I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, December 10th.

Here's an argument emerging from the political right that apparently you can expect to start hearing a lot more of soon.

Policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions are, in fact, discriminatory.

My next guest, Kate Aronoff of the New Republic, has a new story about how the conservative

interest group, Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Alec, is encouraging states to take up that

argument and push anti-climate bills across the country. Some conservatives, it would now appear,

are declaring more on what they call critical energy theory, a riff on critical race theory.

Alec, you may remember, is the right-wing policy group known for drafting model legislation

for Republicans and for being funded by the billionaire Koch brothers who have fossil fuel

interests.

So let's hear more now from Kate Aronoff, staff writer at the New Republic, an author of

Overheeded How Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back.

Her new piece in the New Republic is called Conservatives, Have a New Bogeyman, Critical Energy Theory.

Hi, Kate. Welcome back to WNYC.

Hi, good to be back.

Let's see. Should we start on critical energy theory as a concept or on this idea that climate

protection laws could be seen as discriminatory? How about the discriminatory part?

Sure. So, you know, this is part of a sort of longstanding trend on the right, which I think

is the sort of important context to place these model legislation, place this model legislation within, which is that there's been a real attempt to drag almost everything under the sun into the sort of culture war space, right? And so to frame everything, this is why I sort of, you know, coined the phrase

critical energy theory, which to be clear, no one at the conference said, nor do I think

it's anyone, you know, ever actually use that phrase. Because, you know, climate has long been

sort of on the edges of that territory, right? There has long been a sort of culture or about energy policy and these sorts of things.

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