starting a nonprofit around all of these things and led to the Sierra Club - I think at a national level - our chapter was much further forward than any other chapter on upzones and backyard cottages and making the transition. So to me, this was the big - that was the vision. That was the opportunity. We're going to tear this down. We're going to make a massive investment in changing the system, and this in fact could be a really transformative piece. That's what motivated me. That climate argument wasn't landing with a whole bunch of other interests. There was certainly a vision from the Downtown and Downtown property owners and residents that - boy, wouldn't it be great to get rid of that elevated highway because that's terrible. There was also a vision from the people who still believed in highway capacity and that includes some of our major employers at the time and today - Boeing and Microsoft, they have facilities in the suburbs around Seattle - they think we need highway capacity. As well as all of the Port businesses, as well as all the maritime unions - thought that this highway connection here was somehow critical to their survival, the industrial areas. And then they wanted the capacity. So there were very strong competing visions. And I think it's fair to say that highway capacity is a vision - we've seen that one is now fulfilled. The second priority was an enhanced physical environment to enhance the property values of Downtown property owners. And they cut the deal with the highway capacity people - okay, we're here for your highway capacity, but we have to get some amenities. And the climate folks, I'm not seeing it - never a priority of any of the leaders - just wasn't a priority. [00:15:44] Crystal Fincher: How did you see those factions come into play and break down, Robert? [00:15:48] Robert Cruickshank: It was interesting. This all comes to a head in the late 2000s. And remembering back to that time, this is where Seattle is leading the fight to take on the climate and the fight against George W. Bush, who was seen as this avatar of and deeply connected to the oil industry. Someone who - one of his first things when he took office - he did was withdraw the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol, which is the earlier version of what's now known as the Paris Agreement - global agreement to try to lower emissions. And so Seattle, in resisting Bush - that's where Greg Nickels became a national figure by leading the Mayors' Climate Action Group - not just say we're going to take on climate, we're going to do something about really de facto fighting back against Bush. And then Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore comes out with An Inconvenient Truth. And by 2007, people in Seattle are talking a lot about climate and how we need to do something about climate. But then what you see happening is the limits of that - what are people really actually willing to do and willing to support? The other piece that comes together, I think - in the 2000s - is a revival of the City itself. Seattle spends the late 20th century after the Boeing bust - since the 70s "Will the last person out of Seattle turn out the lights," recovering in the 80s somewhat, recovering in the 90s, and then the tech boom. And by the 2000s, Seattle is a destination city for young people coming to live here and living in apartments and working in the tech industry. I think that unsettles a lot of people. One thing that really stood out to me about the discussion about what to do on the waterfront was this vision from old school folks - like Joel Connelly and others - we've got to preserve that working waterfront. And it's very much the sense that blue collar working class labor is under threat - not from corporate power, but from a 20-something millennial with a laptop working at Amazon who comes to Seattle and thinks - Gosh, why is this ugly viaduct here? It's unsafe. Why don't we just tear it down and have a wonderful waterfront view? And those who are offended by this idea - who are so wedded to the 20th century model that we're going to drive everywhere, cars, freedom - this is where you see the limits of willingness to actually do something on climate. People don't actually want to give up their cars. They're afraid they're going to sacrifice their way of life. And you start to see this weird but powerful constellation come together where rather than having a discussion about transportation planning or even a discussion about climate action, we're having this weird discussion about culture. And it becomes a culture war. And the thing about a culture war is people pushing change are never actually trying to fight a war. They're just - This is a good idea. Why don't we do this? We all say these - we care about these values. And the people who don't want it just dig in and get really nasty and fight back. And so you start to see Cary Moon, People's Waterfront Coalition, Mike McGinn, and others get attacked as not wanting working class jobs, not wanting a working waterfront, not caring about how people are going to get to work, not caring about how the freight trucks are going to get around even though you're proposing a tunnel from the Port to Wallingford where - it's not exactly an industrial hub - there are some businesses there. But dumping all these cars out or in South Lake Union, it's like, what is going on here? It doesn't add up. But it became this powerful moment where a competing vision of the City - which those of us who saw a better future for Seattle didn't see any competition as necessary at all - those who are wedded to that model where we're going to drive everywhere, we're going to have trucks everywhere, really saw that under threat for other reasons. And they decided this is where they're going to make their stand. This is where they're going to make that fight. And that turned out to be pretty useful for the Port, the freight groups, the establishment democratic leaders who had already decided for their own reasons this is what they wanted too. [00:19:11] Mike McGinn: It's important to recognize too, in this, is to follow the money. And I think that this is true for highway construction generally. You have a big section of the economy - there's a section of the economy that believes in it, as Robert was saying, right? And I do think the culture war stuff is fully there - that somehow or another a bike lane in an industrial area will cause the failure of business. Although if you went to the bike - outside the industrial building - you'll find a bunch of the workers' bike there, right? Because it's affordable and efficient. So there's this weird belief that just isn't true - that you can't accommodate industry and transit and walking and biking. Of course you can. And in fact, adding all the cars is bad for freight movement because of all the traffic jams. So there's that belief, but there's also a whole bunch of people - I mentioned Downtown property owners - that gets you to your Downtown Seattle Association. The value of their property is going to be dramatically enhanced by burying, by eliminating the waterfront highway. But then you also have all of the people who build highways and all of the people who support the people who build highways. Who's going to float $4 billion in bonds? It's going to be a Downtown law firm. And by the way, the person who worked for that Downtown law firm and did the bond work was the head of the greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at that time. So you have the engineering firms, you have the material providers, and then you have the union jobs that go with it. So really at this point - and this isn't just about the waterfront highway, this could be any highway expansion - you've captured the business community because a big chunk of the business community will get direct dollars from the government to them. And you've actually captured a significant chunk of the labor community as well, because labor fights for labor jobs. In the big picture, service workers are taking transit, service workers need housing in town, and you can start to see a split - like in my ultimate run for mayor, I won some service worker unions, never won any construction trades. In fact, they held a rally my first year in office to denounce me, right? Because I was standing in the way of jobs. So that's a really powerful coalition. And I think what you see today in the country as a whole - as you know, I'm the ED of America Walks, so I get to see a lot more - this is a pattern. Highways aren't really supported by the public. They don't go to the public for public votes on highways anymore - the public wouldn't support it. And in fact, the data suggests the public gets that building more highway lanes won't solve everything. But you've got a big, big chunk of the economy that's gotten extremely used to billions and billions of dollars flowing into their pockets. And they need to protect that in every year. So you get that level of intensity around - Look, we're talking about $4 billion on the waterfront and a bunch of that money's coming to us. Better believe it's a good idea, and what are you talking about, climate? [00:22:03] Robert Cruickshank: You talk about public votes, and I think there are three crucial public votes we got to talk about. One is 2007, when these advisory votes are on the ballot - and they're not binding, but they're advisory. Do you want to rebuild the viaduct or build a tunnel? They both get rejected. And then the next big vote is 2009, the mayoral election, where Mike McGinn becomes mayor - in part by channeling public frustration at this giant boondoggle. And then ultimately, the last public vote on this, 2011 - in June, I believe it was, it was in August - about whether we go forward or not and the public by this point, fatigued and beaten down by The Seattle Times, decides let's just move on from this. [00:22:43] Mike McGinn: There's no other alternative. And it is worth returning to that early vote, because it was such a fascinating moment, because - I think the mayor's office didn't want to put his expansive tunnel option in a direct vote against the new elevated, fearing it would lose. So they engineered an agreement with the governor that each one would get a separate up or down vote. And by the way, Tim Ceis, the Deputy Mayor at the time, called in the Sierra Club, briefed us on it, and one of our members said - What would happen if they both got voted down? And Deputy Mayor Ceis said - by the way, Tim Ceis has got a big contract right now from Mayor Harrell, longtime tunnel supporter. Tim Ceis is the consultant for most of the business side candidates. Tim Burgess, another big supporter of the tunnel, now works for Mayor Harrell. Oh, and Christine Gregoire has been hired by the biggest corporations in the region to do their work for them as well. So there's a pretty good payoff if you stick around and support the right side of this stuff. But anyway, Mayor Ceis, Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis, when said, What happens if they're both voted down? He goes - Well, that would be chaos. You don't want that, do you? And I remember all of us just kind of looked at each other - and we all went out on the sidewalk, there were like six of us. And we went - We want that, right? And so we joined in and supported the No and No campaign. And The Stranger came in really hard. And I think Erica Barnett wrote the articles. And Cary Moon was in on it. And the defeat of that, for the first time, opened up the possibility - Well, let's think about something else. And so a stakeholder group was formed. Cary Moon was appointed. Mike O'Brien was appointed. The waterfront guys were appointed. And the Downtown folks were appointed. And the labor folks were appointed. And I think a really important part of the story here is that it was advisory - they weren't making the decisions, it was advisory. But they got to a point at which the head of the State DOT, the head of the Seattle DOT, and the head of the King County DOT all expressed to their respective executives that surface transit worked and was worth it. And this was extremely distressing to the business community. So they mounted a big lobbying push and went straight to Gregoire. And Gregoire, for the first time, became a tunnel supporter. And they were promised that this new tunneling technology - the deep bore tunnel - would solve the cost issues of the deep bore tunnel. And not only that, the state's commitment, which to date was $2.4 billion - they had committed $2.4 billion to a rebuild - the state wouldn't have to pay anymore, because the Port would put in $300 million and they would raise $400 million from tolling. And coincidentally, the amount they thought they could raise from tolling was the exact amount needed to meet the projected cost of using the deep bore tunnel boring machine. So the deal was cut and announced. And the whole stakeholder group and the recommendations from the DOT heads were abandoned. And that occurred, basically, late 2008, early 2009 - the deal was made. And that was about the time that I was contemplating - well, I think I'd already decided to run, but I had not yet announced. [00:26:14] Crystal Fincher: And this was an interesting time, especially during that vote. Because at that time, I had an eye into what the business community was doing and thinking, and it was clear that their numbers didn't add up. [00:26:26] Mike McGinn: Oh my God - no. [00:26:28] Crystal Fincher: But they just did not want to face that. And what they knew is they had enough money and resources to throw at this issue and to throw at a marketing effort to obfuscate that, that they wouldn't have to worry about it. And there was this sense of offense, of indignation that - Who are these people trying to come up and tell us that we don't need freight capacity, that we don't need - that this extra highway capacity, don't they understand how important these freeways are? Who are these people who just don't understand how our economy works? [00:27:02] Mike McGinn: They were the grownups who really understood how things worked. And we were the upstarts who didn't understand anything. But there's a great line from Willie Brown talking about - I think the Transbay Bridge, and Robert can correct the name, in California, which was way over budget. And people were lamenting that the early estimates had been made up. And he goes - Look, this is how it works. You just need to dig a hole in the ground so deep that the only way to fill it up is with money. I think that's pretty much the quote. So that's the strategy. You get it started. Of course you have rosy estimates. And then you just have that commitment, and it's the job of legislators to come up with the cost overruns, dollars later. [00:27:43] Robert Cruickshank: And I think it's so key to understand this moment here in the late 2000s, where the public had already weighed in. I remember voting - it was the last thing I voted on before I moved to California for four years. I'm like no - I was No and No. And that's where the Seattle voters were. They rejected both options. And then you start to hear, coming out of the stakeholder group - Okay, we can make the surface transit option work. And I left town thinking - Alright, that's what's going to happen, just like the Embarcadero in San Francisco and done. And the next thing I hear in late 2008, early 2009, there's this deal that's been cut and all of a sudden a deep bore tunnel is on the table. And this is Seattle politics in a nutshell. I think people look back and think that because we are this smart, progressive technocratic city - those people who live here are - we think that our government works the same way. And it doesn't. This is - time and time again, the public will make its expression felt. They'll weigh in with opinion poll or protest or vote. And the powers that be will say - Well, actually, we want to do this thing instead. We'll cook it up in a backroom. We're going to jam it on all of you, and you're going to like it. And if you don't like it, then we're going to start marshaling resources. We're gonna throw a bunch of money at it. We'll get The Seattle Times to weigh in and pound away at the enemy. And that's how politics works here - that's how so much of our transportation system is built and managed. And so people today, in 2023, looking at this monstrosity on the waterfront that we have now think - How did we get here? Who planned this? It was planned in a backroom without public involvement. And I think that's a thing that has to be understood because that, as we just heard, was baked in from the very start. [00:29:11] Mike McGinn: Well, Robert, the idea of a deep bore tunnel was brought forward by a representative of the Discovery Institute, who you may know as the folks that believe in creationism. [00:29:21] Robert Cruickshank: Well, and not only that, the Discovery Institute is responsible for turning Christopher Rufo from a failed Seattle City Council candidate in 2019 into a national figure. [00:29:31] Mike McGinn: The Discovery Institute, with money from local donors - major, very wealthy local folks - they actually had a long-term plan to turn all of 99 into a limited access freeway. It's like - we need to get rid of that First Avenue South and Highway 99 and Aurora Avenue stuff - all of that should be a freeway. So they were the architects of the idea of - Hey, this deep bore tunnel is the solution. But Robert's point is just right on - transportation policy was driven by power and money, not by transportation needs, or climate needs, or equity needs, or even local economy needs really. When you get right down to it, our city runs on transit - that's what really matters. Our city runs on the fact that it's a city where people can walk from place to place. The idea that our economic future was tied to a highway that would skip Downtown - the most valuable place in the Pacific Northwest, Downtown Seattle. No, that's not really what powers our economy. But it certainly worked for the people that were going to get the dollars that flowed from folks and for the people who own Downtown property. [00:30:42] Crystal Fincher: And I want to talk about money and power with this. Who were the people in power? What was the Council at that time? Who made these decisions? [00:30:50] Mike McGinn: The Council at the time was elected citywide. And I think some people have concerns about district representation, but one of the things that citywide elections meant at the time was that you had to run a citywide campaign, and that's expensive. There's no way to knock on enough doors citywide. I did not have a lot of money when I ran for mayor, but at least I had the media attention that would go to a mayoral candidate. A City Council candidate would kind of flow under the radar. So you had people come from different places, right? They might come from the business side, they might come from the labor side. But ultimately, they would tend to make peace with the other major players - because only business and only labor could finance a campaign. They were the only ones with the resources to do that. So the other interests - the environmentalists, the social service folks, neighborhood advocates of whatever stripe - we chose from amongst the candidates that were elevated by, they would unify - in some cases, the business and labor folks would unify around a candidate. In fact, that's what we saw in the last two mayoral elections as well, where they pick a candidate. And so this doesn't leave much room. So when I was mayor, almost the entire council was aligned with the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at that time, either endorsed by them or had made their peace with them so the challenger was not being financed. So Robert said something about those outsiders - I went under the radar screen as a candidate at the beginning of my campaign. When I entered the race, nobody was running because everybody thought that Greg Nickels had the institutional support locked down. [00:32:33] Crystal Fincher: But then a snowstorm happened. [00:32:35] Mike McGinn: Well, it was even before that - honestly, everybody thought that he could win. And long before the snowstorm, I was like - We're getting a new mayor. And I was actually looking around to try to figure out who it was going to be - because I wanted a mayor who actually believed in climate, who had my values. But nobody - I was looking through who the people were that might run, and it dawned on me - Well, nobody's going to run. But we're going to get a new mayor and I have my values - and I've actually run ballot measure campaigns and had a very modest base of support. So I was really the first one in the race that got any attention. So I got some great media attention off that. Then my opponent in the general, Joe Mallahan - whatever else you may think about Joe Mallahan - he actually saw it too. He saw that there was an opening. And then we were joined by a long-time City Councilmember, Jan Drago. And I remember the headline from The Seattle Times or the comments at the time was - Okay, now it's a real race. But it just really wasn't. So I was really under the radar screen in that race because they were disregarding me. But there was in fact a lot of anger about the tunnel. There was a lot of just - Greg, for whatever his positives or negatives that history will deal with - and by the way, I actually think Greg did a lot of good. I just was disappointed in his highway policies and his climate policies at the end of the day - I have a lot of respect for Greg Nickels, but he wasn't going to win that race. And I came out of the primary against Joe Mallahan. And all of a sudden we had these two outsiders and the business community's freaking out. All of it - I remember watching it - all of the support, the business support shifted to Joe. It took about a month, it took a few weeks. But all of a sudden - there was actually one week where I think I raised more money than he did, that was pretty unusual - and then all of a sudden all the money was pouring in. And boy, did Joe believe in that tunnel. And did Joe believe in what the Chamber of Commerce wanted to do. In fact, he believed in it so much that he believed that Seattle should pay cost overruns if there were cost overruns on the tunnel - an admission I got from him during the televised debate, I was shocked he admitted to it. [00:34:41] Crystal Fincher: I remember that debate. [00:34:43] Mike McGinn: Yeah. So you were kind of asking about how politics worked. It was really something. Yeah - here's another memory. About two weeks before the election, the City Council took - three weeks before the, two, three weeks, four weeks - they took a vote to say that the tunnel was their choice. Even though there's a mayoral election in which the tunnel is on the ballot, so to speak - in terms of the issues of the candidates - they took a vote for no reason to say it was a done deal. And then WSDOT released a video of the elevated collapsing in a highway, which is the first time a public disclosure request from a third party was ever given straight to a TV station, I think, in my experience in Seattle. I had Gregoire and the DOT folks down there working on that campaign too - their tunnel was threatened. So it really was something how - I indeed was kind of shocked at - it was such a learning experience for me - how much the ranks closed around this. I didn't appreciate it. I had my own nonprofit, I had been on stakeholder committees, I'd worked with a lot of people that weren't just Sierra Club members and neighborhood types. I'd worked with a lot of business people, many of whom had supported my nonprofit because they liked its vision. But they were very clear with me that as long as I supported the surface transit option, there was no way they could be associated with my run for mayor in any way, shape, or form - even if they liked me. It was a complete lockdown - right after the primary where Greg lost the primary and it was me and Joe, I was - Okay, open field running. I can now reach out to these people. There's no incumbent - maybe some of them can support me now. And they were abundantly clear on all of those phone calls that - Nope, can't do it. Until you change your position on the tunnel, we just can't do it. We have business in this town, Mike. We have relationships in this town. We cannot do that. So it was a real lockdown - politically. [00:36:38] Crystal Fincher: That was also a big learning experience for me - watching that consolidation, watching how not only were they fighting for the tunnel against you and making the fight against you a fight about the tunnel, but the enforcement to those third parties that you were talking about that - Hey, if you play ball with him, you're cut off. And those kinds of threats and that kind of dealing - watching that happen was very formative for me. I'm like - Okay, I see how this works, and this is kind of insidious. And if you are branded as an outsider, if you don't play ball, if you don't kiss the ring of the adults in the room - which is definitely what they considered themselves - then you're on the outs and they're at war. And it was really a war footing against you and the campaign. Who was on the Council at that time? [00:37:30] Mike McGinn: Oh my God. Let me see if I can go through the list. No, and it really, it was - your point about it was a war footing was not something that I fully, that I did not appreciate until actually going through that experience - how unified that would be. Excuse me. The City Council chair was Tim Burgess at the time. Bruce Harrell was on the Council. Sally Clark, Richard Conlin, Nick Licata. Mike O'Brien was running on the same platform as me with regard to the tunnel and he'd just been elected. Jean Godden, Sally Bagshaw. I hope I'm not leaving anything out - because - [00:38:04] Robert Cruickshank: Tom Rasmussen will forgive you. [00:38:06] Mike McGinn: Tom Rasmussen. Yeah - because City Councilmembers would get really offended if you didn't thank them publicly - that was another thing I had to learn. You have to publicly thank any other politician on stage with you or they held a grudge. Yeah. So I had - I didn't know all the politicians' rules when I started. [00:38:25] Crystal Fincher: There are so many rules. [00:38:27] Mike McGinn: There are so many, there's so many rules. But really what you saw then was that the Council tended to move in lockstep on many issues - because if they all voted together and they all worked citywide, there was protection. None of them could be singled out. So it was very - and it's not to say that some of them didn't take principled votes and would find themselves on an 8-1 position sometimes, but for the most part, it was much, much safer to be - it was much, much safer to vote as a group. And they tended to do that. And they had coalesced around the tunnel, except for O'Brien. And that could not be shaken by anything we brought to bear. [00:39:04] Robert Cruickshank: And this is wrapped up in not just the electoral politics, but the power politics. Because Mike McGinn comes in - mayor leading the 7th floor of City Hall, the head of City government - and smart guy, nice guy, willing to talk to anybody. But is not from their crew, is not from that group. And as Crystal and Mike said, the ranks were closed from the start. This is - again, 2009, 2010 - when nationally Mitch McConnell is quoted as saying, It's his ambition to make Obama a one-term president. I don't know if he's ever caught on record, but I would be quite certain that Tim Burgess would have said the exact same thing - that his ambition was to make Mike McGinn a one-term mayor. As it turned out in 2013, Tim Burgess wanted his job - one of the candidates running for it. So these are all people who have a reason to close ranks against Mike McGinn and to use a tunnel as a bludgeon against him to do so. [00:39:58] Mike McGinn: There were other bludgeons. After I won the general election and before I took office, they passed their annual budget - they cut the mayor's office budget by a third before I even took office. Just boom - I know - they were determined, they were determined. And so that was when the planning - that council then and with WSDOT - that was when basically the contours of the waterfront were locked into place, including what we now see as that very wide surface road. That was that Council. So if you're wondering, if you're looking at that going - Okay, wow, who decided that and where did it come from? Again, our current mayor and his current advisor and others - they've always been for that. Building that big surface road has always been the plan to go along with the tunnel, because highway capacity was their highest priority. And the park on the waterfront, along with a lot of money into the aquarium and into these new structures - that's their signature thing for so many other people. But the idea that you should, that there was an opportunity to transform our transportation system and transform our city to make it more equitable and climate friendly was never a priority in this process. Just wasn't. [00:41:20] Crystal Fincher: It was never a priority. It was never seriously considered. And to me, through this process - lots of people know, have talked about it on the show before - I actually didn't start off Team McGinn. I wound up Team McGinn - didn't start off that way. But through that - and you won me over with logic - it was you being proven right on several things. You pointed out that their projections, their traffic projections were just so far out of left field that there was no way that they were going to come close. And they even had to come down on their projections before we even saw the traffic - the actual traffic turned out to be lower. You were right on that one - the laughable - [00:41:59] Mike McGinn: They're under 40,000 cars a day - for a highway that was carrying 110,000 cars a day beforehand. So even as a traffic solution - to put that into context, 40,000 cars a day is like the Ballard Bridge. And I can guarantee you the replacement costs of the Ballard Bridge is not $4 billion or $3.1 billion. The E Line, I think, carries 15,000 people a day. Metro carries 220,000 people a day. What you could do with that $3.1 billion or $4 billion in terms of bus lanes, bike lanes, rolling stock for Metro, maybe pay raises for bus drivers so that we could actually have service - you could do so much with those billions of dollars. And we put it all into moving 40,000 cars a day? It's just pathetic. That's three Rapid Ride lines we could have had for a 10th of the cost, or even less. I think the investments in Rapid Ride lines are about $50-100 million a line to make the capital investments to make it work. So the waste - even if you don't care about climate, the waste of dollars - and who's paying those taxes? To a great degree, we have the most regressive state and local tax system in the nation. And we'll have a ballot measure soon, and I know a lot of environmentalists will be out there if the package spends for the right thing saying - Hey, we need money for local streets. Imagine if we'd taken that gas tax money and the Legislature had allowed cities and towns to use it to improve their streets - which they can do. I know that the constitution says highway purposes, but when you read highway purposes, it says roads and bridges. It includes everything. You can use gas taxes for anything that improves the road. And they do. WSDOT has used gas taxes to pay for bike lanes and sidewalks. It's legal. That's a choice. So we're driving around potholed streets. We have - we're putting up little plastic dividers because we care more about the car getting hurt than the bicyclist on the other side of that plastic divider. We're watching our transit service melt away because we can't pay bus drivers enough. But hey, man, somebody's got a really rapid - 3,000 people a day get to skip Downtown in their private vehicles. Where are our priorities for equity? Where are the priorities for economy, or even just plain old-fashioned fiscal prudence? None of that was there - because all of those dollars were going to fund the needs of the most powerful people in the City. And they captured those dollars - and all of us will pay the taxes, all of us will breathe the smoky air, and all of us will watch our streets deteriorate and our transit service evaporate. [00:44:52] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. And to me, it was such a foundational lesson that the people that we have making decisions really matter - and that we have to really explore their records, their donors, their histories - because over and over again, we look at the decisions that wind up being made that frequently conflict with campaign promises, but that very, very rarely conflict with their donor rolls. [00:45:16] Mike McGinn: And yes - and every one of them knows how to make the value statements. So if I had any advice for people in this year's election - everyone is going to say they care about housing, everyone's going to say they think biking safe. I don't - one of the things that I came away with - I don't care about the goals you put into some policy anymore. Show me the hard physical action you will take that might piss somebody off, but you're willing to do it because it's right. And if you can't do that, then your value statements are meaningless. So take a look - who actually, and that's the question I always ask candidates for office - Tell me about a time you did something hard that might've caused you criticism, but you did it because it was right. Or that you made somebody who was an ally or friend upset, but you did it because it was right. Tell me about that time. [00:46:04] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, it's a challenge. And to your point and learning through just watching how people operated through that and some other processes - but that certainly was a big learning for me - is the role of coalitions, the role of accountability, and understanding. You have always had your finger on the pulse of Seattle, really - you're extraordinarily good at that. You're actually - both of you - are great strategists. But our political class is so detached from that sometimes - certainly I'm feeling frustration at some recent actions by our Legislature - we just had our special session day where they increased criminalization of substances, personal possession of substances - just reflecting on legislation to provide school, kids with free meals at school, things that seem like really basic and foundational that we should be able to land this. If we can call a special session to hand Boeing billions of dollars, we should be able to feed kids, right? [00:47:00] Mike McGinn: At the time we were cutting school budgets - when we found money for that. But I don't want to be too gloomy. And then I want to turn it over to Robert to get a last word in here, 'cause I just loved - his analysis is so awesome. I don't want to be too gloomy because - I look at what happened in the Legislature this year on housing, that we're finally going to allow housing, people to build more housing in places so people can actually live closer to their jobs and live more affordably. 10 years ago, we would have thought that was impossible. There's a lot of hard organizing that did it. At America Walks, we're the host of the Freeway Fighters Networks - there are people in 40 cities or more around the country that are organizing to remove highways. And while it's just a small amount of money compared to the amount going to highway expansion, there's actually federal funds to study and remove highways. So it's a long, hard slog. What felt for us - for Robert and me and Cary Moon and others fighting this - which felt like an impossible fight at the time is a fight that is now winning in places. Not winning enough - we're not winning fast enough - but it can change. And so that's - I don't want to be too negative. They got money, but organizing and people - and we actually have the public with us on this, just like we have the public with us on housing. So we just have to do more. We just got to keep at it, folks - got to keep at it. We can win this one. Don't allow this story of how hard it was to deal with the unified political class in the City of Seattle for their climate arson - should not deter you. It should inspire you, 'cause I actually won the mayor's office and we actually did do a lot of good. And the next fight is right in front of us again today, so get in it people. We need you. [00:48:46] Robert Cruickshank: I think that's spot on. And I remember coming to work in your office at the very beginning of 2011, when it seemed like the tunnel was just dominating discussion, but not in the mayor's office, right? When I joined, I fully expected to be like - roll my sleeves up to take on that tunnel. Instead, I'm working on the mayor's jobs plan, the Families and Education Levy, on transit. That's the stuff that was really getting done, and I think McGinn left a really great legacy on that. But we didn't win the tunnel fight. And I think we've diagnosed many of the reasons why, but one thing that really stands out to me as I look back from 12, 13 years distance is we didn't have the same density of genuinely progressive and social democratic organizations and people and leaders in Seattle that we have now. I think that matters because Mike's been talking about what's the next fight. I think one of the big fights coming up next year - when it comes time to renew that Move Seattle Levy - that's nearly a billion dollars that's going to be on the table. And we keep getting promised - when we are asked to approve these massive levies - that a lot of that money is going to go to safe streets, it's going to go to protect vulnerable users, we're going to do something to finally get towards Vision Zero. And instead it all gets taken away to build more car infrastructure. At what point do we finally stand - literally in the road - and say, No more. Do we look at the broken promises on the waterfront where we were promised a beautiful pedestrian-friendly waterfront and got another car sewer? We're going to have to organize and come together. We have many more groups now and many more leaders who are willing to stand up and say - We're not passing this levy unless it actually focuses on safe streets, unless it focuses on pedestrians and cyclists and transit users, and gives iron-clad promises to make sure stuff gets built so that some future mayor can't just walk in and start canceling projects left and right that we were promised. That's the lesson I take from this is - we're better organized now, we have more resources now, but it's still going to be a slog, and we're going to have to stand our ground - otherwise we get rolled. [00:50:34] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I thank you both for this conversation today - reflections on the tunnel fight, how it came to be, what it was like in the middle of it, and the lessons that we take moving forward in these elections that we have coming up this year, next year, and beyond. Thanks so much for the conversation. [00:50:50] Mike McGinn: Thank you, Crystal. [00:50:51] Robert Cruickshank: Thank you - it's been wonderful. [00:50:52] Crystal Fincher: Thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks, which is co-produced by Shannon Cheng and Bryce Cannatelli. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.

In this episode, environmental social scientist Holly Jean Buck discusses the critique of emissions-focused climate policy that she laid out in her book Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOver the course of the 2010s, the term “net-zero carbon emissions” migrated from climate science to climate modeling to climate politics. Today, it is ubiquitous in the climate world — hundreds upon hundreds of nations, cities, institutions, businesses, and individuals have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. No one ever formally decided to make net zero the common target of global climate efforts — it just happened.The term has become so common that we barely hear it anymore, which is a shame, because there are lots of buried assumptions and value judgments in the net-zero narrative that we are, perhaps unwittingly, accepting when we adopt it.Holly Jean Buck has a lot to say about that. An environmental social scientist who teaches at the University at Buffalo, Buck has spent years exploring the nuances and limitations of the net-zero framework, leading to a 2021 book — Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough — and more recently some new research in Nature Climate Change on residual emissions.Buck is a perceptive commentator on the social dynamics of climate change and a sharp critic of emissions-focused climate policy, so I'm eager to talk to her about the limitations of net zero, what we know and don't know about how to get there, and what a more satisfying climate narrative might include.So with no further ado, Holly Jean Buck. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Holly Jean BuckThanks so much for having me.David RobertsIt's funny. Reading your book really brought it home to me how much net zero had kind of gone from nowhere to worming its way completely into my sort of thinking and dialogue without the middle step of me ever really thinking about it that hard or ever really sort of like exploring it. So let's start with a definition. First of all, a technical definition of what net zero means. And then maybe a little history. Like, where did this come from? It came from nowhere and became ubiquitous, it seemed like, almost overnight. So maybe a little capsule history would be helpful.Holly Jean BuckWell, most simply, net zero is a balance between emissions produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere. So we're all living in a giant accounting problem, which is what we always dreamed of, right? So how did we get there? I think that there's been a few more recent moments. The Paris agreement obviously one of them, because the Paris agreement talks about a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks. So that's kind of part of the moment that it had. The other thing was the Special Report on 1.5 degrees by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which further showed that this target is only feasible with some negative emissions.And so I think that was another driver. But the idea of balancing sources and sinks goes back away towards the Kyoto Protocol, towards the inclusion of carbon sinks, and thinking about that sink capacity.David RobertsSo you say, and we're going to get into the kind of the details of your critique in a minute. But the broad thing you say about net zero is that it's not working. We're not on track for it. And I guess intuitively, people might think, well, you set an ambitious target and if you don't meet that target, it's not the target's fault, right. It's not the target's reason you're failing. So what do you mean exactly when you say net zero is not working?Holly Jean BuckWell, I think that people might understandably say, "Hey, we've just started on this journey. It's a mid-century target, let's give it some time, right?" But I do think there's some reasons why it's not going to work. Several reasons. I mean, we have this idea of balancing sources and sinks, but we're not really doing much to specify what those sources are. Are they truly hard to abate or not? We're not pushing the scale up of carbon removal to enhance those sinks, and we don't have a way of matching these emissions and removals yet. Credibly all we have really is the voluntary carbon market.But I think the main problem here is the frame doesn't specify whether or not we're going to phase out fossil fuels. I think that that's the biggest drawback to this frame.David RobertsWell, let's go through those. Let's go through those one at a time, because I think all of those have some interesting nuances and ins and outs. So when we talk about balancing sources and sinks, the way this translates, or I think is supposed to translate the idea, is a country tallies up all of the emissions that it is able to remove and then adds them all up. And then what remains? This kind of stuff, it either can't reduce or is prohibitively expensive to reduce the so called difficult to abate or hard to abate emissions. Those are called its residual emissions, the emissions that it doesn't think it can eliminate.And the theory here is then you come in with negative emissions, carbon reduction, and you compensate for those residual emissions. So to begin with, the first problem you identify is that it's not super clear what those residual emissions are or where they're coming from, and they're not very well measured. So maybe just explain sort of like, what would you like to see people or countries doing on residual emissions and what are they doing, what's a state of knowledge and measurement of these things?Holly Jean BuckSo the state right now is extremely fuzzy. And so I'll just back up and say that my colleagues and I looked at these long term strategies that are submitted to the UNFCCC under the Paris Agreement. Basically, each country is invited to submit what its long term strategy is for reaching its climate goals. And so we've read 50 of those.David RobertsGoodness.Holly Jean BuckYeah, lots of fun. And they don't have a standard definition of what these residual emissions are, although they refer to them implicitly in many cases. You can see the residual emissions on these graphs that are in these reports.But we don't have a really clear understanding in most cases where these residual emissions are coming from, how the country is thinking about defining them, what their understanding of what's truly hard to abate is. And I emphasize with this being a challenge, because what's hard to abate changes over time because new technologies come online. So it's hard to say what's going to be hard to abate in 10 or 20 years.David RobertsRight.Holly Jean BuckBut we could get a lot better at specifying this.David RobertsAnd this would just tell us basically without a good sense of residual emissions across the range of countries, we don't have a good sense of how much carbon removal we need. So is there something easy to say about how we could make this better? Is there a standardized framework that you would recommend? I mean, are any countries doing it well and precisely sort of identifying where those emissions are and explaining why and how they came to that conclusion?Holly Jean BuckSo there's 14 countries that do break down residual emissions by sector, which is like the first, most obvious place to start.David RobertsRight.Holly Jean BuckSo, number one, everybody should be doing that and understanding what assumptions there are about what sectors. And generally a lot of this is non-CO2 emissions and emissions from agriculture. There's some emissions left over from industry, too, but having clarity in that is the most obvious thing. And then I think that we do need a consistent definition as well as processes that are going to standardize our expectations around this. That's something that's going to evolve kind of, I think, from the climate advocacy community, hopefully, and a norm will evolve about what's actually hard to abate versus what's just expensive to abateDavid RobertsKind of a small sample size. But of the 14 countries that actually do this, are there trends that emerge? Like, what do these 14 countries currently believe will be the most difficult emissions to eliminate? Is there agreement among those 14 countries?Holly Jean BuckWell, it's pretty consistent that agriculture is number one, followed by industry, and that in many cases, transport, at least short transport, light duty transport is considered to be fully electrified. In many cases, the power sector is imagined to be zero carbon. But I will also say that the United Kingdom is the only one that even included international aviation and shipping in its projection. So a long way to go there.David RobertsAnd this is not really our subject here. But just out of curiosity, what is the simple explanation for why agriculture is such a mystery? What are these emissions in agriculture that no one can think of a way to abate?Holly Jean BuckI mean, I think it varies by country, but a lot of it is nitrous oxide. A lot of it has to do with fertilizer and fertilizer production, fertilizer over application and I think obviously some of it is methane too from the land sector, from cows. So I think maybe that is considered a more challenging policy problem than industry.David RobertsYeah, this is always something that's puzzled me about this entire framework and this entire debate is you look at a problem like that and you think, well, if we put our minds to it, could we solve that in the next 30 years? I mean, probably. You know what I mean? It doesn't seem versus standing up this giant carbon dioxide removal industry which is just a gargantuan undertaking. This has never been clear to me why people are so confident that carbon dioxide removal is going to be easier than just solving these allegedly difficult to solve problems over the next several decades.I've never really understood that calculation.Holly Jean BuckI think it just hasn't been thought through all the way yet. But I expect in the next five years most people will realize that we need a much smaller carbon removal infrastructure than is indicated in many of the integrated assessment models.David RobertsYeah, thank you for saying that. This is my intuition, but I just don't feel sort of like technically briefed or technically adept enough to make a good argument for it. But I look at this and I'm like which of these problems are going to be easier to solve? Finding some non-polluting fertilizer or building a carbon dioxide removal industry three times the size of the oil industry? It's crazy to view the latter as like, oh, we got to do that because we can't do the first thing. It just seems crazy. Okay, so for the first problem here with net zero is we don't have a clear sense of what these residual emissions are, where they come from, exactly how we define them, et cetera.So without that, we don't have a clear sense of the needed size of the carbon dioxide removal industry. That said, problem number two here is that even based on what we are currently expecting CDR to do, there doesn't appear to be a coordinated push to make it happen. Like we're just sort of like waving our hands at massive amounts of CDR but you're not seeing around you the kinds of mobilization that would be necessary to get there. Is that roughly accurate?Holly Jean BuckYeah, and I think it follows from the residual emissions analysis because unless a country has really looked at that, they probably don't realize the scale of CDR that they're implicitly relying on.David RobertsRight, so they're implicitly relying on CDR for a couple of things you list in your presentation I saw and residual emissions is only one of those things we're expecting CDR to do.Holly Jean BuckThere's the idea that CDR will also be compensating for legacy emissions or helping to draw down greenhouse gas concentrations after an overshoot. I don't think anybody is saying that exactly because we're not at that point yet, but it's kind of floating around on the horizon as another use case for carbon removal.David RobertsYeah. So it does seem like even the amount of CDR that we are currently expecting, even if most countries haven't thought it through, just the amount that's already on paper that we're expecting it to do, we're not seeing the kind of investment that you would want to get there. What does that tell you? What should we learn from that weird disjunct?Holly Jean BuckFor me, it tells me that all the climate professionals are not really doing their jobs. Maybe that sounds mean, but we have so many people that are devoted to climate action professionally and so it's very weird to not see more thinking about this. But maybe the more nice way to think about it is saying oh well, people are really focused on mitigation. They're really focused on scaling up clean energy which is where they should be focused. Maybe that's reasonable.David RobertsYeah, maybe this is cynical, but some part of me thinks, like if people and countries really believed that we need the amount of CDR they're saying we're going to need, that the models show we're going to need, by mid century they would be losing their minds and flipping out and pouring billions of dollars into this. And the fact that they're not to me sort of like I guess it feels like no one's really taking this seriously. Like everyone still somewhat sees it as an artifact of the models.Holly Jean BuckI don't know, I think the tech sector is acting on it, which is interesting. I mean, you've seen people like Frontier mobilize all these different tech companies together to do these advanced market commitments. I think they're trying to incubate a CDR ecosystem. And so why does interest come there versus other places? Not exactly sure. I have some theories but I do wonder about the governments because in our analysis we looked at the most ambitious projections offered in these long term strategies and the average amount of residual emissions was around 18% of current emissions. So all these countries have put forward these strategies where they're seeing these levels of residual emissions.Why are they not acting on it more in policy? I think maybe it's just the short termism problem of governments not being accountable for things that happen in 30 years.David RobertsYeah, this is a truly strange phenomenon to me and I don't even know that I do have any theories about it, but it's like of all the areas of climate policy there are tons and tons of areas where business could get involved and eventually build self-sustaining profitable industries out of them. But CDR is not that there will never be a self-sustaining profitable CDR industry. It's insofar as it exists, it's going to exist based on government subsidies. So it's just bizarre for business to be moving first in that space and for government to be trailing.It just seems upside down world. I can't totally figure out government's motivations for not doing more and I can't totally figure out businesses motivations for doing so much.Holly Jean BuckWell, I think businesses acting in this R&D space to try to kind of claim some of the tech breakthroughs in the assumption that if we're serious about climate action we're going to have a price on carbon. We're going to have much more stringent climate policy in a decade or two. And when that happens, the price of carbon will be essentially set by the price of removing carbon. And so if they have the innovation that magically removes the most carbon, they're going to be really well set up for an extremely lucrative industry. This is all of course hinging on the idea that we're going to be willing to pay to clean up emissions just like we're willing to pay for trash service or wastewater disposal or these other kind of pollution removal services.Which is still an open question, but I sure hope we will be.David RobertsYeah, it's totally open. And this is another area where this weird disjunct between this sort of expansive talk and no walk. It's almost politically impossible to send money to this greenhouse gas international fund that's supposed to help developing countries decarbonize, right? Like even that it's very difficult for us to drag enough tax money out of taxpayers hands to fund that and we're going to be sending like a gazillion times more than that on something that has no visible short term benefit for taxpayers. We're all just assuming we're going to do that someday. It seems like a crazy assumption.And if you're a business and you're looking to make money, it just seems like even if you're just looking to make money on clean energy, it seems like there's a million faster, easier ways than this sort of like multidecade bank shot effort. I feel like I don't have my head wrapped around all those dynamics. So the first problem is residual emissions. They're opaque to us, we don't totally get them. Second problem is there's no evident push remotely to scale of the kind of CDR we claim we're going to need. And then the third you mentioned is there's no regime for matching emissions and removals.Explain that a little bit. What sort of architecture would be required for that kind of regime?Holly Jean BuckWell, you can think of this as a market or as a platform, basically as a system for connecting emissions and removals. And obviously this has been like a dream of technocratic climate policy for a long time, but I think it's frustrated by our knowledge capabilities and maybe that'll change in the future if we really do get better models, better remote sensing capacities. Obviously, both of those have been improving dramatically and machine learning accelerates it. But it assumes that you really have good knowledge of the emissions, good knowledge of the removals, that it's credible. And I think for some of the carbon removal technologies we're looking at this what's called MRV: monitoring, reporting, and verification.Is really challenging, especially with open systems like enhanced rock weathering or some of the ocean carbon removal ideas. So we need some improvement there. And then once you've made this into a measurable commodity, you need to be able to exchange it. That's been really frustrated because of all the problems that you've probably talked about on this podcast with carbon markets, and scams, bad actors. It's all of these problems and the expense of having people in the middle that are taking a cut off of the transactions.David RobertsYeah. So you have to match your residual emissions with removals in a way that is verifiable, in a way that, you know, the removals are additional. Right. You get back to all these carbon market problems and as I talked with Danny Cullenword and David Victor about on the pod long ago, in carbon offset markets, basically everyone has incentive to keep prices low and to make things look easy and tidy. And virtually no one, except maybe the lonely regulators has the incentive to make sure that it's all legit right there's just like there's overwhelming incentive to goof around and cheat and almost no one with the incentive to make sure it's valid.And all those problems that face the carbon offset market just seem to me like ten times as difficult. When you're talking about global difficult to measure residual emissions coupled with global difficult to measure carbon dioxide removals in a way where there's no double counting and there's no shenanigans. Like, is that even a gleam in our eye yet? Do we even have proposals for something like that on the table?Holly Jean BuckI mean, there's been a lot of best principles and practices and obviously a lot of the conversation around Article Six and the Paris agreement and those negotiations are towards working out better markets. I think a lot of people are focused on this, but there's definitely reason to be skeptical of our ability to execute it in the timescales that we need.David RobertsYeah, I mean, if you're offsetting residual emissions that you can't reduce, you need that pretty quick. Like, this is supposed to be massively scaling up in the next 30 years and I don't see the institutional efforts that would be required to build something like this, especially making something like this bulletproof. So we don't have a good sense of residual emissions. We're not pushing very hard to scale CDR up even to what we think we need. And we don't have the sort of institutional architecture that would be required to formally match removals with residual emissions. These are all kind of, I guess, what you'd call technical problems.Like, even if you accepted the goal of doing this or this framework, these are just technical problems that we're not solving yet. The fourth problem, as you say, is the bigger one, perhaps the biggest one, which is net zero says nothing about fossil fuels. Basically. It says nothing about the socioeconomics of fossil fuels or the social dynamics of fossil fuels. It says nothing about the presence of fossil fuels in a net-zero world, how big that might be, et cetera. So what do you mean when you say it's silent on fossil fuels?Holly Jean BuckYeah, so this was a desirable design feature of net zero because it has this constructive ambiguity around whether there's just like a little bit of residual emissions and you've almost phased out fossil fuels, or if there's still a pretty significant role for the fossil fuel industry in a net-zero world. And that's what a lot of fossil fuel producers and companies are debating.David RobertsYes, I've been thinking about this recently in the context of the struggle to get Joe Manchin to sign decent legislation. Like, if you hear Joe Manchin when he goes on rambling on about climate change, it's very clear that he views carbon dioxide removal as basically technological license for fossil fuels to just keep on keeping on. Like, in his mind, that's what CDR means. Whereas if you hear like, someone from NRDC talking about it, it's much more like we eliminated almost everything. And here's like, the paper towel that we're going to use to wipe up these last little stains.And that's a wide gulf.Holly Jean BuckI don't want to seem like the biggest net-zero hater in the world. I understand why it came up as a goal. I think it was a lot more simple and intuitive than talking about 80% of emissions reduction over 2005 levels or like the kind of things that it replaced. But ultimately, this is a killer aspect to the whole idea, is not being clear about the phase out of fossil fuels.David RobertsAnd you say you can envision very different worlds fitting under net zero. What do you mean by that?Holly Jean BuckWell, I mean, one axis is the temporality of it. So is net zero, like, just one moment on the road to something else? Is it a temporary state or is it a permanent state where we're continuing to produce some fossil fuels and we're just living in that net zero without any dedicated phase out? I think that right now there's ambiguity where you could see either one.David RobertsThat is a good question. In your research on this, have you found an answer to that question of how people view it? Like, I'd love to see a poll or something. I mean, this is a tiny subset of people who even know what we're talking about here. But among the people who talk about net zero, do you have any sense of whether they view it as like a mile marker on the way to zero-zero or as sort of like the desired endstate?Holly Jean BuckYou know, it's funny because I haven't done a real poll, but I've done when I'm giving a talk at a conference of scientists and climate experts twice I've asked this question, do you think it's temporary or do you think it's like a permanent desired state? And it's split half and half each time, which I find really interesting. Like, within these climate expert communities, we don't have a clear idea ourselves.David RobertsAnd that's such a huge difference. And if you're going to have CDR do this accounting for past emissions, for your past emissions debt, if you're going to do that, you have to go negative, right. You can't stay at net zero, you have to go net negative. So it would be odd to view net zero as the end state. And yet that seems like, what's giving fossil fuel companies permission to be involved in all this.Holly Jean BuckYeah. No, we do need to go net negative. And I think one challenge with the residual emissions is that carbon removal capacity is going to be finite. It's going to be limited by geography, carbon sequestration capacity, ecosystems and renewable energy, all of these things. And so if you understand it as finite, then carbon removal to compensate for residual emissions is going to be in competition with carbon removal to draw down greenhouse gas concentrations. And so we never get to this really net negative state if we have these large residual emissions, because all that capacity is using to compensate rather than to get net negative, if that makes sense.David RobertsYeah. Given how sort of fundamental those questions are and how fundamental those differences are, it's a little this is what I mean when I sort of the revelation of reading your book. Like, those are very, very different visions. If you work backwards from those different visions, you get a very, very different dynamic around fossil fuels and fossil fuel companies and the social and political valence of fossil fuels, just very fundamentally different. It's weird that it's gone on this long with that ambiguity, which, I guess, as you say, it was fruitful to begin with, but you kind of think it's time to de-ambiguize this.Holly Jean BuckYeah. Because there's huge implications for the infrastructure planning that we do right now.David RobertsRight.Holly Jean BuckIt's going to be a massive transformation to phase out fossil fuels. There's a million different planning tasks that need to have started yesterday and should start today.David RobertsYeah. And I guess also, and this is a complaint, maybe we'll touch on more later, but there's long been, I think, from some quarters of the environmental movement, a criticism of climate people in their sort of emissions or carbon greenhouse gas emissions obsession. And when you contemplate fossil fuels, it's not just greenhouse gases. There's like all these proximate harms air pollution and water pollution, et cetera, et cetera, geopolitical stuff. And I think the idea behind net zero was, let's just isolate greenhouse gas emissions and not get into those fights. But I wonder, as you say, we have to make decisions now, which in some sense hinge on which we were going to go on that question.Holly Jean BuckYeah, I mean, it was a huge trick to get us to focus on what happens after the point of combustion rather than the extraction itself.David RobertsYeah, it says nothing about extraction, too. So your final critique of net zero fifth and final critique is that it is not particularly compelling to ordinary people, which I think is kind of obvious. Like, I really doubt that the average Joe or Jane off the street would even know what you mean by net zero or would particularly know what you mean by negative carbon emissions and if you could explain it to them, would be particularly moved by that story. So what do you mean by the meta narrative? Like, why do you think this falls short?Holly Jean BuckI mean, accounting is fundamentally kind of boring. I think a lot of us avoid it, right? And so if I try to talk to my students about this, it's really work to keep them engaged and to see that actually all this stuff around net zero impacts life and death for a lot of people. But we don't feel that when we just look at the math or we look at the curve and we talk about bending the curve and this and that, we have this governance by curve mode. It's just not working in terms of inspiring people to change anything about their lives.David RobertsYeah, bending the curve didn't seem to work great during the pandemic either. This gets back to something you said before about what used to be a desirable design feature when you are thinking about other things that you might want to bring into a meta narrative about climate change. Most of what people talk about and what people think about is sort of social and political stuff. Like, we need to talk about who's going to win and who's going to lose, and the substantial social changes and changes in our culture and practices that we need. We need to bring all these things in.But then the other counterargument is those are what produce resistance and those are what produce backlash. And so as far as you can get on an accounting framework, like if the accounting framework can sort of trick various and sundry participants and institutions into thinking they're in a value neutral technical discussion, if you can make progress that way, why not do it? Because any richer meta narrative is destined to be more controversial and more produce more political backlash. What do you think about that?Holly Jean BuckNo, I think that the problem is we haven't invested at all in figuring out how to create desire and demand for lower carbon things. I mean, maybe the car industry has tried a little bit with some of the electric trucks or that kind of thing, but we have all this philanthropy, government focus, all the stuff on both the tech and on the carbon accounting pieces of it. We don't have very much funding going out and talking to people. About why are you nervous about transitioning to gas in your home? What would make you feel more comfortable about that?Those sorts of relational things, the conversations, the engagement has been gendered, frankly. Lots of times it falls to women to do this kind of relational work and hasn't been invested in. So I think there's a whole piece we could be doing about understanding what would create demand for these new infrastructures, new practices, not just consumer goods but really adoption of lifestyle changes because you need that demand to translate to votes to the real supportive policies that will really make a difference in this problem.David RobertsYeah, I very much doubt if you go to talk to people about those things they're going to say, well, I want to get the appliance that's most closely going to zero out my positive conditions. You're not going to run into a lot of accounting if you ask people about their concerns about these things. So these are the problems. We're not measuring it well. We're not doing what we need to do to remove the amount of CDR we say we need. We don't have the architecture or the institutional structures to create some sort of system where we're matching residual emissions and removals.And as a narrative it's fatally ambiguous about the role of fossil fuels in the future and plus ordinary people don't seem to give much of a shit about it. So in this presentation you sort of raise the prospect that the whole thing could collapse, that the net-zero thing could collapse. What do you mean by that and how could that happen?Holly Jean BuckSo I think this looks more like quiet quitting than anything else because I do think it is too big to fail in terms of official policy. There's been a lot of political capital spent.David RobertsYeah, a lot of institutions now have that on paper, like are saying on paper that they want to hit net zero. So it seems to me like it would take a big backlash to get rid of it.Holly Jean BuckYeah. So I don't think some companies may back away from targets. There'll be more reports of targets not being on track. And I think what happens is that it becomes something like the Sustainable Development Goals or dealing with the US national debt where everybody kind of knows you're not really going to get there, but you can still talk about it aspirationally but without confidence. Because it did feel like at least a few years ago that people were really trying to get to net zero. And I think that sensation will shift and it'll become empty like a lot of other things, unfortunately.But I think that creates an opportunity for something new to come in and be the mainframe for climate policy.David RobertsNet zero just seems like a species of a larger thing that happens. I don't know if it happens in other domains, but in climate and clean energy it happens a lot, which is just sort of like a technical term from the expert dialogue, worms its way over into popular usage and is just awful and doesn't mean anything to anyone. I think about net metering and all these kind of terminological disputes. So it doesn't really I'm not sure who's in charge of metanarratives, but it doesn't seem like they're very thoughtfully constructed. So let's talk a little bit about what characteristics you think a better metanarrative about climate change would include.Holly Jean BuckFirst, I think it is important that we are measuring progress towards a goal for accountability reasons. But I think there needs to be more than just the metric. I think we have an obsession with metrics in our society that sometimes becomes unhealthy or distracts us from the real focus. But I do think there should be some amount of measuring specific progress towards a goal. I think that the broader story also has to have some affect or emotional language. There has to be some kind of emotional connection. I also think we have to get beyond carbon to talk about what's going on with ecosystems more broadly and how to maintain them and have an intact habitable planet and then just pragmatically.This has to be a narrative that enables broad political coalitions. It can't be just for one camp and it has to work on different scales. I mean, part of the genius of net zero is that it is this multi-scalar planetary, but also national, also municipal, corporate, even individual does all of that. So those are some of the most important qualities that a new frame or a new narrative would have to have.David RobertsThat sounds easier said than done. I can imagine measuring other things you mentioned in your book several sort of submeasurements other than just this one overarching metric. You could measure how fast fossil fuels are going away. You could measure how fast clean energy is scaling up. There are adaptation you can measure to some extent. So I definitely can see the benefit in having a wider array of goals, if only just because some of those just get buried under net zero and are never really visible at all. That makes sense to me. But the minute you start talking about a metanarrative with affect, with emotion, the way to get that is to appeal to people's values and things that they cherish and feel strongly about.But then we're back to the problem we talked about earlier, which is it seems like especially in the US these days, we're just living in a country with two separate tribes that have very, very different values. And so the minute you step beyond the sort of technocratic metric, which in a sense is like clean and clinical and value free and start evoking values, trying to create emotion, you get greater investment and passion in some faction and alienate some other faction. Do you just think that that's like unavoidable and you have to deal with that or how do you think about that dilemma?Holly Jean BuckI actually think people do have the same values, but they're manipulated by a media ecosystem that profits from dividing them, which makes it impossible for them to see that they do have aligned values. And I base that just on my experience, like as a rural sociologist and geographer talking to people in rural America. People are upset about the same exact things that the leftists in the cities I visit are upset about too. They really do value justice. They think it's unfair that big companies are taking advantage of them. There are some registers of agreement about fairness, about caring for nature, about having equal opportunities to a good and healthy life that I think we could build on if we weren't so divided by this predatory media ecology.David RobertsI don't suppose you have a solution for that, in your back pocket?Holly Jean BuckI have a chapter on this in a forthcoming book which you might be interested. It's edited by David Orr. It's about democracy in hotter times, looking at the democratic crisis and the climate crisis at the same time. And so I've thought a little bit about media reform, but it's definitely not my expertise. We should have somebody on your podcast to talk about that too.David RobertsWell, let me tell you, as someone who's been obsessed with that subject for years and has looked and looked and looked around, I don't know that there is such thing as an expert. I've yet to encounter anyone who has a solution to that problem that sounds remotely feasible to me, including the alleged experts. And it kind of does seem like every problem runs aground on that, right? Like it would be nice if people had a different story to tell about climate change that had these features you identify that brought people in with values and drew on a broader sense of balance with the earth and ecosystems.But even if they did, you have to have the mechanics of media to get that message out to tell that story. You know what I mean? And so you got one whole side of the media working against you and one at best begrudgingly working with you. It just doesn't seem possible. So I don't know why I'm talking to you about this problem. No one knows a solution to this problem. But it just seems like this is the -er problem that every other problem depends on.Holly Jean BuckYeah, I mean, we should talk about it because it's the central obstacle in climate action, from my point of view, is this broken media ecosystem and if we could unlock that or revise it, we could make a lot of progress on other stuff.David RobertsYes, on poverty, you name it. Almost anything that seems like the main problem you talk about. The narrative must be able to enable broad political coalitions, but you are working against ... I guess I'd like to hear a little bit about what role you think fossil fuels are playing in this? It seems to me pretty obvious that fossil fuels do not want any such broad political coalition about anything more specific than net zero in 2050, right. Which, as you point out, leaves room for vastly different worlds, specifically regarding fossil fuels. It seems like they don't want that and they're working against that and they have power.So who are the agents of this new narrative? Like, who should be telling it and who has the power to tell it?Holly Jean BuckSo I think sometimes in the climate movement we grant too much power to the fossil fuel industry. It's obviously powerful in this country and in many others, but we have a lot of other industries that are also relevant and powerful too. So you can picture agriculture and the tech industry and insurance and some of these other forms of capital standing up to the fossil fuel industry because they have a lot to lose as renewables continue to become cheaper. We should have energy companies that will also have capital and power. So I do think that we need to think about those other coalitions.Obviously, I don't think it needs to be all grounded in forms of capital. I think there's a lot of work to be done in just democratic political power from civil society too. What I'd love to see is philanthropy, spending more money on building up that social infrastructure alongside funding some of this tech stuff.David RobertsYeah, I've talked to a lot of funders about that and what I often hear is like, "Yeah, I'd love that too, but what exactly be specific, David, what do you want me to spend money on?" And I'm always like, "Well, you know, stuff, social infrastructure, media, something." I get very hand wavy very quick because I'm not clear on exactly what it would be. So final subject, which I found really interesting at the tail end, I think it's fair to say your sympathies are with phasing out fossil fuels as fast as possible. And there's this critique you hear from the left-left about climate change that just goes, this is just capitalism, this is what capitalism does.This is the inevitable result of capitalism. And if you want a real solution to climate change on a mass scale, you have to be talking about getting past capitalism or destroying capitalism or alternatives to capitalism, something like that. Maybe I'm reading between the lines, but I feel like you have some sympathy with that. But also then we're back to narratives that can build a broad political coalition, right? Narratives that can include everyone. So how do you think about the tension between kind of the radical rethinking of economics and social arrangements versus the proximate need to keep everybody on board?How is a metanarrative supposed to dance that line?Holly Jean BuckYeah, unfortunately, I think in this media ecosystem we can't lead with smashing capitalism or with socialism. It's just not going to work, unfortunately. So then what do you do? I think you have to work on things that would make an opening for that. Having more political power, more power grounded in local communities. It's not going to be easy.David RobertsEven if you let the anti-capitalist cat out of the bag at all, you have a bunch of enemies that would love to seize on that, to use it to divide. So I don't know, what does that mean? Openings, just reforms of capitalism at the local level? I mean, I'm asking you to solve these giant global problems. I don't know why, but how do you solve capitalism? What's your solution to capitalism? What does that mean, to leave an opening for post-capitalism without directly taking on capitalism? I guess I'd just like to hear a little bit more about that.Holly Jean BuckSo I think that there's a lot of things that seem unconnected to climate at first, like making sure we have the integrity of our elections, dealing with redistricting and gerrymandering and those sorts of things that are one part of it. Reforming the media system is another part of it. Just having that basic civil society infrastructure, I think, will enable different ideas to form and grow.David RobertsDo you have any predictions about the future of net zero? Sort of as a concept, as a guiding light, as a goal? Because you identify these kind of ambiguities and tensions within it that seem like it doesn't seem like it can go on forever without resolving some of those. But as you also say, it's become so ubiquitous and now plays such a central role in the dialogue and in the Paris plans and et cetera, et cetera. It's also difficult to see it going away. So it's like can't go on forever, but it can't go away. So do you have any predictions how it evolves over the coming decade?Holly Jean BuckWell, it could just become one of these zombie concepts and so that really is an opportunity for people to get together and think about what other thing they would like to see. Is it going to be measuring phase out of fossil fuels and having a dashboard where we can track the interconnection queue and hold people accountable for improving that? Are we going to be measuring adaptation and focusing on that? Are we going to be thinking more about the resources that are going to countries to plan and direct a transition and trying to stand up agencies that are really focused on energy transition or land use transition?I mean, we could start making those demands now and we could also be evolving these broader languages to talk about and understand the motion. So we have some concepts that have been floated and already sort of lost some amount of credibility, like sustainability, arguably just transition. We have Green New Deal. Will that be the frame? Is that already lost? What new stuff could we come up with? Is it regeneration or universal basic energy. I think there's a lot of languages to explore and so I would be thrilled to see the Climate Movement work with other movements in society, with antiracist movements, with labor movements and more to explore the languages and the specific things we could measure and then take advantage of the slipperiness of net zero to get in there and talk about something else we might want to see.David RobertsOkay, that sounds like a great note to wrap up on. Thank you for coming. Thank you for the super fascinating book and for all your work, Holly Jean Buck. Thanks so much.Holly Jean BuckThank you.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Gerald Kutney (@geraldkutney) is a professor, journalist/speaker, author and founder/consultant of 6esm, a C-level consulting firm focused on the bio-economy, renewable energy and the politics of the Kyoto Protocol and others like it. Gerald's a frequent contributor to the HuffingtonPost, Canada's National Observer and is the author of the peer-reviewed: Carbon Politics and the Failure of the Kyoto Protocol – in search for an answer to the failure of the international community to act on climate change. Dale Johnson: Former alarmist (cooling world 1970s) Ozone (1980s) global warming (2000s) I read the first batch of leaked emails 2009 just out of curiousity, reading the first 100 changed my alarmism into skepticism. I did read them all but just absorbed the information and started to post a few things on Twitter about it but kept getting banned. I used one ban from Twitter to take 4-5 months to read everything in ClimateGate 2.0 including Harry Read Me file, then started a new account and had a good friend that I met in the Philippine (graphics art background) team up with me and we become Dawn. She's being stalked for our views so she can't post personal pics. My background - high school (accounting) college (accounting) but dropped out; numbers were boring. I worked for Northern Telecom for a decade (world's top 3 telecom manufacturer - PBX, cell site equipment etc, several years quality control and ISO900 auditor for one line of cell site equipment. Other job opportunities since then included long haul truck driver (Canada - USA) Public works foreman (small municipal government in Alberta) water and waste water certified, current occupation professional driver for a local tourist related company. Gerald Kutney: https://twitter.com/GeraldKutney Dale Johnson: https://twitter.com/DawnTJ90 Climate Brawl I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k6vqV96L9M&t=0s Climate Brawl II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmev8btSm68&t=0s —— https://linktr.ee/tomanelson1 Tom Nelson's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tan123 Substack: https://tomn.substack.com/ About Tom: https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2022/03/about-me-tom-nelson.html Notes for climate skeptics: https://tomn.substack.com/p/notes-for-climate-skeptics ClimateGate emails: https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/p/climategate_05.html

On the prospect of slowing climate change with our smallest actions, to shift the temperature of our planet in real time. A conversation around ‘The Carbon Almanac' exploring the power of shopping our values, the impact of economic demand on climate change, and hope for the future through accountability in rectifying the global temperature. 0:41 – Introducing Diane Osgood; The Carbon Almanac; https://dianeosgood.com/ 3:00 – Diane's passion for people shopping their values; understanding economic behaviors based on demand. 6:10 – Getting involved with The Carbon Almanac 9:00 – As an individual, how can I engage in with a systemic issue that is a result of how our economy is built, how our energy systems are built, politics, etc?; ‘The Tyranny of Convenience' 14:05 – What is climate change?; The Greenhouse Effect 18:00 – The impact of 1 degree Celsius; understanding the changes we are currently facing. 20:40 – Whose job is it? The roles of government, business and individuals in creating change. The Glasgow Breakthrough Agenda – > Power, Road Transport, Steel, Hydrogen, Agriculture. 25:51 – UNFCC – > United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; Kyoto Protocol; The Paris Agreement 29:00 – The Indigenous Youth of Panama; All We Can Save by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katharine K. Wilkinson 33:25 – Youth led climate litigation 37:00 – Influential artists and climate change Diane Osgood; Ph.D. is a pioneer in corporate sustainability. For over 30 years she has helped companies to innovate, manufacture and sell sustainable products that are better for the planet, and for the people. She believes that everyone has a shopping superpower, to purposely use your wallet to build a better world. Diane is passionate about sharing tips and strategies that anyone can use in day to day life to help address climate change. She is a contributing author and chapter editor of bestseller, ‘The Carbon Almanac.'

On Season 4, Episode 6 of EvC, Sara, David and Ed tackle the thorny and always controversial topic of carbon offsets, live at Avatar Innovations at The Energy Transition Centre in downtown Calgary.An offset in principle is paying someone else - a company, or a country - to reduce emissions that you yourself cannot, or simply will not reduce. What is the role of offsets in helping the world to avoid dangerous climate change? What's 'additionality' when it comes to offsets, and is it fundamental or merely an after thought? How are offset markets regulated to ensure integrity? And should you bother to click that "yes" button to offset your flight emissions?EPISODE NOTES@1:10 EvC Live held at the Energy Transition Center, at the Ampersand @2:02 Infidelity Offsets video from Climate Ad Project@4:15 Business Renewable Centre of Canada @4:48 Guide to Purchasing Carbon Offsets with Pembina Institute  @5:48 CDM mechanism to reduce emissions by developed countries - Kyoto Protocol @10:05 Additionality, permanence, leakage 101 @23:09 Example of voluntary offsets @24:30 Two flavours of offsets: Alberta Emissions Offset Registry and the Emissions Performance Credit Registry @32:41 Discussion on the quality of voluntary offsets @37:43 Gaming the system with low quality voluntary offsets  @53:50 Low-cost American airline, JetBlue, moving away from carbon offsets energyvsclimate.com@EnergyvsClimate

Jos Cozijnsen has been working the climate puzzle for decades -- first by helping to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol and then by helping NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund craft legal policies with teeth. Today, he offers his take on the year-end climate talks (COP27), which took place last month in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. We discuss the Bridgetown Initiative, the African Carbon Markets Initiative, and the new Loss and Damage Fund -- as well as the bad-faith arguments of those seeking to undermine carbon markets by pretending to make them perfect.

Today's guest is Emily McAteer, co-founder and CEO of Odyssey Energy Solutions, helping emerging market project developers to finance, build and operate distributed renewable energy at scale. How the Global South modernizes is the original climate justice debate that has been a key topic of global policy discussions for decades, going back to the Kyoto Protocol of the 1990s and even earlier. The crux of the conversation is that climate change has primarily been caused by the 20th century economic development of the United States, Western Europe, Japan, et cetera. And if the rest of the world were to follow the same fossil fuel enabled development path, we'd rapidly blow past emissions targets and into the worst possible climate change outcomes. So what's the rest of the world to do?The answer seems to be to leapfrog, to modernize via a network of distributed renewable energy technology as opposed to a monolithic fossil fuel-powered grid. And yet that also introduces a whole new host of questions. Emily's been working at the nexus of climate and emerging markets for just about her whole career and brings a wealth of experience into Odyssey while working on answering these questions. In this episode, Cody and Emily have a great conversation about energy access in emerging markets today, what new distributed grids will look like, how development finance institutions (DFIs) work and the role of nation states in securing financing for energy projects. We also cover how Odyssey is bringing financing, procurement, and operational solutions to market to solve the local problems inherent in this space. Emily and Odyssey just announced a seed round led by Equal Ventures that we at MCJ Collective were honored to participate in. So we're welcoming Emily today as an MCJ Collective portfolio CEO, as well as an MCJ podcast guest. Enjoy the show! In this episode, we cover: [3:16] Emily's dedicated career in climate [10:18] Grid challenges in emerging markets [14:51] Financing gaps for small projects [17:33] The Nigeria Electrification Project case study [21:38] Profile of project developers in emerging markets [23:56] An overview of Odyssey's solution [28:38] The company's FERN platform [31:44] How Odyssey is scaling and handling projects in multiple countries [35:09] The capital they've raised thus far and what they're using it forGet connected: Cody's TwitterOdyssey TwitterMCJ Podcast / Collective*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.Episode recorded on  September 21, 2022.

In the past two years, we've seen a remarkable renaissance of the carbon markets. Some markets are of a “compliance” type - like in Europe - heavily regulated but limited in geography and scope; but there is limited prospect for an overall Cap & Trade worldwide as carbon markets were ignored in the US IRA - the largest Climate bill ever. So, what happens when a sector or a company is not covered by those compliance markets but still have pledged a net-zero or carbon-neutrality (whatever that means)? Well, that's where the “voluntary market” steps in.Re-born on the ashes of the Kyoto Protocol, projects such as forestry, carbon avoidance and removal are developed and get rewarded for their environmental benefits. That's not THE solution to climate change, but that could be one of several.The current voluntary market has quadrupled its size in the last 3 years to 2bnUSD and is expected to reach 50bnUSD by the end of the decade. Still small, compared to a 10bnUSD/day on the oil market… but we need all the help available on our road to a +1.5C world. Unfortunately, we have immediately witnessed a lot of gaming and greenwashing around the issue of carbon credits. Only horror stories make it to the media, not the great projects (and there are a lot); the former must be banned, the latter promoted and rewarded. Around Mark Carney, former governor of the central banks of Canada and England, a group of scientists, NGOs, Industries have coalesced into the Integrity Council for Voluntary Carbon Market to create a quality benchmark, and make sure that the carbon credits proposed to corporations on their way to net-zero are sound. We bring Annette Nazareth, chair of the Integrity Council to discuss about the goal, talk about horror stories and how the ICVCM, in full openness, is establishing rules for a robust market.(we're sorry if sometimes the sound quality is not perfect)-------------------References:https://icvcm.org/public-consultation/https://vcmintegrity.org/https://trove-research.com/Alessandro VitelliMark Lewishttps://www.ieta.org/https://verra.org/---------------------We thank Aquila Capital for their continuous support

Bill Hare is a physicist and climate scientist with 30 years of experience in science, impacts and policy responses to climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion. He is a founder and CEO of Climate Analytics, which was established to synthesize and advance scientific knowledge on climate change and provide state-of-the-art solutions to global and national climate change policy challenges.He was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, for which the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Hare has contributed actively to the development of the international climate regime since 1989, including the negotiation of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement in 2015. Hare is a graduate of Murdoch University in Western Australia and a visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.· https://climateanalytics.org· https://climateactiontracker.org· www.oneplanetpodcast.org· www.creativeprocess.info

“Net-zero is a big idea. It's a big theme. And, unfortunately, what's going up are many ways to look like you're doing net-zero when you're not. So in the ideal world, getting to net-zero means essentially reducing your emissions, and then, where you have residual emissions left, that means you might need to have negative emissions. For example, it's relatively easy to decarbonize the power sector completely, and you can do it quickly and cheaply in most places, but you're always going to be left with some levels of emissions from agriculture.”Bill Hare is a physicist and climate scientist with 30 years of experience in science, impacts and policy responses to climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion. He is a founder and CEO of Climate Analytics, which was established to synthesize and advance scientific knowledge on climate change and provide state-of-the-art solutions to global and national climate change policy challenges.He was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, for which the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Hare has contributed actively to the development of the international climate regime since 1989, including the negotiation of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement in 2015. Hare is a graduate of Murdoch University in Western Australia and a visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.· https://climateanalytics.org· https://climateactiontracker.org· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

Bill Hare is a physicist and climate scientist with 30 years of experience in science, impacts and policy responses to climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion. He is a founder and CEO of Climate Analytics, which was established to synthesize and advance scientific knowledge on climate change and provide state-of-the-art solutions to global and national climate change policy challenges.He was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, for which the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Hare has contributed actively to the development of the international climate regime since 1989, including the negotiation of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement in 2015. Hare is a graduate of Murdoch University in Western Australia and a visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.· https://climateanalytics.org· https://climateactiontracker.org· www.oneplanetpodcast.org· www.creativeprocess.info

“Net-zero is a big idea. It's a big theme. And, unfortunately, what's going up are many ways to look like you're doing net-zero when you're not. So in the ideal world, getting to net-zero means essentially reducing your emissions, and then, where you have residual emissions left, that means you might need to have negative emissions. For example, it's relatively easy to decarbonize the power sector completely, and you can do it quickly and cheaply in most places, but you're always going to be left with some levels of emissions from agriculture.”Bill Hare is a physicist and climate scientist with 30 years of experience in science, impacts and policy responses to climate change and stratospheric ozone depletion. He is a founder and CEO of Climate Analytics, which was established to synthesize and advance scientific knowledge on climate change and provide state-of-the-art solutions to global and national climate change policy challenges.He was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, for which the IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Hare has contributed actively to the development of the international climate regime since 1989, including the negotiation of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement in 2015. Hare is a graduate of Murdoch University in Western Australia and a visiting scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.· https://climateanalytics.org· https://climateactiontracker.org· www.oneplanetpodcast.org

The U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland concluded last weekend—the 26th “Conference of Parties.” After more than two decades of these promises, it's worth wondering how much of this is all just hot air. According to the non-profit Climate Action Tracker, not a single country is on target to meet the COP21 pledge, also known as the Paris Climate Accords, and many aren't even on target for their COP3 pledge, the Kyoto Protocol.   And yet, these summits are often still covered with breathless play-by-play analysis: all the juicy details about diplomatic attaches, late-night negotiation, and backroom deals. Which is not without value, but it's worth asking: what are the stories being missed when all eyes are on the summit? To answer that, we called Nathaniel Rich, writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine, who takes a markedly different approach. On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.