from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday,

August 13th. We begin today with our climate story of the week, which we're doing every Tuesday

on the show this year, as many of you know.

And with the elevation of Tim Walls to Kamala Harris's running mate, we're going to look today at Walls' climate record as governor of Minnesota.

Remember, Walls was a high school geography teacher, right, before running for Congress in 2006.

Geography is actually a pretty good grounding

from which to approach environmental issues to begin with because a geographer by trade and by

definition, if you think about it, develops awareness of what's happening at different places

on Earth. In a couple of minutes, we'll talk with Darnanur, fossil fuels and climate reporter for

the Guardian, who was written explicitly about Governor Wall's climate record. But first, I want to

play another excerpt from a speech, and we'll use two during this segment, a speech we sampled

from yesterday that Walls gave last month. This was before he was tapped as Harris's

running mate and before Biden dropped out of the race, but it was after Biden's disastrous

debate performance in June, meaning people were starting to talk about Tim Walls as a possible

candidate for something. But the context was a conference he was already

scheduled to speak at put on by the company ESRI for users of its GIS or geographical information

system software. And Walls had been invited to be the keynote speaker at the conference because

he's known to be a data geek.

So he talked at length about how we love using data, including geographic data, especially geographic

data, as governor of Minnesota, to help identify and solve problems, climate change included.

And because this speech is not explicitly a campaign speech, it gives

us a different kind of window into how Tim Walz thinks about things. We'll take this in two chunks.

...