The Rise of Conspiratorial Environmentalism with Dr. Holly Jean Buck

David & Ed chat with Dr. Holly Buck about Conspiratorial-Environmentalism’s connection to climate & geoengineering; the anti-vax movement; and what it tells us about mainstream environmentalism & climate politics.

(03:08) Skip Intro
(09:12) David's personal experience with Conspiratorial-Environmentalism
(27:15) Social Media and monetization
(38:58) What do we do when environmentalists turn to conspiracies?
(46:33) Audience Questions

Detailed show notes available on episode page

About Our Guest:
Holly Jean Buck is an Associate Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo. She is an environmental social scientist and human geographer whose research focuses on public engagement with emerging climate and energy technologies. She holds a Ph.D in Development Sociology from Cornell University, and is the author of the books Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough and After Geoengineering. Currently, she is a 2024-25 Radcliffe-Salata Climate Justice Fellow at Harvard University.

About Your EvC Co-Hosts:
David Keith is Professor and Founding Faculty Director, Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at the University of Chicago. He is the founder of Carbon Engineering and was formerly a professor at Harvard University and the University of Calgary. He splits his time between Canmore and Chicago.

Sara Hastings-Simon studies energy transitions at the intersection of policy, business, and technology. She’s a policy wonk, a physicist turned management consultant, and a professor at the University of Calgary and Director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Development.

Ed Whittingham is a clean energy policy/finance professional specializing in renewable electricity generation and transmission, carbon capture, carbon removal and low carbon transportation. He is a Public Policy Forum fellow and formerly the executive director of the Pembina Institute, a national clean energy think tank.

Produced by Amit Tandon & Bespoke Podcasts

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ed Whittingham: Hi, I am Ed Whittingham and you're listening to Energy Versus Climate, the show where my co-host, David Keith, Sara Hastings-Simon and I debate today's climate and energy challenges. On April 1st, the day before the US imposed new tariffs on goods and energy from Canada, gee, I'm getting a certain deja vu whenever I say that.

David and I recorded a live webinar with Dr. Holly Jean Buck of the university at Buffalo. The topic was the rise of conspiratorial environmentalism, or how once core environmental ideas are being reshaped by a new coalition that draws from fringes. On both the left and the right, we discussed conspiratorial environmentalism, connection to climate, geoengineering, this connection to the anti-VAX movement.

And what the rise of it tells us about mainstream environmentalism and climate politics. It's a topical topic and generated lots of great questions from our live audience, so I think you'll enjoy it. Well, I know that you will because I'm going to activate the chip in your brain to make sure you enjoy it.

Now, here's a show. There once was a time that if someone. Talked about a garden variety conspiracy theory at a party, like say the moon landing hoax or nine 11 was an inside job. That others would try to steer clear of that person, but it seems like that's becoming harder. And that same conspiracy theorist these days could very well be in the US Congress or maybe even the American Health Secretary.

The internet, especially social media, is awash with conspiracy theories of all kind, and the Trump administration is awash with conspiracy theorists, unfortunately. Environment, climate and energy topics, the ones that we cover on this show aren't immune to the explosion of conspiracy theories, whether to do with weather manipulation or RAs.

And we now unfortunately, have this strange parallel between mainstream environmentalism that blurs the lines between legitimate concerns. And then completely unfounded bs. And while I know in my personal life it's tempting or I have dismissed conspiracies as crackpot ideas with no real impact, our guest today argues that we need to address them head on.

Dr. Holly Jean Buck calls this movement conspiratorial environmentalism or para environmentalism. We'll get into those terms momentarily. And she wrote about it in a recent article. With a Click Beatty title that we'll also get into. Holly is an associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo.

She holds a PhD in development sociology from Cornell at university, and has authored a number of books including ending Fossil fuels, why Net zero is Not Enough, and after geoengineering. Holly. Currently Holly is a 20 24, 20 25 Radcliffe Salad, climate Justice fellow at Harvard University. Welcome Holly.

[00:03:00] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Thanks so much. It's great to be here. 

[00:03:03] Ed Whittingham: Before we learn a bit more from Holly about her ideas in that article. David any quick thoughts from you? 

[00:03:12] David Keith: No, I'm I, I've always found that Holly has some of the most interesting things to say, and so the less I say and the more Holly says, the better 

[00:03:20] Ed Whittingham: you heard it here folks. More Holly, less David. We'll see if that holds up later on into the show, and we'll see if we can get less Ed too. Okay. Let's start, Holly, with your definition of conspiratorial environmentalism. You also use the term para environmentalism or MAHA environmentalism, which not everyone on this side of the border might be familiar with that acronym.

So can you explain it and then maybe explain how it differs from traditional environmental skepticism, if that is not completely meaningless? 

[00:03:55] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: So. I began talking about para environmentalism because I was searching for a word that describes an environmentalism that goes off the rails in a strange direction and is parallel to environmentalism, but not sanctioned by mainstream or official institutions.

Kind of like paranormal other things with that prefix. They're just a bit. Off a bit different, not within the, the mainstream flow. Why introduce a new term? Academics love to do this. I believe the bar should be very high, but I had a few reasons. One is I wanted people to see that there's really an environmentalist.

Core here, a seed of something recognizable. Because if we can see that we can have more empathy, we can find common ground and a way forward perhaps. I also think it brings up this question of whether mainstream environmentalism is failing people somehow, that they go off in this direction. And I wanted to say that, you know, we shouldn't just dismiss this as fringe, but as a political force and a social movement.

[00:05:00] Ed Whittingham: Mainstream environmentalism isn't failing that I think we're gonna dig into in a little bit. That's gonna be a, a fun conversation. Now, your article appeared in if I recall, memory serves Compact Magazine and it was called The Rise of Green maga. That was not your choice of the title. Um, and explain why.

[00:05:22] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: So I think people see these conspiracies. They might see them little sound bites or clips and they think, oh, that's a maga, that's a far right. Environmental thing, and it's, it's. Not actually far. Right. And I think there could have been an alternative timeline when it became more left. And I think it's actually horseshoe meaning that it's kind of where left and right meet.

And the reason I say this is because of field work I was doing where I went to meetings and I was interviewing people who held these beliefs. Back in, you know, going back quite some years, but really doing a lot of this research around 2023 and the people I was speaking with, they, they were fed up with Trump too.

They were fed up with all political parties. They felt failed by kind of both sides. And so I, I don't want us to think of this as just a right wing thing, even though it's wearing a Maha hat now or a Make America healthy again hat. 

[00:06:22] Ed Whittingham: So what I'm hearing you saying is there is a, like a green. Let's call it a green maha, but neither people from the right, no, not exclusively from the right or left, that they can self-describe themselves as completely bipartisan.

Is that right? I. 

[00:06:36] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think a lot of them, they might be with Trump now because RFK joined that train, although even that wasn't totally foretold. Um, and so they've kind of jumped aboard that as the vehicle for what they see as their best chance to get these policies furthered. But what I'm saying is that there's an alternative.

Timeline where they could have just as well jumped on a, a left bandwagon. They, they really are fed up with politics as usual in both the parties. 

[00:07:08] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. You, you said join that train. Uh, you, you didn't say specifically join that crazy train I. I just did, but we can put a pin on that for now. When what, so what, what generated the academic interest for you?

Like when did you think that this is sort of a distinct movement that could, you know, warrant a label and actual academic research? 

[00:07:28] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I started paying attention to it. As a sociologist from the very beginning of when I started working on this around 2010, and if you went to conferences on geoengineering during the 2010s, you might see a few protestors outside.

And you know, for me that was interesting. I think it was 2017 when I ended up interviewing Dane Wigington is who is one of kind of the leaders of this anti geoengineering movement. And I thought it was interesting, the things he was saying, so I followed it and didn't see it actually becoming the political force that I would now argue it is, um, until really around 20, 22, 23.

I think a lot changed after Covid 

[00:08:16] Ed Whittingham: for sure. And I think all of us have experiences during COVID of being surprised by people around us who had conspiratorial ideas. That we were unaware of. But what I'd like to do now is, and 'cause David, you've got a lot of experience in this, let's sort of make it a a bit more tangible by talking about conspiratorial environmentalism connection, not just to climate, but to geoengineering specifically, and.

That you can't talk about it without talking about the chemtrails movement. So maybe David, over to you, you have worked on geoengineering for decades. Maybe give us a short, you know, annotated history of the chemtrails movement and how you first came into contact with it. 

[00:09:03] David Keith: So I wasn't prepared to really think this through, but I would say around.

2000, or certainly really early in the two thousands, maybe in the late nineties there began to be people who. Came using, I think using the word chemtrails and it was connected with beliefs about the harp project, high altitude or rural something or other. It was a geophysics project that was, uh, trying to excite the ionosphere with microwaves.

So they were often connected with that and. I remember I had a conversation with a bunch of them that I invited them in to talk to me when I was at UCal around, I'm gonna say something like 2 0 0 5 or oh six, and I certainly had a bunch of contact with people before that. That conversation has to be very respectful and it's somewhere out there on YouTube, and at that point I would say people.

Were concerned about a range of things, but they basically all this was a belief that somehow airplanes were deliberately spraying something with the goal being mind control or exterminating people or weather control, but kind of all mixed up and, and tied to these other beliefs about kind of, that I think all had something to do with humans deliberately interfering in the, in the.

In the geo geological, geophysical world. 'cause I think that's a link back to the heart project, I'd say. And then I'd say over the years, and Ali would've looked at this more carefully than me, I. That movement has grown more and more to sort of directly attack the kind of thing that I think Silver Geosharing is.

So in some sense, I think in some sense it is now an anti geosharing movement, except of course there's an anti geosharing movement that presupposes the geosharing is happening when it's not. And so this is the way in which I think calling it parallel environmentalism is really sensible. I think a centerpiece of it is people really believe that.

That airplanes are spraying some secret thing and, and they believe it passionately. And I've, you know, talked with quite a lot of the people over the years. I've got some pretty like write up to kind of death threats. We had to call the police about a couple times. Every time I've actually talked with people in person, it's been reasonably respectful.

Even right now I know it's getting ready for this. I have a bunch of things on my desk that are, seeming affidavits for me to appear in some court. It's all kind of gobbledygook 'cause it's not actually legal. We check with the university lawyers for doing something related to chemtrail. So these things are, are, you know, people are energized to, to do stuff about this.

Um, and I think an obvious question that some viewers presumably have is, why am I so confident it's not happening? Let me say a couple words about this 'cause we have, we gotta kind of figure out how we're gonna separate out truth from falsehood here. I don't particularly trust the governments will always do what they say or not lie.

I think governments lie plenty. But I think my read of history is it's actually extremely hard to keep large scale secrets. I mean, uh, the fact is the Soviet Union knew the key design features of the nuclear weapon before the Trinity test at Los Amos. And. From people I know who've worked in kind of high security operations.

You can keep operational details of of operations in place unless you have Jeffrey Goldberg on your chat. But it's actually really hard to keep things secret for a long time, and I would say that. That, you know, obvi, the, the idea that there could be a decades long thing that to, to load all this material on aircraft would have to have a supply chain involving thousands or tens of thousands of people.

And to have that be be secret without any physical evidence for that long would be completely outside. You know, the history of anything that's been kept secret that's right there with keeping the moon landing secret. It's just anybody who has what I would consider a kind of a grounded sense of the way.

Humans in politics work would know that there's can't be secrets like that. Not because people are good, but because there's just no way somebody wouldn't talk. 

[00:13:06] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. And in that YouTube video. So, um, looking through the screen here to one of our wonderful volunteers, Harris, who's preparing the show notes, it would be good to pull that up.

'cause I've watched it and it is a fascinating study in, what did you just say, David? Sort of a grounded, realistic sense of how. I think politics worked. You said something to that effect, but it, it's hard. You counter with how could you keep this secret in the way that you just described and the, the, the counterpoint is, well, it's the Rockefellers and the deep state and everyone's in on it because they're all on the payroll or they're cowed into submission and you can't kind of counter.

With facts because you're countered with irrationality and illogic. 

[00:13:53] David Keith: I think people will, I have had experiences of people changing their minds of, and listening. I think, I think that business of, of how would you prove it has worked? I, I used a similar technique with Calgary oil patch. People who believe that climate scientists were faking the climate models to make them, you know, show that CO2 was a problem and.

One of my, I think, kind of effective answers in some cases would say, doesn't cost that money to build a client model. You know, you cow grow. Ill people take your million bucks, hire some climate scientists and build a client model that's not necess to CO2 and you'll win. 

[00:14:24] Ed Whittingham: So Holly, you, in your article, you, you tell this wonderful story about being at a town hall.

And it was advertised if, if I've got it right. Uh oh. No, you received a flyer and it was about solar geoengineering non-US agreement, which is Dave and I just were talking about that with a group of people last week. Uh, in Ottawa. It's a legitimate proposition put forth by a group of academics. You'd mentioned you're a peer reviewer on one of their journals, academic journal articles.

But then at the same thing, there is, uh, an advertisement for Save our Skies with a group that's trying to raise legal money to fight against geoengineering or presumably the David Keys of the world that make the point that aerosol spraying, uh, stratospheric aerosol injection, that that's actually underway now without the knowledge or consent.

Of citizens of the world, and it's hard when they're conflated at the same meeting and it's hard when you're going in and you're new to it to pick apart the legitimacy or doing your own fact-based analysis between the two. Do you what? Could you comment on that a little bit more? 

[00:15:34] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I mean, these were literally on either side of a piece of paper, one side.

An argument that would be very familiar to the academics that are critical in this space. And on the other side, conspiracy. And as we go forward in time, more and more details get enrolled into the whole thing. So the speaker who was concerned and who believed geoengineering was already happening, pointed to things like the congressionally mandated White House report and.

The application by Make Sunsets to Noah, which is just a page written, you know, tongue in cheek, basically how they filled it out. But those, those read as official documents to people who haven't worked in government. Right. So, and they are like the, the White House report and together it forms a story with a lot of.

Believable details, and I think it is very hard for people to discern what's true and false. You know, the local newspaper recorded, um, reported on this meeting and the journalist didn't ever say that geoengineering wasn't happening in the article. They just reported what had been said at this meeting.

And so now you have 200 people at the meeting. But then that circulation of 12,000 people that that's going to, and I do think, the way our media ecosystems underfunded, this could definitely perpetuate. 

[00:16:58] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. Now David and I have a media story that actually I think is quite positive and encouraging.

And this again has to do with David's personal experience with chemtrails Conspiracy theorist, and. We live in Canmore, and there was a time, and I wanna say David, it was early 2010s, maybe early 2010s, and for a multi-month period, at least half a year, because the lease was half a year that you would drive from Calgary to Banff and on the north side of the highway as you're traveling.

West, there is a billboard saying, look up Banff. And it had an address. Look up banff.com or.org. And when you go to that, it immediately redirected you to a chem trails conspiracy theorist site with all sorts of links within. And David and I were sitting on the balcony at his old place in Canmore and he pulled up his, at the time, the Blackberry, and he showed me.

Some of the hate emails that he got, which were vile threatening, some of them anti-Semitic. And then we talked about this, this billboard. So I said, well, here's what I'll do is I'll call a CBC reporter. His name is Carl B in Calgary. He's still there. He is a terrific reporter. And I'll just ask him simply, have you ever thought about that billboard as you passed it?

'cause I knew that he comes into the mountains and that was the catalyst for him doing a story. On that billboard, trying to talk to the person who paid for the billboard, who is a private citizen, uh, living in Banff. And at the time a prominent local business businessman who has since left who would not comment.

But then Kyle talked to David, and then that actually became the basis for a main page CBC story that back then. Maybe the news cycle being a bit less stayed on the CBC main page for about three days. And I remember in the title David, it had something like ludicrous conspiracy theory and it was quoting you, but it really helped to just point out, I think some of the some of the bs, uh, that exists around chemtrails.

Now I don't know if it made any difference in the end, but David, like back to you, uh, maybe your memories of, of it and what came out of it. 

[00:19:14] David Keith: Yeah, I think you just spun that as a positive story and it's positive by the metric of, we got our, we, we got on C, B, C and got a bunch of press, but I. I have absolutely no idea whether it did anything, and I'm gonna assume it didn't match.

And I think I'd really like to hear Holly's views. But I think, you know, question one to me is, is it really true that there's a measurable big rise in conspiratorial thinking that is in people really believing stuff that I think is objectively nonsense, uh, not just on this topic. And if there is why and.

Overhaul in a second. But I think, I think a bunch of this is to do with social media and the way the rules are set and the difference between the Wikipedia rules and the social media algorithms. And I think, um, that is a essential question and I don't think that things on CBC deal with it at all.

I think the deal is that we have to apply some of the non-centralized, but, uh, fact-based. Decision algorithm that's in Wikipedia to other parts of our lives. I don't think having centralized media like the New York Times or CBC say things are wrong, is helping much. But I wanna hear Holly's point of view.

[00:20:25] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: It's a good question about whether there's a measurable rise. I think there's a lot of people who just don't feel confident. And so I'm basing that on a, a survey we did last September. Um. Over 3000 respondents in the US and we asked the question, is it true or false that the United States government is currently operating a program that uses airplanes to put chemicals into the air in order to counteract global warming?

And so. About 30% of people said, that's false. You know, that's not happening. About 20% of people said it was happening, and then you had this 50% of people who were unsure. They didn't feel confident in saying that wasn't going on, and so I think. That there's the core people who are caught up in this and who believe and who care enough to post about it or go to a meeting is still pretty small.

I don't think it's moved beyond 20%. And I, I've seen this with other sorts of conspiracies as well. But then you just have a bunch of people who are like, I, I don't know what's going on. They don't feel, um, oriented in this media environment. And I do think it's getting worse because, for example, this.

Tweet from RFKA week or two ago. It says 24 states move to ban geoengineering our climate by dowsing our skies, our waterways, and landscapes with toxins. This is a movement every MAHA needs to support. HHS will do its part. So when you have that kind of messaging coming from. People in government, it, I think it makes it even more confusing for people.

[00:22:05] David Keith: Uh, Holly, I remember Ashley Mercer and I, who did one of the first public opinion polls related. So GI sharing my recollection is we asked almost the same question. Do you remember how different the answers were? 

[00:22:17] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. So it has gone up. And we asked two, two different wordings of this and looked at it over time.

And so did Tingley and Wagner in, um, 2017, but it hasn't gone up, um, a crazy amount. It, you know. Maybe from 10 to 20% say. 

[00:22:37] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. David, I remember you talking to me about that polling that you did, and I remember being frankly shocked at the high. I thought relatively high. Number of people who did think there was something to the chemtrails.

Conspiracy theory, and again, it's hard to tease apart. They don't know it, but they just have a deep suspicion of government to begin with. So when presented to them, it sounds plausible and they think it's the Rockefellers of the deep state or George Soros or whomever must be behind it. Just as an end note to that BA story and whether it had any effect that prominent businessman.

He was quite upset by being, uh, in the CBC and not named, but through the context. Uh, you knew who it was and everyone locally knew that he was a bit of a crackpot. I challenged him to a public debate. He refused the debate. I. He ended up leaving Banff and moving to the golden area BC not long after that.

I'm not claiming responsibility, but there is enough of a people said a bit of a public humiliation that it, let's say, contributed to souring his relationship with the local town and eventually pull up stakes. And then he set up one of those billboards. In Golden BC that was also on the Trans Canada Highway.

He just took his money and and deployed it elsewhere and it was called Lookup BC instead of lookup Banff 

[00:23:59] David Keith: and more fertile ground. That part of BC For craziness, I would say it would be good to 

[00:24:05] Ed Whittingham: then talk about, you know, other things that created hooks, and maybe again, on the topic of has this number gone up or not?

It certainly seems more prominent with what we see coming outta the Trump administration. And of course you cannot. Overstate, uh, for a Canadian perspective, how astounding it is. And partly this is loyalty, but you get people genuinely believing that the 2020 election was stolen and have maintained that all along right up to the president.

But let's talk about conspiratorial environmentalism connection to the anti-VAX movement. And what you said, Holly, in your article, is that vaccine hesitancy or the anti-vax, anti-vax sentiments falls into that paren environmentalism bucket. And then you tell this, this, this great story about meeting moms who fear big tech or big ag or big pharma and that's, you know, fueling some of their beliefs at your kids' crunchy private school.

I loved how you used crunchy. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

[00:25:06] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'll say is people wouldn't necessarily take up the label anti-vax. I think they would say medical freedom. Health freedom, health sovereignty. A lot of it is about having the freedom to choose what's right for your family.

I, I think that's the, the frame people have and how, how is that connected with. Anti engineering. I think that there, there was a movement infrastructure around this, um, because there was this sense of urgency of crisis when there were different vaccine measures being introduced which catalyzed people who had already been, you know, anti-vaccine even before Covid had a new, source of revenue, new retention, and that was an infrastructure that, that could be used to fight geoengineering as well. Before that, I, I don't think the chemtrails or anti geoengineering people were very organized, but they, they were able to merge with and use this, um. Medical freedom infrastructure to do things like launch state leg legislative efforts or lawsuits and so on, to a degree that we hadn't seen before.

[00:26:22] David Keith: How much you mentioned money. How much do you think the simple fact that YouTube pays you for hits? I. Matters. That is that there's, it's now possible to make money from conspiracy theories in a way. I don't wanna say that it wasn't before, 'cause my dim memory of my life as a teenager in the seventies is there were kind of books about what I would call conspiracy theories where the authors must have made money, but I if that would've be many less authors and much slower.

Whereas now there are obvious examples of people making really quite, very large amounts of money. In some cases, off pedalling conspiracy theories. 

[00:26:57] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: You know, my priors were that it made a big difference, but I spent some time looking into the. Peer-reviewed studies around, uh, the so-called rabbit hole effect and so on, and it seems to be actually a more complicated picture.

And there's also a lot of questions that people have about whether YouTube's algorithms were. Suppressing chemtrail content for a period of years and then stopped doing that. And there's also the complicating factor of people have moved away from a keyword like chemtrail, so it could maybe even be harder to discern what the content is actually about.

But I think overall this, the way the media ecosystem works and, and you know, the outrage industrial complex is, I would say if I was trying to be more, more radical about it, our, it's a huge problem for society for a number of reasons.

[00:27:51] David Keith: I. I mean, taking is most obviously the, the fact that the, you know, significant fraction of people including Congress, people and so on, believed that, uh, election was US election was stolen and contravention to any kind of reasonable interpretation of, of, of the actual electoral system.

I. Given that, I think it's, it seems pretty clear that the rise of the, that this thinking has risen. Well, it's hard to have a real objective measure. I think it's clear, it's risen. So I really want to get to the why question. So, so, so let's just, let's, let's take it as given that there's a lot more conspiracy theories around, a lot more people believing stuff that, that, you know, just isn't true by objective reality.

What's going on here? 

[00:28:28] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: So there's a number of different ways to think about it. There's a school of thought that says we should view these as entertainment, and there's actually something fun or pleasurable about consuming the content. And you combine that with a media ecosystem that people have described as limbic capitalism, as there being kind of a biochemical, um, addiction component to it.

So that, that's one way of looking at it. You could also take an interpretation that says, well, PE people aren't seeing enough progress. From the political parties that claim to care about the environment or these other issues. I actually, I'm not sure you know empirically that that's true, but that there's an understanding, and I think this really comes in with their concern about agriculture and about the food system, which is a core concern for many of the same people.

They think that there's all these toxins and pesticides and. They're not wrong. Right. And we haven't regulated that here in the US anyway. I can't speak to Canada to the degree that. We should have. And so I think that feeds it as well. 

[00:29:43] Ed Whittingham: So, I wanna ask about social contagion, and that is a factor as well.

And I say that because I've just recently read Malcolm Gladwell's Revenge of the Tipping Point. I know, you know, people will take, uh, Gladwell to ask for, for some of his pop psychology or some of his research work, but it's interesting on this anti-vax topic, he looked at a crunchy Waldorf school. In California and they have interesting data to see, to track the number of unvaccinated students over time.

And to this question, is it going up? That number clearly went up. And in this book he talked about influential individuals and once they meet, once they, and you get super spreaders and once you get. To a tipping point, and he said it's 25% of any group. Then you'll find that groups through norms and through wanting to be included and societal pressures will tip, and then very quickly it spreads after that.

Have you, does, does that resonate with you, Holly, and some of the, the research that you've done? 

[00:30:44] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. And do you think that would be another common sociological understanding of it? I, one another thing I haven't talked about. Too much yet is wellness culture, which also feeds into this. And I think it's relevant to what you just said about social contagion because you know the, some of these wellness practices, some of them are actually more of kind of a multi-level marketing thing where there's a very intentional cultivation of a group, but some of them are more spiritual in nature, where pe people are seeking that fulfillment, those bonds, that community. Um, and there's a big overlap between those themes and the Make America Healthy again, movement.

[00:31:29] Ed Whittingham: The, the Gwyneth Paltrow Effect, in other words. 

[00:31:33] David Keith: You can put it like that. I wanna pick up on this question of whether you mentioned, you know, that in terms of the food chain, the fact that there are of course chemicals that are unregulated and harmful out there, and we're gonna get to this conversation about.

How this relates to kind of mainstream environmentalism and what it represents a, a failure, I wanna try arguing that it represents success. That in fact, mainstream environmentalism has done a fantastic job pulling out most of the chemicals that we know to be harmful. So the combination of like the Clean Air Act, which added kind of a year and a half of life to average Americans are reducing chemicals like.

DDT that had very, very long, or DDE and its breakdown products very long. Uh, half-lifes in the environment, reducing metals environment. The kind of first order environmental toxins that we knew objectively were really bad and were not regulated, have been regulated. And now the environmental, even the, the non conspiratorial environmental movement is concerned with say, microplastics, where.

The way I read the literature, what's clear is you can detect them, but it's actually really quite unclear whether they have particularly harmful effects. I'm sure they have some harmful effects, but just to set a scale compared to the harmful effects of metals or organic chlorines, they're likely to be very small.

So I think one way to think about it is the environmental movement did clean up an enormous number of those chemicals as measured by. You know, actual impacts on people's lifespan or iq and, and it and, and, and now in a sense, we've sort of set this machinery in motion, but there's not that much to, to go after anymore because many of those toxins have actually been removed.

I. 

[00:33:11] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: That may be may be true, but I, two things come to mind. One is that a lot of it is invisible, which, which is a challenge, obviously not with something like air pollution where people who were, you know, with us 50, 60 years ago, can really describe the differences, but with a lot of the things in the food system.

So they may not understand it. But I think that there's, the second thing that comes to mind is there's a bigger theme here about. Agency and corporate control and this distrust that, you know, these big food companies, big pharma. Whoever it is is doing something behind the scenes. And so with that trust breaking down, even though things might be getting better in some dimensions, people are interpreting it as, um, still not something that they have a lot of control or agency over.

[00:34:03] David Keith: I agree. I think what is interesting is it feels like precisely when by many measures, the kind of. Older environmental agenda of removing toxins that had easily measurable effects by science from the food chain and the air and the water has largely succeeded. Is when this distrust has grown, which in some sense is precisely the opposite of what you'd expect.

You expect there to be more trust. 'cause environmental regulators have in fact done the right thing and regulated and cleaned up the environment substantially. And it's enormous success in the environmental world. Uh, and yet that success that, you know, I teach my class about, I think of as a a, a fantastic successive.

Science and environmental battles and public policy. Um, exactly that is exactly the time of that success is when people have lost their faith and distrust it. And I dunno if this analogy is useful or not, but thinking about the way the left embraced some issues of, of, um, discrimination and representational politics.

You know, what the right is now calling DEI. Uh, you know, in some ways at a time where by some measures, America was doing pretty well on those topics and had not, not that all was well, but had actually made real strides was when the trust broke down on both sides. I. 

[00:35:20] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: There, there's another dimension that I wanna make sure I mentioned too, that was going on simultaneously with this, which is a skepticism about technology such as 5G electromagnetic radiation.

Uh, you know, around the time we're getting smartphones, we're seeing our lives behaviors change. A lot of anxiety about AI that's also in the background here, and I think it's an important factor. 

[00:35:48] Ed Whittingham: That is interesting, and this is really one data point, but that prominent businessman who put up the billboard in Banff was also very active about cell towers, uh, near the school.

Even though in a height of irony, he ended up leasing part of his land to a cell tower company. So very complex and shows some of the, the corruption that gets into the system. I do wanna wonder like how much. How much do we lay this at the feet of mainstream environmentalism? You know, you've mentioned success, David, and, and theory.

You know, you would think that it would do the opposite, but then there have been the failures as well, and the failures. I mean, I think of conspiratorial, conspiratorial framing of. Uh, oil and gas or fossil fuel companies, there's some legitimate there, but I think many of us know folks who go, uh, maybe two extra clicks to the left of Vladimir Lenin in terms of their thinking of the impacts that fossil fuel companies have and their controls over the levers of state.

Holly, I think you've looked at that. 

[00:36:56] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah, I mean, I do think that some of the critical theory I read bleeds into conspiratorial thinking in this, in this domain of. You know, the influence of fossil fuel companies doing awful things, and, and it's because that there's a grain of truth there, obviously, but there's other reasons why we're not getting off of fossil fuels.

Obviously, I wrote a, a book on this, so I've thought a lot about just the ways that they're ingrained in our infrastructure and the maturity of alternatives and so on. It's much more complicated than. The evil fossil fuel companies manipulating things. But that storyline was, I guess, useful for people to explain the problem or to raise money around, and it's because we didn't do a better job getting into that complexity and doing education and outreach about the problem in a more, a more holistic way.

I think that's part of why we're in the situation we're in now. 

[00:37:54] Ed Whittingham: It's kind of hard to know what to do as well, so. Bobby Kennedy Jr. RFK Jr. Is a great example. So I met him in, I wanna say the early two thousands because I was actually part of setting up the first Western Canada branch of his Waterkeeper Alliance.

And at the time, he was this star environmentalist who had figured out this great trick. And the trick was using private prosecutions under environmental laws to go directly after polluters to sue them and win and take the winnings that they would get, and then reinvest that environmental protection or starting new groups now.

It turned out that in Canada, that model is slightly broken because it was much harder to do private prosecutions and not have, uh, a government, provincial or federal government come over, take over the case and stay the charges. But we brought him up. We met with him and if you had asked me 25 years ago, Hey, this guy in 2025 is gonna be health secretary.

I am not very good at backflips, but I might attempt to backflip for joy because I thought, this is great, this is what we want, and he's gonna get all the pollutants outta the system. And of course, fast forward to today and I. Deeply, deeply fearful of what he might do in the United States. So I'm, I'm not quite sure what my question is, but perhaps my point is, along with Elon Musk, we've had these folks who have been accredited to the environmental movement, and then along the way they become a tremendous discredit.

And I don't know what we do about that. 

[00:39:32] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I mean, I think, I think we need a better alternative. I think that people are starting to talk about what narrative, what message, um, happens after, you know, rumor environmentalism is passed and are we doing abundance now or is there something else on the horizon?

I'm not sure, but I, I, I think that. With the void that we have, his, his message is around being more holistic around moving away from just focusing on carbon fundamentalism or whatever do seem to be resonating. 

[00:40:11] Ed Whittingham: But have we hit our own tipping point? I mean, if you're to gaze into your crystal ball and you look at the number of.

 Conspiracy theorists and those, let's say practicing conspiratorial environmentalism in and around the Trump administration four years from now, has the US been fundamentally changed? Has it tipped in a way that we can't go back? 

[00:40:30] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: It's hard to say. I think I can say a few things. I don't think things will get substantively better until we reform our media ecosystem and our relationship to it.

So there's. Political and regulatory and structural elements to that. But there's also a cultural shift of you might starting maybe with things that are sensible, like banning phones in schools, but people need to start to realize the harms of the media use and change their relationship to it. And that's gonna be a long process.

I'm not sure that'll happen very quickly. The other part that's hard to see is. Does RFK stay in this coalition with MAGA and get anywhere, or does it take a, a Elon Musk direction? Like what are the, the factions in that administration that will actually continue and do they work together or fall apart?

I don't think anybody knows the answer to that yet. 

[00:41:28] David Keith: We're particularly interested to know how you think this changes sort of mainstream environmentalism, not just in the us I mean, the questions you're asking about Kennedy versus versus Elon. I don't know. Um, important questions for sure. But, but this general thing, power environmentalism that you've identified is clearly visible in lots of places outside the us.

And it is a big thing. I think you're right. I think really you've done a really important service by pointing out that this isn't, um, this is something that will affect the course of mainstream environmental policy substantially. So it is in a sense of fringe belief, but it's a fringe belief that that will and does matter.

And so I, I would love you to think a little bit about what that means or what it might mean over the next years decade to, to the course of mainstream environmentalism. 

[00:42:19] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Yeah. One thing that's really troubling about it is that the symptoms of climate change, and we can. You know, debate and bringing in all the literature about how much of a wildfire or a flood has a climate footprint versus other drivers.

But those things get narrated as weather manipulation, as these conspiratorial things rather than climate change itself. So in some ways, the farther we go into climate change, the, the more content there is for this vortex to draw in and keep feeding it. I do think that that will force. Kind of the bigger, more legitimate NGOs to start to draw some lines around what's real or not, whether it changes their approach, I'm not sure.

What I'm hoping will happen is that climate, philanthropy and other kinds of funders will fund engagement that is a lot deeper that they'll see that. You know, this really is a social understanding engagement problem, and there's been obviously some funding for that in climate philanthropy, but a lot of it has looked like campaigns or pr.

That's very one way, and I think we need a whole new approach, a whole new style for this. Um, I don't know if that's likely to happen, but my hope is that we get serious about thinking about engagement in a new way. 

[00:43:47] Ed Whittingham: From what I've seen climate, well, there are many activists and outside the environmental movement who are serious about that, and they've done a good job of talking to call 'em mainstream environmentalists, to say, you's something wrong with your messaging.

And up here in Canada, Holly, uh, we had a, a consumer facing carbon tax. It was federal policy. It was first unveiled or first rolled out in the province of bc. It was policy here in Alberta. And now we've had everyone, not just right-leaning politicians, but even left-leaning politicians run screaming for the exits from it and have actually repealed it.

And the premier of British Columbia, our neighboring province, to David and to David and me is the latest, greatest one who's going to repeal it so that. Is now prompting some existential, uh, and naval gazing exercises, including what did the environmental movement do wrong? Why did it just fail? To communicate it in a way to build up support for it so that as soon as there is a downturn, there's no policy resilience, no political support, and we lost what is arguably a very, uh, useful tool in carbon pricing, and we could lose it.

Our polluter pays system as well, our industrial carbon pricing system. What do we do about it? Like there's now sort of musings and David and I will be part of it at a gathering in June. What do we do differently? I'm not sure we know yet. And without dissing my colleagues in climate philanthropy, I'm not sure that they know either.

But, uh, for those who take exception to me saying that, please load me up. Let me know what you're thinking. Why don't we get to audience questions? We've got one from Yuri Vert. How do you think politics can be reframed to provide sufficient expla uh, explanatory functions and also agency to people so that they're able to participate in politics meaningfully and without resorting to conspiracy to explain their frustrations?

It's not just political functions. Maybe you could comment on that, but you've also, in your article, talk about universities. So what do universities and academic institutions need to do differently as well? 

[00:45:58] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: And this is something I've heard in my focus groups with people talking about climate and energy.

They'll say things like, we need to be educated on this. Um, which is interesting because in the fields I work in, we don't wanna stick over ourselves as giving people one way information. We wanna think about it as a dialogue, but we do actually have the responsibility of getting good information out there.

I think the challenge is that. We don't wanna go around to people with this posture of you're misinformed. I'm gonna tell you the truth and not listen to what people are saying. Because what people are saying oftentimes has brings up really important things like they'll talk about, um. The supply chains for critical minerals, they'll talk about where we're sourcing lithium from.

Those are things that, you know, the experts I work with are concerned about too. And there's some people in climate advocacy that will, you know, just say, oh, that's not a concern. That's misinformation. Those are actually openings. Like if you listen closely to all of the concerns that people have, even the ones that read as conspiratorial, they're actually opening points for a conversation to get.

Good information there. The challenge is how do you scale that because it's very time and labor intensive to have a two-way dialogue. Um, and so I think that's what we need to be thinking about is scaling mechanisms for that sort of interaction. 

[00:47:24] David Keith: My, my magic solution is some kind of format, not just for this problem that gets dialogue to happen in a structured way using some.

Tie back maybe like the Wikipedia rules to generally accepted facts, and I think something that does that citizen to citizen rather than expert to citizen seems to me the key of making this work. 

[00:47:47] Ed Whittingham: Anonymity is guaranteed, which, uh, allows people to not just say all sorts of wild and crazy things, but also allows 'em to say hateful things.

It's tough to ask a, a company, a tech company, it can do whatever it wants. It's a private company or publicly traded company, but you pull back that anonymity veil and say, if you're gonna say this online, you have to put your name to it. 

[00:48:09] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I think that's one structural reform. That could help be helpful.

I also think there are platforms like Reddit that I think do a better job just in their design because people can upvote certain pieces of content and the results just turn out better, even though it's still an anonymous platform. So I think it's those other design choices that matter too. 

[00:48:32] Ed Whittingham: We're gonna bring in a, uh, a voice familiar to many EVC listeners.

Rob Trombley, you've got a question for Holly, so go 

[00:48:40] Robert Tremblay: ahead, Rob. As conspiracies pop up in response to different policy pushes, what's the best way to address them? A good example I can think of of this is in recent memory is the conspiracy surrounding, um, 15 minute cities as that was an idea over the last few years.

I. Should we just be rebranding our policies to something similar, but that sounds different. Abandoning them for different policies altogether, or just pushing back against the conspiracies and powering through. And then following that, if we do power through, what's the best way to do that? Um, like debunking, maybe kind of derision or making fun of the conspiracies, mobilizing public sentiment just in bigger numbers against the conspirators.

So what, what's the best way to address that? 

[00:49:23] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I guess two things come to mind, and this won't be a com complete catalog of all the things that we could do, but I think we do need more pre-work or, you know, before some ideas introduced, um, workshop at a bit more to think about what it. Sounds like to different sorts of people.

The other thing that comes to mind is that a lot of times our institutions aren't set up for rapid response to things just thinking about working in government. They, there did eventually get to be some pretty good fact sheets about wind turbines and whales on the NOAA website, for example. But the process of.

Getting that information out there is just totally out of step with how quickly it travels. So we need to think about how we fund and execute rapid response to these things. Um, it which is challenging. 

[00:50:23] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. One story and this builds upon what David, you said when you actually sat down in your University of Calgary office and met in person and there was like maybe three of them.

And as I say, for me it was fascinating viewing. And you say they're, they were far more reasonable in person. So just a quick story, and obviously this is difficult to scale. I was down in Beaver Mines. It's a little mountain community in Southwest I. Alberta, I was staying at a friend's place. He had literally like a trailer that he'd had dropped on, uh, 11 acres of land and it ended up that one Saturday night.

It was just me and another guy he didn't know, and he was actually a friend of this friend and we're around the campfire and suddenly he turned to me and said, outta the blue, like, have you, have you heard about the great reset? Have you heard about the World Economic Forum? And you know, he would've had this conversation umpteen times, and I was the, and I said, my friend, it is your lucky day because in this little town, this is probably the first time you've actually met someone who has been to World Economic Forum meetings.

I was part of a World Economic Forum. Global Agenda Council, like you've hit the jackpot. And let me tell you, it's not a conspiracy theory. It's not a cabal of, you know, a socialists and globalists who want to create a global social order. It's a bunch of capitalists who want to make money, and we actually ended up getting into a conversation.

And he, I'd like to say, kind of flipped his opinion. Now, as I said earlier, you can't scale that up. You can't hope to go and meet with each conspiracy theorist out there and turn them around. But it is still amazing the, the potency of that person to person interaction. With someone who's coming in and actually willing to listen.

[00:52:07] David Keith: I absolutely think you can scale it up. I, I don't think this is, in some sense, I don't think this is hard. I think it's that we allowed a profit motive to shape a media environment that made money off a certain kind of engagement and design the system to produce an outcome. And I think it's.

Easy to imagine designing a system to produce a much better outcome. I think we know there's no perfect way, but lots of ways to structure social interactions that would manage this kind of copi thinking much better. Uh, not by experts talking down, but by peer-to-peer interactions tied back to, to different sources of, of, of more trusted knowledge.

I think, I actually think in some sense it's easy. The hard part is. Pushing through the democratic process. Now a democratic process in the US is actually at the top owned by products and conspiracy thinking to, to change these structures. 

[00:52:59] Ed Whittingham: Yeah, maybe if you wanna keep going, David. 'cause we have a question from Ed Brost and he asks.

What can we do to help people increase their trust in institutions and society? Or maybe what can institutions and society do to increased trust? 

[00:53:13] David Keith: I think it's something like that. I mean, I turn, turn over to, to Holly about how to do it, but I, but I, I think the biggest thing is I don't think doing more of what we have been doing.

So actually maybe to disagree with Holly. It'd be nice if Noah responded quicker, but I don't think the answer to this is better. Noah blurbs with the truth. I think it's something else that has a peer-to-peer element with a different structure. Ollie, 

[00:53:37] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: I tend to agree, and I'll acknowledge that this is a huge topic with a lot of literature on it, but I think that.

We need to continue our retrospectives of what went wrong with Covid I, because that was a hit, um, to a lot of trust. Obviously there are a lot of things before then too, and I think some of the things that we can point to are. Acknowledging where we don't know or we don't have all the answers. Being very clear about uncertainty, being clear about where experts disagree about certain things.

Making all of those deliberations that go on within the scientific community more transparent. I think people are sometimes afraid to do that. But that would be helpful. 

[00:54:23] Ed Whittingham: Yeah. We've got another question by, from Bruce Winter. And he asked why does a fact, fact-based discussion not work to change minds and is changing minds a proper focus?

So this is interesting, and I think of something you flagged for me in New York Times Daily podcast that I listened to last week, David, that was exceptional. And a, uh, brought on a couple of academics who looked at Covid and the responses and divided them between. Uh, pharmaceutical responses, IE vaccines and non-pharmaceutical responses, and essentially said the non-pharmaceutical, uh, responses by institutions and by governments really didn't have a measurable impact as far as we can tell in decreasing mortality.

Whereas vaccines clearly did, and you know, to cut to the chase, going back to Covid, we could avoid a lot of negative side effects or negative consequences by just focusing on vaccines. The problem is a bunch of people won't take vaccines, and so coming out of c. We've got a problem that is fine when you have a respiratory pandemic that has a mortality rate of half a percent.

It could be disastrous if you have a respiratory pandemic with a mortality rate of say, 15 to 20%. So instead of changing the minds. Of those anti-vaxxers, is there something else we should be doing that doesn't actually take into account their opinions? I know that sounds autocratic. Maybe Trump would like that.

But Holly, what do you think? And that's gonna be our last question. 

[00:55:55] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: So this question about whether fact-based discussions work to change minds, and if that's a proper focus. I think it's part of the focus. I mean, I think. It's also important to understand where people are coming from and where you can meet them.

And one thing I wanted to note is that it would be a mistake to dismiss. Para environmentalists is not interested in facts or science. Actually, a lot of them love to do research. They wanna go get their soil and their water tested, they wanna find stuff out. And if we worked with that drive, um, we might.

Get a bit further. And I think you can extrapolate that to other arenas as well. So maybe, you know, it's more like fact finding together. Again, very labor intensive thing, but as David had said, if you have some peer-to-peer or group-based mechanisms, maybe it can scale. 

[00:56:53] David Keith: David closing comment. We need to figure out how to do this and I'm not the right expert to tell you how.

[00:57:01] Ed Whittingham: We had my friend Roger Thompson just posted to the chat one, need not change minds to change behavior. We'll leave that as a provocative final thought. Holly, thank you so much. Uh, this has been a fun and rich conversation and we're really grateful for your time. 

[00:57:18] Dr. Holly Jean Buck: Great to be here. Thanks so much. 

[00:57:20] Ed Whittingham: Thanks for listening to Energy Versus Climate.

The show is created by David, Keith, Sara Hastings Simon and me, ed Whittingham, and produced by Amit Tandon with help from Crystal Hickey, Vinuki Arachchi and Haris Ahmad. Our title and show music is the windup. By Brian Lips. This season of Energy Versus Climate is produced with support from the University of Calgary's, office of the Vice President Research and the University's global research initiative.

Further support comes from the Trottier Family Foundation, the North Family Foundation, the Palmer Family Foundation, and you our generous listeners. Sign up for updates and exclusive webinar access at energyvsclimate.com. And review and rate us on your favorite podcast platform. This helps new listeners to find the show.

We'll be back with a new EvC show in the weeks to come, and some bonus content too. Thanks for listening.