M-S-W-Media.

Episode of the Daily Beans. I am joined by a veteran of national media. She was the host of Marketplace Tech on NPR and she began covering climate tech all the way back in 2018 and now she has a new podcast called Everybody in the Pool and it's a podcast about climate solutions. So let's welcome Molly Wood.

Hi Molly. Hi Allison. I'm excited to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you about this podcast that you're working on. It comes out every week, every Wednesday, wherever you get your pods. And the thing I love the most about it is that, you know, right now obviously we're in the middle of a climate crisis. We have been for a very long time but now we've got these massive heat waves and record temperatures in the ocean. We've got these massive storm events

and we've got about 1,000 year floods instead of 100 year floods. And I hear a lot of complaining out there and I hear a lot of people covering it. But the thing that I love about your show is that it has actual practical solutions that we can do, that we can, like actions we can take to help do our part. So talk a little bit about why you wanted to to launch this podcast.

I'm glad that you're enjoying the premise and it was exactly for that reason I was overwhelmed. I had spent a long time, you know, I've spent 25 years in journalism and journalism is very good at presenting a problem to you, I would argue that we have gotten addicted as journalists to presenting that I actually call it problem porn, like we have this sort of obsession with.

There's this really big problem and there's this really and this is an even bigger problem here are all of the ways in which this is a problem.

And for normal people, I think the question often becomes and like listen, I grew up in the northern plains, I only know how to just work hard and fix stuff. And so my question was, well, who's working on this because there has to be someone humans are pretty good at surviving and people must be trying to figure out how we're going to survive this and what we're going to do.

And how we're going to fix it. And so I just wanted to basically do the opposite of what I've always done as a journalist and present solutions instead of problems.

That's really, I like that problem porn. We see it, we see rage farming, we see, you know, people just trying to get clicks and eyes. We know that, you know, we know this Facebook testified to Congress that, you know, they gave seven times the weight to an anger reaction than a like or love reaction.

That just sells that kind of rage that fear that that problem porn really does sell. And so this I like the solution porn myself. I think I'm with you on that.

Let's talk about what led us here because we've got a lot of a long history of Republicans turning the climate into a culture war and it's sort of come to a head more recently with this whole idea of wokeism or virtue signaling.

But I mean, they have been calling this a hoax for the longest time and I think we know why the answer is a whole lot of money from the fossil fuel industry.

I mean, if you look at, you know, it's just the data. It is just simple math and charts, which is that for decades now all the way back to, I would argue it really ramped up at kind of the George W. Bush.

George H. W. Bush, actually, that's the administration that put into place because they were starting to have serious warnings from the Secretary of State's office about the potential economic calamity, like national security costs of climate change.

If these, you know, now well known predictions were to come to pass, that's the administration that said, OK, well, every four years we need to do a federally mandated national climate assessment and look at what's happening here.

And you saw fossil fuel spending and donations start to go up and up and up and up and up to Republican candidates.

And you saw the messaging change over time and then you're absolutely right that with the Trump administration, it was in 2018 that one of those nationally mandated climate assessments came out.

And instead of any kind of, you know, previously we'd had these kind of economic arguments or well, you know, the sciences in doubt or will I don't know when we need this and we need that.

He just said, I don't believe it.

And then it became religion. It just stopped being anything to do with any argument at all other than nope. And if you like it, you're a woke weeny.

Yeah, I think that it took a lot of damage during the Trump administration. They started pulling the use of the word climate change or climate crisis off of all the government websites, you weren't even allowed to use the phrase in any government documents.

And the odd thing here is that, you know, going back to like you said, HW with the with the four year every four year climate assessment.

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