Sea Change Radio

Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan. For three years in a row now, the United Nations has chosen to hold its flagship environmental meeting – the UN Conference of the Parties, or COP – in a country largely dependent on oil revenues for its economic well-being. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News, currently in Baku, Azerbaijan covering COP29. We examine the problems associated with holding this ever-expanding event in a petro-state, discuss the logistics behind the selection, and consider the key takeaway policies from the conference.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Bob Berwyn (BB) | 00:22 – And there’s people every day here telling me stories about their islands, where their wells are full of salt water, where they can’t grow food anymore, where their shoreline communities are being flooded. And then go into these, uh, sort of glitzy reception in pavilion areas where people are backslapping each other and making deals and smiling and drinking espressos. I mean, there’s hundreds of boots that everyone has its own little espresso stand. And, you know, it feels like a business convention.

Narrator | 00:56 – Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Azerbaijan for three years in a row. Now the United Nations has chosen to hold its flagship environmental meeting, the UN conference of the parties or cop in a country, largely dependent on oil revenues for its economic wellbeing. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News. Currently in Baku, Azerbaijan covering Cop 29. We examine the problems associated with holding this ever expanding event in a petro-state. Discuss the logistics behind the selection and consider the key takeaway policies from the conference.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:50 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Bob Berwyn from Inside Climate News. Bob, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

Bob Berwyn (BB) | 02:04 – Hello Alex, and thanks for having me back again. I appreciate it. 

Alex Wise (AW) | 02:08 – Well, it’s always a pleasure. I wish there’d be better news as an expat based in, uh, Austria, you have a, a different perspective, a unique perspective on the American political process, and it’s been a very difficult one for all of us to deal with. But we’re not going to talk about that moving forward on Sea Change Radio as much as possible. It’s just too depressing. So let’s focus on something else depressing, which is last time we had you on, well, I don’t know if it was the last time we had you on, but we did talk to you last year when you covered the Cop 28 Conference, the United Nations Climate Change Summit in Dubai this year. It’s in another petro-state, not that far from it. It’s in Azerbaijan. And this one might be even more depressing from what I’ve been reading about it. From your coverage set, the stage, if you will, for what this conference means and what the message is coming from the United Nations ho having it hosted by Azerbaijan. 

Bob Berwyn (BB)  | 03:09 – Sure. Depressing is probably, uh, a good word. Saddening is another good word. And it is the third year in a row that the conference has been hosted in an oil dependent petro-state with, uh, authoritarian tendencies. So, uh, there were concerns going in about restrictions on civil liberties and dissidents of the government here being imprisoned. And quite some restrictions on protests. You probably recall that sub past cops, there have been fairly large, uh, demonstrations in the streets of the host cities, really with thousands of people turning out. And that’s been kind of ratcheted down the last three years to the point that this year demonstrators are only allowed inside the blue zone. The so-called Blue Zone of the conference, which is for the duration of the event, is designated as United Nations territory. So the United Nations rules apply rather than the host country laws. But even in that space, at yesterday’s main demonstration by civil society, which is here represented by hundreds of environmental groups and various types of citizen groups, they weren’t allowed to do their, their regular chants and, and so on. So when they had their, their main demonstration yesterday, they were restricted to sort of humming and snapping their fingers. That was the only thing that the, uh, the host country would permit in its agreement with the United Nations. And, uh, those folks saw that as a, you know, again, as another new restriction on their ability to get their messages of concern about the escalating climate crisis to the delegates and to the negotiators. Um, not that those folks are not aware of those concerns anyway, but this has been sort of an important part of this ritualized process. And it was really sad to see yesterday. And, you know, many of the demonstrators had put tape over their mouths to sort of symbolize that, that silencing. And it was really tough to see in talking to them and interviewing them after the demonstration. It was a lot of us were near tears. 

AW | 05:42 – Where are these demonstrators from generally?

BB | 05:46 – They’re literally from all over the world. 

AW | 05:49 – So people are flying in from all over the world to protest, and yet they’re muzzled essentially? 

BB | 05:53 – Correct. Yes. 

AW | 05:56 – We read a lot about, and we hear a lot about greenwashing and sports washing from these petro states where they, they’ll build a big stadium to host a soccer tournament, et cetera. It seems like the U United Nations COP conferences have become part and parcel with these big sports events or things like that. There’s not a huge revenue stream for hosting a conference like this compared to like the World Cup, I’m imagining. So it’s more of a big picture greenwashing for a fossil fuel dependent nation. Is that correct? 

BB | 06:32 – Yeah, I would say that that’s been correct the last several years with the, with the cop the last, uh, this year and the two previous years. And I hear what you’re saying about sports events, totally agree with that, with the World Cup and Qatar and some of these big sports, international sports organizations are very money-oriented. And as we’re starting to see right now, there’s a very direct connection between emerging authoritarianism and, and the sort of extreme neoliberal capitalism that has developed over the last few decades. And I don’t think there’s a huge amount of money to be made on a cop, but it does. The host countries can use it. And Dubai last year was a great example of this, to try and show that they are sustainable and, and on board with global climate efforts, even if they’re not Dubai is clearly not, it’s planning to increase fossil fuel production for the foreseeable future. They were trying to make oil deals while the conference was going on. Um, but to, you know, to casual observers in, in other countries, you know, they might look at this and say sort of like, he described, wow, well this climate conference is going on in Azerbaijan, so, you know, they must be on board with this. And, uh, and they’re not, you know, the country’s president said in his opening speech at the conference that, that fossil fuels are a gift from God and that they plan on using him and developing him and exporting him as long as they can. I mean, he didn’t beat around the bush. 

AW | 08:18 – So one could look through rose colored glasses and see these oil rich nations making a play for the environmental movement to be grouped with sustainability leading countries around the, the globe in, in an optimistic glass half full kind of way. One could look at this and say, oh, well, you know, deep pocketed countries need to be on board with climate change solutions. Just like people have said, well, oil companies have a lot of money, eventually they’re going to be able to be leaders in the sustainability space. They’re going to be building the wind farms and solar farms of tomorrow. It seems like a very pollyannish view, but I’d like to hear your perspective on that comparison. 

BB | 09:08 – Yeah, I mean, I, and those two go hand in hand, and I think both parts of what you said are, are ac are accurate. I was at the OPEC booth yesterday in the, in the delegates pavilion area to do an interview with somebody. And what they highlight is their, you know, their financing of development efforts and their assistance to developing countries with, uh, economic development and so forth. And they see that as their main role in this. And their newest twist now is to focus on things like, uh, hydrogen energy, which is derived from natural gas in most cases, uh, or from fossil gas, I should say. I need to stop using that term. Natural gas. It’s fossil gas. 

AW | 09:59 – Yes. I remember reading Bill McKibben’s piece on that. We’re like, we need to stop calling it natural gas.  

BB | 10:05 – It’s o hard to get out of that. I mean, they sold us that word. And, uh, when I write, obviously have a chance to reflect and I never use it, but in conversation it, it slips out. 

AW | 10:17 – Well, if you use fossil gas, some people might not actually know what you’re talking about. ’cause it really hasn’t become part of the lingua franca. 

BB | 10:24 – Yeah. There has been this sort of inclusionary vision of the UNFCCC from the very beginning to say that if we’re going to have a durable, sustainable agreement, everybody needs to be at the table and buy into it. And that’s one of the reasons it’s taken so long. Yet at the same time, when you start to see outright obstructionism and ongoing obstructionism and, and you know, we can single out, we can go ahead and single out Saudi Arabia because as a researcher who wrote a paper on this told me last year, they don’t care about criticism because it’s a totally authoritarian state. So they don’t really care what anybody thinks or says, you know, they’re just going to do their thing and promote fossil fuels as long as the rest of the world allows them to do that. And so, if I could pivot a little bit, there are renewed calls for cop reform right now, which is encouraging to me. It’s something I’ve written about quite a bit for Inside, Climate News. And just a couple of days ago, a pretty illustrious list of folks including top climate scientists, the former head of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, who led the organization, uh, preceding and up to adoption of the Paris Agreement, which is kind of the, you know, the high point of this process, signed onto the letter and said, this is really no longer fit for purpose and we need to change this, uh, in some way to, to make more progress on reaching the global goal of, of limiting warming to, you know, as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline as possible. And we’re already there actually now, you know, we’re, we’re right at that threshold with 2024 projected to be the first year that the global temperature reaches that, that sort of red line. And if I can just add on to that, you know, my frustration has grown each year and so has my sadness because it’s hard emotionally to talk to people that you know, are struggling. I mean, there’s people every day here telling me stories about their islands, where their wells are full of salt water, where they can’t grow food anymore, where their, you know, their shoreline communities are being flooded. And then go into these, uh, sort of glitzy reception and pavilion areas where, you know, people are backslapping each other and making deals and smiling and drinking espressos. I mean, there’s hundreds of boots that everyone has its own little espresso stand and, you know, it feels like a business convention, um, not like a, a sort of a life or death, crisis that they’re talking about. And, and I walk out of there sometimes with tears of my eyes. And I had that yesterday when I was talking to the protestors after that demonstration. You know, I’m supposed to be a reporter and I’m supposed to keep a distance and, you know, and be calm and cool and rational about it, but it hits me really hard and I, I feel it, I feel it.

(Music Break) | 14:02

AW | 14:45 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Bob Berwyn, he’s a reporter for Inside Climate News. Bob, before we dive into the nuts and bolts of the policies that are being discussed at the Cop 29 Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, can you give us some insight into the United Nations decision making process and how they’ve decided for three consecutive years to hold this conference in a controversial petro-state? I mean, this is the first year I understood it a little bit. “Oh, oh, let’s just see how it goes.” It seems like now the for sale sign is up. 

BB | 15:24 – It’s pretty easy to explain. When the, when the UNFCCC was started in 1992, they adopted sort of a, you know, rules of procedure. One of them is that, um, the, the host country will rotate to different re to a different region each year to simplify it. It’s actually even more complicated than that. The, the default place for these talks is Bond Germany. That’s where the UNFCCC is headquartered. The secretariat of the organization is headquartered, and the meetings are to be held there unless another country offers to host them. And since then, a tradition has developed a rotation tradition has developed where each year it goes to a different region. The United Nations countries are grouped into, I think, seven regions. The Americas, uh, central East Asia, the Pacific, I don’t remember what they all are. In any case, this, this last time it was the turn of Central East Asia. And, those countries, then, the countries that are part of that group, they decide amongst themselves informally which country will host it in that region. Last year’s announcement for Baku came terribly late, much later than usual because there were other aspects of geopolitics involved. Namely, Russia, which is also part of that same region, was not willing to accept a host country that had imposed sanctions on it, or that sort of was overtly opposed to the aggression in Ukraine. And so Azerbaijan was kind of the last country left standing in that group. And so it almost went to here by default. So I hope that that explanation helps a little bit. 

AW | 17:32 – I understand logistically how they decide, but just from a philosophical standpoint, it seems beyond the pale to me.

BB | 17:40 – I think there’s a lot of people that would, that would agree with you. Yeah. 

AW | 17:44 – Why even have it in different places at this point? I mean, we have a planet that’s linked in many ways. People can be connected like you and I are talking right now from San Francisco to Azerbaijan, and it sounds perfect. So it doesn’t seem to have to be like the Olympics. Why can’t they just have it in Bonn every year? 

BB | 18:03 – One of the ideas for reform is to change that structure. For example, to have the conference every two years, the actual negotiations every two years, or every year in one place, and then have all these side events and only very tangentially related activities occur in kind of regional climate weeks. That’s just one specific example that’s, that’s floating around out there. And, you know, maybe with this new letter that came out, and I’ve got a story, uh, that’s coming out on that in a day or two, those ideas will get some traction. But like any large organization, there’s a lot of inertia within this UN process, and they sort of adopt things and then they just stick with them because, uh, because it’s, it’s easier, you know, to just keep doing stuff the same old way. Right. A lot of us, a lot of us fall into, into patterns like that these events have also grown, you know, outsized. And in fact, the most recent story I wrote about, COP describes that and has a graph showing how, you know, the first 10 years, about 5,000 people came to the COPs, and it was mostly negotiators and technical support staff. And then as the stakes grew higher, more and more people showed up to where, in Paris you had about 35,000 people for the Paris Agreement in 2015. And people thought that was pretty huge. And then last year it went up to somewhere around 80,000 people in Dubai because it was so heavily promoted by Dubai, even though really, there are no more major deals to be made at COP. I mean, we have the Paris agreement. It says countries will do what they can based on their abilities to prevent global warming from going above 1.5 degrees. And the focus now really should be on implementing that, on making sure that countries deliver on what they’ve already agreed to do. Instead, we keep getting new, new agreements. I think of them as these kind of, you know, shiny yet hollow bobs, like Christmas ornaments as we’re getting close to the holiday season, that really keep distracting from this, you know, from this primary goal. And it would really seem to make sense to me and other experts, people who’ve studied this and written peer reviewed papers on the process to really trim this back down again and, you know, let the negotiators and the representatives of the countries get down to business. The other thing that’s happened as a result of that growth is that the UNF CCCs secretariat, so the administrative part of this has been handed all these new mandates by these 198 member countries to do this, to do that. Yet they haven’t gotten any increased funding for that. And in fact, some countries have been pretty delinquent, including the US on, you know, making what payments they’re supposed to make toward this process. So they’re stretched on budget, they’re stretch stretched on staff to, to run these meetings. You know, if somebody wanted to come up with a proposal for reform, they’d work with the UNFCCC Secretariat, but, their staff is busy working on all these new missions that the member states have given them without giving them more money to hire more staff to work on this stuff. So it’s become a bit of a Catch-22. It definitely feels a treadmill.

AW | 22:05 – It’s kind of counterintuitive having more and more participants where more and more inertia gets created in this almost absurd Tom Robbins novel. It 5,000 people sounds like a lot of people to be negotiating these complex carbon related sustainability policies. This is not fun. This is not like going to a Super Bowl or something like that, you know, this is hard work. 80,000 people, sounds like it’s turned into a bit of a circus. 

BB | 22:37 – Yeah, I would, I would say that’s a pretty apt description, and I use that analogy in talking to my colleagues at Inside Climate News about it, where the, you know, the negotiations are sort of the, the main event really, the big tent. And then you have all these, you know, sideshows with a couple years ago it was a big methane agreement. And, and, uh, the year before that in Glasgow was a global agreement on deforestation, which none, none of the objectives of these additional deals have been met. There have been, there’s been very little progress, you know, just, uh, I’ll take deforestation because I know that best, you know, actually deforestation keeps going up, you know, despite all these countries making a big announcement in Glasgow that they were going to end forest loss by 2030. There’s no sign of that happening yet/ When the news media focuses on these conferences, and it’s one of the few times when there’s really, you know, a concentrated focus on climate, you know, the coverage ends after Cop with Great, we have a deal to end global deforestation. And then there’s very little follow up either from the people that signed onto the deal or from the media to describe what actually happened. So I think a lot of people are left with the impression, oh, great, we’re going to have more forests and they’re going to take carbon out of the air, and we’re going to deal with, you know, at least part of the climate crisis that way. So it creates a very much a false sense of, of confidence and security. That’s something is actually happening at these, at these meetings. And again, you know, there’s, it’s, it’s really clear. I mean, the Paris Agreement is really clear. It’s brief. It’s only like, I don’t know, 10 pages or something and, you know, pretty much spells out what we’re supposed to be doing right now and we need to get down to implementing it. And that’s, that’s what this letter that came out the other day, clearly, you know, clearly said as well. 

AW | 24:49 – In a few years, what are we going to look back on and say, regardless of how toothless these announcements may be, you mentioned methane, previous ones, and deforestation. What’s COP29’s trademark going to be in your estimation, Bob? 

BB | 25:04 – It’s built as the finance COP. And the big goal is to significantly increase global financing for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries primarily. So mitigation means giving them the means, to develop economically in a low carbon way. And adaptation means giving them money, providing them with means, and giving them money to deal with the climate impacts that are already happening at a, at a frightening rate, especially in the past year, I don’t think there’s been a day where we haven’t seen reports of a, you know, or very few days where we haven’t seen reports of big fires somewhere in the world, um, of floods lately. It seems almost on a daily basis, all over the place. The physical part of this is not changing because people are talking, the physical realities of climate change are, are happening. The heat keeps building up in the oceans. It keeps melting ice, it keeps drying out soils, it keeps killing forests. And the only thing that’s going to stop that is to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So right now, we’re operating under a system of a goal that was adopted several years ago. Pardon me, I don’t remember the exact year of a hundred billion dollars of annual climate finance. And the goal this year is to get upwards of a trillion dollars. So it’s kind of a quantum, kind of a quantum increase and some of the big discussions about which countries should be included as countries that should pay and which countries should receive it, exactly what form that financing should take. Whether it’s loans, whether it’s grants and, and those sorts of things. And so this COP will be measured in the end by whether or not it reaches that goal and whether or not countries actually follow through on it. 

AW | 27:41 – Well, if listeners were depressed about the results of the US election, we’ve given them something completely different to be depressed about today. I know this isn’t easy work that you’re doing, and I really appreciate the dedication to your craft and informing us all about this Bob Berwyn from Inside Climate News, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

BB | 28:02 – You’re welcome. 

Narrator | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Chris Joss and Dr. John. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

When it comes to energy transitions, marine vessels tend to get overlooked, even though they are some of the worst polluters of our oceans and air. The heavy duty diesel fuel used by most ships presents serious problems for the planet. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Maria Gallucci, a Senior Reporter at Canary Media, who describes efforts being made to transform boats and ships into zero emission marine fleets. We look at a project to electrify tugboats in San Diego, a cutting-edge hydrogen ferry about to launch in San Francisco, and innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the international cargo shipping space.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Maria Gallucci (MG) | 00:17 – When we think about the effect that these vessels have, yes, they are certainly contributing to climate change in a very real way. They’re also directly spewing pollution into these communities as well.

Narrator | 00:30 – When it comes to energy transitions, marine vessels tend to get overlooked, even though they are some of the worst polluters of our oceans and air. The heavy duty diesel fuel used by most ships presents serious problems for the planet. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Maria Gallucci, a Senior Reporter at Canary Media, who describes efforts being made to transform boats and ships into zero emission marine fleets. We look at a project to electrify tugboats in San Diego, a cutting-edge hydrogen ferry about to launch in San Francisco, and innovations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the international cargo shipping space.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:30 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Maria Gallucci. Maria is a senior reporter for Canary Media. Maria, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Maria Gallucci (MG) | 01:43 – Hi. Thanks for having me.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:45 – Why don’t you first tell us about Canary Media. You just recently celebrated your third anniversary, correct?

Maria Gallucci (MG) | 01:51 – Yes, we did. So, Canary Media is a nonprofit newsroom covering the clean energy transition. We are a fully independent outlet, and we focus primarily on the United States, but kind of hoping to expand globally because obviously this is an issue that affects everywhere.

AW | 02:07 – When we think about energy transitions, we’re often thinking about getting an electric vehicle or making a change to our electric grid. But one of the more global issues is ocean transport. And you’ve written a few pieces on how maritime vessels are trying to electrify. Why don’t you first kind of give us an overview of some of the industry’s problems that they’re facing and, and what the solutions could be on the horizon? 

MG | 02:36 – Sure. So globally, the International Shipping Sector accounts for about 3% of greenhouse gas emissions every year. That includes cargo ships, harbor crafts, and all types of vessels that serve this massive multi-trillion dollar industry. And there are kind of many ways to go about tackling the problem of, one of which is, is developing greener fuels to go in these cargo ships. Another is electrifying, uh, especially the smaller vessels like tugboats and ferries. Still complicated and expensive to do, but, uh, we’re starting to see a lot of progress on harbor craft and particular that operate close to ports close to communities. And so it’s not just a solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also kind of these toxic air pollutants that concentrate in communities. 

AW | 03:28 – So these harbor craft, let’s focus on those a little bit more. It makes a lot of sense. These are kind of the low hanging fruit for transitioning to electrification, right? You can recharge them pretty frequently because they’re not out to Sea for two or three days. 

MG | 03:43 – Exactly. Uh, ferries especially, and even tugboats, they kind of have a home base. They’ll go out, they’ll do the run, they’ll come back, and so they can recharge, whereas right, a, a cargo ship could be sailing for weeks, uh, or longer, uh, kind of crossing the oceans. So that’s more complicated than something that sort of is, is always going to be at point A or point B.

AW | 04:06 – Maybe the holy grail is to someday transition these heavy long distance shipping fleets away from the heavy diesel that they use to electrified boats. But in the meantime, let’s talk about tug boats, which are surprising sources of quite a lot of pollution, particularly when you consider that they’re usually operating close to land. If you can back up a little bit and tell us a little bit about the history of the tugboat industry and how it’s been moving up till now. That might give us a little better perspective on, on the next phase in terms of electrification. 

MG | 04:43 – Sure. So right, in the United States, there’s about, 6,000 tugboats nationwide. These vessels account for about a quarter of, uh, greenhouse gas emissions from the US maritime fleet alone. That’s roughly the equivalent of driving 1.3 million cars in a year. So pretty significant. And, um, in California, which is obviously a, a major hub of shipping imports and exports, that state has about 230 tug boats, and these represent a disproportionate share of the air pollution in the state or air pollution among the commercial harbor craft. So just looking at California’s numbers, tug boats represent about 7% of the total harbor craft fleet, but they represent 19% of particular mat at 2.5 emissions. And these, uh, increase the risk of cancer in people. And this 7% of tugboats is responsible for 23% of total NOx emissions, which can damage people’s lungs and trigger asthma symptoms. So even though there are fewer tugboats, they represent a much bigger share of these nasty toxic emissions that harm people’s health. And that’s because of the, the diesel that they’re using and sort of the inefficient engines that they’re burning it with.

AW | 06:04 – And is that disproportionality also reflected in water pollution, or is it more of a airborne emissions are the, are the real problem when it comes to tugboats?

MG | 06:16 – To be honest, I actually don’t have a a, a clear answer for the water pollution as to whether tugboats certainly do contribute water pollution. They leak diesel, they, you know, spill trash. Um, but I don’t know exactly if it’s disproportionately worse as it is with air pollution.

AW | 06:36 – Right. The reason I asked is that I was thinking of these cruise ships that go into some of the more fragile harbors around the world. You’ll hear about them going into fjords, and then these very pristine waters will end up having oil slicks and fish die offs, et cetera, because of these very large boats, it seems like the ocean is infinite, but these heavy diesel fuels have a real direct impact on, on the coastlines that they come across.

MG | 07:03 – Definitely. And, and the fact that these vessels are so concentrated in such a small area. So even though the ocean is vast, all of this pollution, all of these emissions are happening in a concentrated area where, um, they interact with each other and there’s sort of this effect that happens, these cumulative effects that happen by being in a port or a harbor instead of sort of out in the middle of nowhere where, um, it kind of can spread out, be more diffuse. 

AW | 07:32 – So let’s talk about San Diego’s EWolf project, if you can. It’s, it’s pretty exciting and hopefully a template for transitioning tugboat fleets around the country. What is the EWolf project, Mariam?

MG | 07:45 – Sure. So EWolf is the first all electric tugboat in the United States and one of only a few in the world. It recently arrived, uh, at the port of San Diego, and it should be, uh, set to start operating in the coming weeks. EWolf uses, batteries to power its electric motors and charges its batteries. It plugs in at a shoreside station in San Diego, that was built specifically for the project. It was EWolf has been several years in the making. Um, it was an initiative of Crowley, which is the company that owns and operates the vessel, the Port of San Diego, the Environmental Protection Agency, and kind of assorted regional authorities in California and around San Diego County. Uh, the support of the project. 

AW | 08:35 – And what are some of the hurdles that an electric boat needs to leap over? What are the biggest drawbacks? Is it the battery, is it the power charging, etc?

MG | 08:47 – It’s probably a combination of all of those. With any vessel in particular, weight is the biggest issue, and batteries are heavy. And so say for a tugboat that really needs to, to kind of rev up and down have a lot of power, it needs this, these bursts of energy. And to get that using batteries requires a lot of weight, which affects its ability to do the job. So it’s really a balancing act between, um, the weight of the batteries and how much power they deliver. And the other part of the equation is the charging equipment. So in general, ports tend to be, you know, they’re, they’re literally at the end of the grid. They’re on the waterfront. There might not be sufficient electrical infrastructure to supply all of this power that they need. You know, we’re talking about in the e wolf’s case, the EWolf has a 6.2 megawatt hour battery system, and so it needs about that much, you know, to, to recharge. And so in order to have an electric tugboat or an electric vessel, you need to compliment that with charging infrastructure, um, building batteries on land, pulling directly from the grid, uh, whatever you can do to supply the power without kind of overburdening the infrastructure that’s there. 

AW | 10:04 – And is there a solar element as well in terms of the recharging? 

MG | 10:08 – Yeah, so with the EWolf project, they built what’s called a micro grid. So this system draws power from San Diego Gas and Electric’s power grid. It can also store it in a three megawatt hour battery system, and it also has a canopy of solar panels over top of it. So the solar’s charging the batteries, it can draw from the grid, and that allows the tugboat to be able to charge whenever it needs to charge. And it also allows for that charging to happen, uh, without stressing out the grid, especially if everybody is turning on their air conditionings at the same time, or for whatever reason, there’s a huge power surge on the main grid, the tugboat can kind of do its own thing without adding that sort of surge of demand.

(Music Break) | 11:03

AW | 12:16 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Maria. Gallucci Maria is a senior reporter for Canary Media. So Maria, we’re talking about this EWolf project, this, this electric tugboat that’s setting sail in San Diego. Are there other similar projects that you’re aware of? What, what’s the competitive landscape look like for the electric tugboat market moving forward? 

MG | 12:43 – I’m aware of at least a one or two other electric tug boats, uh, that are launching in New Zealand, actually, but I believe it’s a relatively new space. I think where we’ve seen a lot of electrification in vessels happen has been with passenger ferries. One part of that is the fact that people ride on passenger ferries, sort of the general public interacts with ferries a lot more than they do with these working tugboats. And so there’s kind of more public pressure and exposure to clean these up first. 

AW | 13:13 – I would imagine also that these public ferries are public boats so that there’s no private industry that’s already made an investment into their diesel boat. And then asking them to give up that investment and switch to an electric is, is very difficult in like the tugboat industry, let’s say, where a private company might own a fleet of non-electric boats, and now you’re asking them to switch to these very expensive boats, that that transition won’t be easy, I imagine, or certainly not as easy as as something like a government mandate with ferries, right? 

MG | 13:48 – Exactly. And that’s, well, a big reason why you’re starting to see the shift happen in California specifically is because the state has adopted regulations around harbor craft emissions. So requiring, um, ports or vessel operators to switch to cleaner technologies, be it, you know, all electric or some version of a, a less polluting, uh, engine or, or technology for these vessels. 

AW | 14:14 – So in San Francisco, there’s a hydrogen powered ferry system. How far along is it, and maybe you can contrast that technology from what you were describing with the battery powered tugboat. 

MG | 14:26 – So the battery powered tugboat is just that, it’s all batteries and electric motors. The hydrogen ferry in San Francisco called the Sea Change. 

AW | 14:35 – It’s called the Sea change, huh? 

MG | 14:37 – Yeah. Aptly named .

AW | 14:40 Go on, sorry.

MG | 14:44 – No, no, that’s all right. So, uh, fuel cells work like batteries except that they are using hydrogen to, um, produce electrical energy that drives the motors. Uh, Sea change has been several years in the making. It is in San Francisco. Um, I’m not quite sure the exact status. I know that they are the sort of, the owners and operators are waiting to get all of the requirements that they need because this is a new type of technology, a first of a kind for, um, for the country certainly and for San Francisco. So there are a lot of extra layers of, of regulations that go into making sure everything’s good to go. I mean, in any situation, but especially when you’re dealing with passengers, I think there’s an, uh, sort of an enhanced layer of making sure nothing goes wrong. 

AW | 15:29 – And would the fueling be comparable to hydrogen powered vehicles that we see, especially in fleet vehicles? Would fueling up these ferries be similar to just fueling up a hydrogen car, or is it a more elaborate process? 

MG | 15:45 – It’s fundamentally similar, and that is sort of one of the advantages, um, that at least proponents of hydrogen ferries and cars say, is that it’s more akin to fueling up your gas car, your diesel truck, uh, your, you’re putting a nozzle into the tank and refueling in that way. Versus with a charger, you have to wait potentially hours, um, to, to recharge a battery. The Sea Change, the hydrogen ferry in San Francisco has fuel cells. It also has storage tanks, which it keeps on board. So it is bringing its own fuel with it in that way, just as it might, you know, um, tanks of diesel fuel and that allows it to travel up to 300 nautical miles at speeds as fast as 15 knots, which is kind of similar to the capabilities of diesel-powered vessels. So in that way, it’s kind of able to operate relatively similarly to sort of the existing, existing ferry technology. 

AW | 16:47 – So are there other ferries that are using hydrogen power around the country or the globe that you’re aware of? And are there also some battery-powered ferries that we can kind of compare the performance and the problems that need to be overcome with both of these concurrent technologies that are unfolding? 

MG | 17:07 – So, as far as I understand, Sea change is the first hydrogen powered ferry in the United States. There are others in the, around the world. Uh, Norway especially has been leading on all types of, uh, sort of zero emission technology for, for maritime, uh, including ferries and other types of vessels, because they have a huge amount of public money to invest in these projects, but also because it is such a maritime culture traveling from, from these fjords, you know, that’s how people get around. So there’s a real need to reduce pollution from those vessels. Um, in the United States, we are starting to see more electric ferries. Washington state is, uh, working to convert some of its fleet. San Francisco actually the same, uh, uh, uh, public agency that is bringing on the hydrogen ferries, also working on battery powered ferries. And that technology, my sense is that battery ferries are gaining momentum, uh, are gaining more momentum than hydrogen fuel cell ferries. That’s not to say that we won’t see more of the hydrogen, but I think, um, the same way that’s happening on, on the road is the more you have of something, the costs come down, timelines come down, people understand the technology better. And so I think that’s slowly starting to happen with, uh, battery powered ferries in particular. 

AW | 18:32 – So turning back to these tugboats for a second, if we can, we, we kind of discussed how the transition could be challenging in the face of private industry and, and it’s less public facing in general than ferries, but, um, how, how do, how do people that you, um, well, um, how should, how will policymakers approach putting in incentives and, and helping to usher along this transition from, um, uh, diesel powered tugboat fleets to an electric fleet in your estimation? 

MG | 19:14 – Well, one of the sort of clearest example of this at the federal level is the Inflation reduction Act, uh, which Congress passed in 2022. That includes, well, includes hundreds of billions of dollars for clean energy investment. Among those are $3 billion just for cleaning up ports. And, uh, some of that funding, uh, is, could be used for zero emission vessels and other types of infrastructure like cranes and forklifts and other kind of heavy duty diesel burning equipment that also contribute to port pollution. So that’s a, a very clear example. The EPA has other funds that is pulling from to reduce diesel emissions in particular. And so, especially with ports and these types of harbor crafts, I think, um, there’s a lot of overlap between investments for reducing carbon emissions, but also public support for just clean air in general with, uh, reducing diesel pollution.

(Music Break) | 20:17

AW | 21:59 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Maria Gallucci Maria is a senior reporter for Canary Media. At the outset of our conversation, Maria, you gave us some information about how tugboats affect climate change, their disproportionate share compared to other vessels. How do ferries stack up in terms of their emissions? Are they bad polluters as well? 

MG | 22:26 – They are, and for similar reasons, um, because they typically have these older diesel engines. Um, so looking again at California, uh, ferries represent 2% of commercial harbor craft, but they contribute 11% of particulate matter, 2.5 pollution and 15% of NOx emissions. So they have a much higher share of pollution than they do actual number of vessels, very similar to tug boats. And these, again, are operating very close to shore, very close to communities. Another kind of interesting stat for the entire country is that about 39 million Americans live in close proximity to ports. The majority of those people, uh, are lower income or people of color. And this is, uh, these are stats from the, uh, EPA. So really when we think about the effect that these vessels have, yes, they are certainly contributing to climate change in a very real way. They’re also directly spewing pollution into these communities as well. 

AW | 23:29 – And for the passengers, is that a problem? I know that there’s been studies that show that people who work on cruise ships tend to have a higher rate of asthma and other airborne illnesses. I can’t imagine it’s good to be sitting right next to a, a motor of an old polluting diesel ferry if that’s part of your daily commute, let’s say, or the employees who work on these boats. 

MG | 23:53 – Right? Yes, that, that’s a very good point. I would say that the, the risk is probably much higher for the people who work on the boats in terms of the health impacts, it’s obviously not a good thing, but I think it really depends on how much exposure a person has a little bit in the morning, a little bit in the evening, uh, is kind of different than having these sort of emissions accumulate above a community day in, day out. 

AW | 24:21 – Unless there’s some epidemiological study that’s looking at the impact of ferries on employees or, or the, the local communities. It’s tough to pinpoint, but one can imagine that it’s, it’s a lot better when it’s a zero emissions boat that we’re looking at rather than these heavy diesel fuel emitters. 

MG | 24:39 – Exactly. And the mission’s, um, obviously a big thing, but noise as well. Um, these zero emission vessels are generally much, much quieter, uh, which is more pleasant for the passengers,  and for the workers. Um, although an interesting sort of, um, uh, fact, what I learned talking, uh, to folks on the e tugboat story, the EWolf is that crews on tugboats use noise as, as cues to understand what the vessel is doing. And so in the absence of noise, they’re having to relearn or kind of learn new ways of understanding, uh, the direction or, or sort of the function that the tugboat is doing, because they can no longer depend on sort of the groan of the diesel engine to tell them. 

AW | 25:24 – We’re not all going to be riding on electric ferries anytime too soon. It sounds like it’s going to be a slow rollout over the next decade or so, one would imagine. Is that fair to say?

AW | 26:15 – What does the future hold for international shipping and travel? Are there solutions on the horizon for electrified vessels that can travel long distances, Maria? 

MG | 26:27 – The future for large cargo ships and other types of vessels is a lot less clear. Um, there are, I think certainly we will see batteries incorporated into these vessels, and, and that’s already happening today. Hundreds of, of vessels, uh, large vessels use batteries, um, but not necessarily for sort of their main source of propulsion. It’s more to, to kind of power the lights and the equipment on the vessel. Um, a lot of, there’s sort of a lot of momentum around, uh, what are called kind of future fuels. So it could potentially be ammonia, uh, or hydrogen ideally produced using renewable energy. Um, these fuels are possible to make, but they’re extremely expensive, extremely energy intensive, and no place really has the infrastructure to supply them. So, uh, but I, I think there’s general consensus that to clean up large cargo ships, you’ll need a cleaner fuel. Because again, like I was talking about at the, uh, earlier part of the segment, the weight from the batteries is a big problem and it’s an even bigger problem when you’re on a, you know, 300 plus foot long cargo ship carrying cargo, uh, carrying containers, carrying cars, all these things. So there’s a lot of progress and a lot of momentum, but I don’t think that there’s sort of a real, um, agreement or clear picture yet of what, you know, the future cargo ship will look like. 

AW | 27:53 – Maria Gallucci is a senior reporter for Canary Media Maria, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

MG | 28:00  Thank you. It’s been fun. 

AW | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Lettuce, Elvis Costello and Crosby Stills & Nash. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

Many of us on the Left see the fight for environmental justice as going hand-in-hand with other progressive battles, including racial justice and human rights. But, evidently, not all environmentalist efforts are rooted in the same values. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for ProPublica, about his recent piece chronicling an ugly, hidden side to the history of the American environmentalist movement. We learn about John Tanton, a virulent racist and eugenicist who befriended many environmental leaders, find out how he’s connected to the perpetrator of the El Paso Wal-Mart mass shooting, Patrick Crusius, and talk about how white supremacy and xenophobia have come to dominate right-wing rhetoric in this country.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 00:18 – We are all paying too little attention to, you know, the human impacts of climate change to the pressures of climate change and what that does to society and to politics, and to communities, not physically, not the disaster threats and things like that, but what it does to the way that we relate to each other.

Narrator | 00:35 – Many of us on the Left see the fight for environmental justice as going hand-in-hand with other progressive battles, including racial justice and human rights. But, evidently, not all environmentalist efforts are rooted in the same values. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Abrahm Lustgarten, a reporter for ProPublica, about his recent piece chronicling an ugly, hidden side to the history of the American environmentalist movement. We learn about John Tanton, a virulent racist and eugenicist who befriended many environmental leaders, find out how he’s connected to the perpetrator of the El Paso Wal-Mart mass shooting, Patrick Crusius, and talk about how white supremacy and xenophobia have come to dominate right-wing rhetoric in this country.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:35 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Abrahm Lustgarten. He’s a reporter at ProPublica. Abrahm, welcome back to Sea Change. Radio.

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 01:48 – Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:50 – Been almost a decade, I think, since we’ve spoken, but I wanted to have you on because you wrote an excellent piece recently for ProPublica entitled “The Ghost of John Tanton – Climate Change and Anti-Immigrant Hate are colliding for Telling a Volatile Future.” A lot of our discussions about the environmental movement have focused on race, and one of the criticisms that we hear is that it’s too white of a movement In many ways, John Tanton is really the poster child for that discussion. Who is he and why don’t you explain how you came to discuss him as part of a, a, a larger point you’re trying to make in this piece. 

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 02:28 – Yeah, so John Tanton is a man who started most of the organizations that we now know to be hugely influential in steering and characterizing and setting the tone of our debate over immigration in the United States. But he didn’t start out that way. He started out as, uh, an avid environmentalist and going back to the 1950s, 1960s, you know, he was, uh, both an early conservationist. He lived in Michigan and he started early conservation groups in Michigan. He was an early member of the Sierra Club and headed the Michigan chapter of the Sierra Club. And he, like many environmentalists of the era, was most concerned about this idea that we were overpopulating the planet, that the number of people on the planet was drawing too much on resources and making life unsustainable. And so he set out, uh, you know, a very intelligent individual and a very organized, uh, and networked individual to campaign against, uh, overpopulation, uh, and to do that in every way that he could. But that evolved over the years. And as the US reproductive rate stabilized in, in the mid 1970s, immigration became the largest form of population growth for the United States. And he turned all of his interest in energy and eventually his organizations towards battling immigration initially  as a form of population control. 

Alex Wise (AW) | 03:51 – And this intersection of anti-immigrant philosophy and environmentalism was born into some of these modern activists like Patrick Crusius, the El Paso Mass Murderer. Explain how he plays a role in, in your piece. 

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 04:11 – Yeah, so I was really interested in trying to trace the evolution of ideas. You know, you hear people say things, you hear Patrick Crusius say that immigrants are await on the environmental burden that Texas can handle, or that overpopulation from immigrants is displacing people from homes in the United States or using up too much water. And I’m interested in where those ideas came from and how, and how they evolved. And if you read deeply as I did into the history and the writings of John Tanton, he was among the first to try to frame immigration issues and environmental issues in this way. And over the decades that have followed the organizations that he founded or supported founding. So the Federation for American Immigration Reform Numbers, USA Center for Immigration Studies being the three primary very influential groups, they have trafficked in these precise messages for a very, very long period of time. They have formalized and made the argument that immigration is leading to the sprawl that we see outside major American cities, that immigration is responsible for the traffic jams, that immigration is responsible for rising CO2 emissions in the United States, and thus for the climate impacts that we’re experiencing and that immigration can account for water shortages and, and things like that. So when I read the manifesto of someone like Patrick Crusius this terrible crime, right? He, he went into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 and killed 23 people. And he did that to target Hispanics and migrants specifically. And he wrote a manifesto that touched on these exact themes. I recognized that those themes were not his invention and were not something that he had pulled from very recent or modern influences. But in fact, you know, went back quite a bit of time and had been carefully cultivated, starting with John Tanton.

Alex Wise (AW) | 06:01 – And John Tanton, as you write, didn’t come up with these ideas in a vacuum. He was very effective in evangelizing them. But you go back even further to the roots of the American Conservation Movement with John Muir and other people who were bordering on eugenics in many ways.

Abrahm Lustgarten (AL) | 06:21 – Yeah. Or were eugenicists. But, I mean, the intersection between environmentalism and, uh, you know, racist hate actually goes very, very far back, has a, has a deep history. It goes back to, you know, the Nazi party in Germany and the 1920s, even as far back as the late 18 hundreds, 1890s in Germany, with this idea of ecology and deep ecology and preserving this sort of purity of, of land and environment, and the argument that the earth is becoming overpopulated and that, that the earth can’t sustain. That goes back to, you know, Malthusian principles from, you know, Great Britain in the early 18 hundreds. And so these are very old themes, and they have always evoked deep feeling and, and resonance among, you know, a certain part of the population in that po the population is, on one hand, concerned with environmental preservation. You know, which many people would argue is a very good thing but partially out of a motivation to preserve the sense of, of purity, uh, whether that’s purity of water, uh, you know, a clean river running out of the mountains or purity of place, or purity of people, which for many people means, you know, white people, European descent. So you see, you see this sort of racist inflection point in a lot of what we consider the classic environmental movement in the United States. And John Muir, um, you know, was susceptible to this way of thinking. He, uh, uh, advocated, for example, you know, for the clearing of Yosemite Valley in California from, uh, of Native Americans, and described them as, you know, as dirty people. And you know, John Muir’s writings don’t portray him as an outright racist individual, but he’s, you know, he’s, uh, operating at a time, you know, just after the genocide of, of, uh, native Americans across the country. And he’s susceptible to this same sort of thinking, um, you know, about, um, you know, a certain type of people as a certain type of, of pollutant. And you see that also in, you know, the formative, um, environmentalists like Madison Grant, uh, uh, you know, conservationist who, uh, you know, was involved in the, in the establishment and founding of the Bronx Zoo in New York and in Glacier National Park. And, you know, and other, very influential, you know, environmental movements, in the Roosevelt era, um, where, Madison Grant was explicitly, um, motivated by eugenics ideas and kind of a racial preservationist calling, to preserve what he described as, you know, as the great race, meaning the white race of, of European descent.

(Music Break) | 09:01

AW | 10:02 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m thinking to Abrahm Lustgarten from ProPublica. So Abram, we were talking about this piece that you’ve written on John Tanton. I think what’s so troubling to me reading this is the progressive movement has put its flag in the ground and said that they are the movement of, of science, and that the climate change denying class are setting us back. And, and that’s fairly clear, but one of the things that’s so troubling about this movement that you write about is that it incorporates science and they don’t deny climate change, and they embrace environmentalism in so many ways, but it’s, it takes such a dark, troubling turn. 

AL | 10:48 – Yeah. You know, that was a surprising outcome of my reporting, this notion that, you know, so many prominent conservatives, uh, and I’m talking about far right, not kind of middle right conservatives, but so many far right. Conservatives that I spoke with over the course of my reporting did not deny climate change. And, you know, I think many of us think of, you know, climate change as a, as a Democrat issue and absolutely denied by, by conservatives. And what I found is denied by the corporate class conservatives, but less so by the cultural and fundamentalist, you know, far right. Conservatives. And that’s because, well, it’s, it’s for a lot of reasons. I mean, these people that are often more rural and more related to the land that they live on, I found in the extremist communities, you know, they’re people that were more sympathetic to the kind of racial arguments that I was just describing, this notion of environmental threat being climate change, threatening environmental purity, which has been, you know, an age old notion. And, you know, the, the evolution that I think that we’re beginning to see is that, you know, the denial of climate change on the right is, you know, is giving way to an acceptance of climate change. And what that means is that like every other issue, uh, we will have differing opinions on, on what to do about it. And so what I began to hear on the right was, uh, something along the lines of, yeah, this is happening and it’s affecting us, and it has meaning for us. And, uh, we, as you know, as a, as a body politic, uh, you know, on the far right, might have different solutions or different outcomes we’d like to see than you on the left. And we think that, you know, Democrats are doing a lousy job of, you know, addressing the implications of climate change because some of them, for example, might be enhanced immigration. And what are we gonna do about that? And so there is this sort of early sign of a retaking, a reclaiming of environmentalism and a reclaiming, you know, of climate change as an issue among far right extremists that I spoke with. 

AW | 12:43 – And how do these extremists take the current Republican talking point? Well, the Donald Trump talking point that sure, climate change might exist, but that just means that these rising sea levels are gonna mean more beachfront property. 

AL | 12:57 – Yeah. You know, I found real division there that, that, that this is not a monolithic kind of group when we talk about conservatives, you know, I heard real kind of anger and resentment towards what I described as sort of corporate class Republicans. The idea being when they think about, um, immigration, that, you know, that there’s a corporate class that’s pro-immigration, uh, because they want cheap labor for, you know, for their big businesses, and they want to undermine the American worker. And, and on the far right, I, you know, I heard a little bit more about the need to preserve old historic notions of, American demography, American family, the sanctity of, you know, of our nature and wild places and, and the sanctity of a majority of European descent racially. So that, that’s a real, real difference. I don’t think that we, you know, can any, I will never again think of, you know, of, of conservatives or as Republicans as, as representing, a single view on climate change. 

AW | 13:53 – Maybe you can expand on how the rural population has embraced environmentalism in a different way, and how that ends up getting distilled into this anti-immigrant sentiment. 

AL | 14:05 – Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s so many, so many things here, and some of, you know, the conversation about the environmental movement in the United States, you know, is outside the, the scope of, of this reporting. Um, except to say that, you know, there’s, there’s long been, um, you know, some interesting overlaps between the goals of, you know, what we’d call standard environmentalists, mainstream environmentalism in the United States, and, um, you know, and if not explicitly, uh, you know, terribly bigoted notions, um, at least sort of leaning, um, you know, in that direction or expressing sympathies in that direction. And, you know, that goes back to the Sierra Club and the example I mentioned about, you know, about John Muir, uh, as a sentiment. And, um, you know, and in my article, I, I look closely at a chapter in which, um, the, the Sierra Club itself was, um, an active participant in this conversation, uh, and ultimately defended, um, uh, you know, a, uh, a non-racist position, uh, for environmentalists, but was really, you know, kind of on the fence about that for a long time. Where, um, you know, legendary American environmentalists like David Brower, uh, were strongly on, you know, on the side of the Sierra Club standing for controlling immigration, uh, as a form of protecting the American environment. And I think you see that, you know, uh, in lots of different ways. If you look closely at what environmental organizations do in the United States today, for example, um, you know, deeply devoted to the protection of, of land, the conservation of land, the purity of that land, a lot less involved in, um, you know, in issues of, uh, you know, uh, inequality or, um, you know, or climate justice or environmental justice issues when we talk about, you know, um, the largest environmental groups in the United States. So, you know, there, there is a systemic vulnerability there in that community that comes out in things like, um, you know, this story about John Tanton because the whole community of John Tanton and his colleagues and the people who run the organizations that he founded, almost all of them, you know, have strong environmentalist leanings and arose out of, you know, these, um, these environmental organizations and, and their history. 

AW | 16:14 – And Tanton was able to connect with like-minded people to a certain extent through environmentalism. And then this anti-immigrant rhetoric became a larger and larger part of his philosophy without giving away too much of the story. And I want our listeners to go and read your piece. Why don’t you tell the tale of his evolution or de-evolution in the environmental movement as his life came to an end? 

AL | 16:43 – Yeah. You know, so my reading of John Ton’s, um, brilliance, if you wanna call it that, you know, he certainly was a, you know, a very intelligent individual, uh, was that he, you know, with some, um, sort of political, you know, acuity, he recognized that there was an overlap between these environmental issues, this interest in conservation, and, um, his interest in, uh, eugenics and in preserving, you know, uh, uh, communities of European descent, for lack of a better way to, you know, call it, he was trending towards a white nationalism. And, um, you know, he recognized explicitly that he could build a stronger movement, not by just appealing to, uh, you know, the most conservative elements that would already naturally agree with him, um, but by appealing to that, you know, that environmental community that had these sort of vulnerabilities, that had an interest in preserving, you know, an older notion of America, a wilder, a clean version of America. And he basically systemically, systematically preyed on, um, you know, on those sympathies, uh, throughout many, many decades, um, he, he wrote explicitly about the need to build a movement and to draw from the liberal side of the spectrum and to draw from the environmental movement. Um, he indirectly, his, you know, his organization’s waged this campaign, uh, with the Sierra Club to try to, you know, bring the Sierra Club in it’s 750,000 members, right? We’re talking about just an enormous environmental, uh, uh, organization in the United States, um, to, you know, to, to, to bear on the issue of, you know, of halting or, uh, slowing immigration into the United States to turn the Sierra Club into an environmental, into an anti-immigrant organization. Um, when that failed, uh, you know, he, again, you know, sort of preyed on those, um, environmental sympathies and turned the direction of his immigration organizations, uh, towards the issue of climate change and explicitly, uh, published studies that, um, you know, purported to link immigrants to rising carbon emissions, uh, and things like that, um, to basically make the argument that, uh, you know, the immigration was causing climate change, the immigrants were causing climate change. And he did that as his organizations grew in, in influence and power, and they’ve, they eventually became far more powerful than he was. Um, uh, right in the piece how, you know, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Center for Immigration Studies become, um, you know, the quintessential lobbying groups in Washington that affect, uh, the laws that we think about, or the lack of, you know, of laws and policy progress that we know about when it comes to immigration, that they, when you hear about, you know, uh, Arizona’s, you know, law to stop people on the streets and, and ask them for documentation, right? That arose from lobbying, uh, from the Federation for Immigration Reform. Uh, you know, the Dream Act has been, you know, uh, uh, curtailed and, and delayed from passage because of efforts of, of these groups, they become incredibly powerful and they guide the conversation we’ve had today. And ultimately, they, their, their sentiments, their rhetoric, uh, you know, has gotten picked up, uh, repeatedly, um, hundreds and hundreds of times by, um, by right wing influencers, by right-Wing radio, um, by people like Tucker Carlson. And they repeat those messages, or they morph those messages, and they kind of evolve over time. And it’s like, you know, the old playground game of telephone, really, I mean, you start with an idea and you say something one way and somebody else says it in a slightly, you know, different way, maybe a slightly more inflammatory way or slightly more dangerous way. Um, and it evolves through steps over time. And then it’s heard by, uh, you know, and absorbed by people like Patrick Crusius and other mass shooters, uh, around the world and, and in the United States who, um, you know, have referenced the same sentiments in, uh, you know, in their manifestos and the things that they write. They call themselves eco fascists that refer to themselves as protectors of, you know, of the environment. Um, and the danger is, and what the academics, uh, that I talk to warn me of, and the, you know, counter-terrorism experts that I talk to warn me of is that, you know, as the pressures of climate change get worse, and these, uh, these sentiments and sympathies are already kind of floating around there in, you know, in the kind of ecosystem of, you know, of far right ideas, um, that, uh, you know, it suggests a more volatile reaction in the future, um, maybe an organized reaction, uh, you know, that bu begin to see explicit campaigns to use the pressures of climate change to, you know, to divide us further, um, you know, to justify more hate to justify policies that close the border and so on.

(Music Break) | 21:27

AW | 22:30 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Abram Lust Garden from ProPublica. So Abram, you’re talking about this anti-immigrant hate becoming normalized. I can’t help but think of the Republican National Convention this summer where I saw thousands of people chanting mass deportation or something to that effect. The messaging has become so normalized that quote unquote, normal people feel comfortable being on national television chanting this kind of hate, it’s become acceptable. 

AL | 23:04 – Yeah, I think, I think that’s right. And to the degree that that is true, uh, a very, very significant part of the responsibility for that goes straight back to John Tanton. I mean, that is why he’s such an important sort of node of activity on this issue. But I want to be clear, you know, I mean, this is a nuanced issue. I, I don’t wanna overstate, you know, that climate change is primary driver of immigration to the United States. It’s not, it’s a factor among many, many others. And it’s probably a growing factor. And I also, you know, don’t wanna deny what, to me seems pretty clear from having looked at immigration and border issues for a long time, which is that, you know, we have a system that’s broken and needs to, to be repaired. So, you know, not a conversation about whether or whether or not we should allow immigration. I kind of, you know, leave that to the side. It’s a problem in need of some policy. But to the extent that the rhetoric is extraordinarily vitriolic to the extent that it leads to, to violence and hate, and begins to intertwine with other things like rising white supremacy and white nationalism in the United States, that isn’t just immigration focused. You know, there is a very strong thread there that ties to environmentalism and ties to John Tanton and ties to his early recognition that climate change was going to exacerbate all of this.

AW | 24:16 – You end your piece quoting Crucius, many people think that the fight for America is already lost. They couldn’t be more wrong. This is just the beginning. So in your research of  his manifesto and, and where he became familiar with these ideas, was he reading directly from a John Tanton, or was he a couple generations removed from it? Where did Patrick Crusius swerve so far off the road of basic sociology? 

AL | 24:46 – So we actually know less than, uh, you might think about Patrick Crusius thinking, uh, most of, of that is still tied up in, uh, you know, in court cases that are, that are sealed at the moment. I did not base my reporting off of direct links between him and John Tanton. I don’t have evidence that he read John Tanton or, or anything like that. Um, but what is really clear is that the sentiments that he wrote in his manifesto, uh, very, very strongly echo things that John Tanton said, and things that, uh, John Ton’s colleagues said, and things that John Canton’s organizations published over many, many years. The ideas are clearly overlapping. And where Patrick Crusius got those ideas from, whether he got them from, uh, a friend down the street or got them from Tucker Carlson, or got them from reading John Tanton himself, I don’t know. And I don’t know if we’ll ever know. And that was kind of my interest in, in trying to trace the genesis of I, of these ideas. But the ideas are very clearly the same. And at the same time, Patrick, Crusius was at the time, you know, a a 21-year-old kid who didn’t appear to have, not kid, you know, he’s, he’s an adult and he’s responsible for his actions, but did not appear to have, you know, a broad range of, of life experience and, you know, and was not necessarily a deep thinker on these issues, uh, so much as, you know, a a reactive thinker to some of the influences around him, um, that, you know, seemed to have destabilized and already, you know, unstable, uh, situation. And so, I see Patrick Crusius, the sign of the future or a great actor, but really as, you know, just one of the symptoms that’s popping up of a, of a much larger, you know, theme. And if I can just step back for a second, you know, and take the 40,000 foot view, you know, of, of this and, and why I looked at this story. It’s because I think that we are all paying too little attention to, you know, the human impacts of climate change to the pressures of climate change and what that does to society and to politics and to communities, not physically, not the disaster threats and things like that. But what it does to the way that we relate to each other and the United Nations has, uh, a assist, uh, you know, a spectrum of scenarios that they use to define, you know, the futures that they’re predicting for climate change. And one of them calls for, you know, rising nationalism, uh, a turn inwards in our domestic focus and, um, and, uh, growing conflict. And there’s very little exploration of what that means and what that looks like. And that’s basically the premise, you know, for my reporting is, you know, how are we where when we look at the United States politically, culturally, do we start to see the friction that’s growing or being enhanced by the pressures of drought, by the wildfires, by forest retreat, by immigration, to the extent that it’s, you know, driven by climate change, um, and by each of these issues. And, uh, and that’s what led me to look at, at immigration for this particular story and led me to look at John Tanton. I think it’s just one example of many ways that we’re starting to see that the impacts of climate change are dividing us with enormous potential risk. 

AW | 27:58 – Abrahm Lustgarten, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

AL | 28:01 – Thank you for having me. 

AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Stevie Wonder, Alex Wise and Joe Henry. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

This week on Sea Change Radio, we give you one last pre-election episode with two keen political journalists. First, a free-flowing conversation about the presidential election with John Stoehr of the Editorial Board where we discuss the state of polling, take a look at the closing days of the two candidates and evaluate the impact of the Harris campaign having a significant ground game advantage. Then, we speak to Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine as he breaks down his site’s new voting guide – a useful tool to get a better grasp of the many amendments on state and local ballots across the country.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

John Stoehr (JS) | 00:21 – We don’t even talk about self-inflicted wounds with him because there’s so many of them. There’s so many. We just toss it in the pile of more of the same. We won’t think of it until he loses. When he loses and all the dread is gone, then we’ll look back and say, of course, of course he was going to lose.

Narrator | 00:39 – This week on Sea Change Radio, we give you one last pre-election episode with two keen political journalists. First, a free-flowing conversation about the presidential election with John Stoehr of the Editorial Board where we discuss the state of polling, take a look at the closing days of the two candidates and evaluate the impact of the Harris campaign having a significant ground game advantage. Then, we speak to Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Magazine as he breaks down his site’s new voting guide – a useful tool to get a better grasp of the many amendments on state and local ballots across the country.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:20 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by John Stoehr. He’s the founder and editor in chief of The Editorial Board. John, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

John Stoehr (JS) | 01:37 – Thanks for having me back, Alex.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:39 – I really wanted to get a chance to speak with you before the election one last time. I think we’re all on pins and needles a little bit. There’s that sense of dread, not necessarily because we think Kamala Harris will lose, but because if she does, the downside is just so terrible. I think you, just like myself, have, have skipped over a lot of the articles that we’ve seen. Here’s what will happen to the Department of Education if Donald Trump should win. Here’s what will happen to the EPA if Donald Trump should win. I’m just not clicking on any of those articles right now. Well, why don’t you speak to this greater dread that we’re all feeling and and what it means from your perspective.

John Stoehr (JS) | 02:18 – Well, I, I think first of all, the dread is appropriate. It’s appro. We are all, we’re not crazy. You know, we, we do think, we do, we all understand the risks that we we’re facing and that we are all feeling a bit of hype. Hypervigilance is really what that is. It’s a anticipation, a bracing of oneself or some i some impact that’s coming, and that’s, that is appropriate. And I think, I think a lot of people, uh, actually see things in, in an upside down kind of way. Like, this is a bad thing that we’re all feeling and we actually can’t wait for it to be over. Now, I do think we can all, we all want it to, to be over. That’s true. And I think that’s also reasonable. But let’s not forget how reasonable it is to be bracing for impact . You know, we, it is not crazy. And I think that’s where we should, you know, if you’re, if you’re, um, doom scrolling or trying to get ahead, read ahead about project 2025 and so on and so forth, yes, there can be some, maybe some unhealthy obsession with that. But it’s also, it begins with a very reasonable impulse to protect oneself, at least mentally and emotionally. I think, I think we can, we can spiral off into doom. And I think if you’re into doom, you’ve, you’re going too far because it hasn’t happened yet. , you know, the future is unwritten. We don’t know what it is quite yet. But I think all of us should bear in mind that this, this is, this is really important, right? And, and the feelings, our feelings are telling us something, so we should listen to them.

Alex Wise (AW) | 04:01 – I’ve been quite ambivalent and gone back and forth from being very optimistic to very scared and pessimistic. As a journalist who doesn’t work for an official organization, I’m my own boss here at Sea Change Radio, I’m able to go canvas, and I often take advantage of that by going to a swing state. I’m in California, so my vote really doesn’t count all that much for the presidency. So I’ve been to Reno twice in the last month or so, and just speaking to a lot of Trump voters, because Nevada has this automatic registration system since 2018. So there’s a, a huge swath of the electorate there that is not aligned by party. Many of them don’t even know they’re registered. So you knock on a door and it says Bob Johnson, 35-year-old male nonpartisan. And you just have no idea. It’s almost harder to have these friendly conversations because you have to be friendly with these people in their homes, and then you realize that they’re voting for a fascist, and it, you, you walk away saying, okay, thanks for your time. You know, you don’t want to push it with somebody who’s a Trump supporter, but you end up feeling a real pit in your stomach.

JS | 05:20 – Mm. Can I ask you a question about that, Alex?

AW | 05:22 – Please.

JS | 05:22 – Yeah. So, I mean, where do you begin? And I asked that question specifically because, you know, these are, these are folks who see other people as not human beings. You see what I mean? Like a fascist is somebody who looks at the other as not a human being and, and who’s worthy of destruction. Right? That’s really boil boils down to. So I’m curious like what a door knocker does when they discover . That that’s the fact. I mean, where do you, where do you begin? 

AW | 05:47 – Well, it depends on what stage you are in the campaign, when I was there in mid-September, we were still in the voter persuasion and identification stage. So we had a little bit more of a mandate from the campaign to go out and try to really listen to them. We just had a guest on Sea Change Radio, who wrote a book called The Joy of Talking Politics with strangers, Elizabeth Cher, and she’s a superstar, canvasser herself, and her, one of her core principles of canvassing is the 80 20 policy of, of listening 80% of the time, and only talking 20%. So it, it has to be their own conclusion that they’re reaching. You’re not going to be able to make some impassioned speech like an Aaron Sorkin show and convert them to see it the way you see it. This last weekend was very different though, because this was getting out the vote. So if somebody is a Trump supporter, there’s too many people who are on the blue team that you need to get to, you move on. And everybody has their own style. I have to bite my tongue. It kills me to do it, but I really feel like I would be doing a disservice to the candidates and the policies I represent if I got angry or if I told these people what I really think about their candidate. 

JS | 07:04 – All right. Yeah, it sounds like the early stages, you’re ac actually the 80 20 situation, you’re actually demonstrating your humanity. You are like, look, this, I’m a real person, . Right? I have real stakes just like you. And we’re all, you know, we really are all in this together. If you, if you believe that we’re all in this together, and I hope you do believe we’re all in this together, because otherwise you’re gonna vote for the fascist . Just really what it boils down to. 

AW | 07:29 – Yes. And I’m optimistic about Kamala Harris’s chances in, in the election, but if it all was based on Nevada, I would not like her chances. I think she’s going to win, but I don’t think she’s gonna win Nevada because I think it has unique demographics that have shifted quite a lot over the last 10 years or so. If you think about Nevada’s exploding population centers, originally they were all based on casinos. Reno and Las Vegas are gambling towns. And for the first 20, 30 years of that expansion, there was a huge service economy that had to be built around that. And so there were lower and middle income workers who were working in that sector. I think now you’re seeing more of the, the similar migrations that Phoenix and other parts of the Sunbelt Texas witnessed over the last decade or two. Nevada, you know, doesn’t have an income tax. So you’re seeing a lot of white people moving from California and other states to these regions. Like, uh, Las Vegas has become this giant excerpt, you know, this is a big metropolitan area now. It’s not just the Las Vegas strip. Let me frame it this way. If you were moving to a state that had 60 to 90 days of triple digit temperatures, you can’t really believe in climate change, right? If you think it’s a good investment in the future to buy a home in Phoenix or Reno right now, or, or Las Vegas, your values are that you are able to have a home. You have your own little fiefdom. You want the status quo, which is cheap air conditioning, lots of it. You want to have access to your trucks, your boats, your jet skis. You want to enjoy the fruits of your labor and so to speak. That person wants the status quo. They’re looking to keep what they have. Those people are generally not thinking about the future, and they’re not swayed by a vision of a brighter tomorrow. 

JS | 09:24 – I’ve been very skeptical about all the polling. I mean, I, I like it when it, I like everybody else. I, when polls show Kamala Harris going, going up, I’m like, oh, great. But then a part of me thinks, well, yeah, well, well, you know what the last poll is on election day. Let’s just, you know, see what happens. Also, I have this kinda, maybe I have a grumpy attitude. Some say that basically, I’m like, well, you know, polls don’t matter because what matters is what taking democracy, uh, seriously. If you take democracy seriously, then you, then a polls are really irrelevant to you. 

AW | 09:58 – The polls don’t gauge who’s voting. 

JS | 10:01 – Yeah, that’s right. And, and people so often lie, I mean, this, this just, it’s really stunning. Like so much of our political discourse is based on polling, you know, as if it’s an empirical data point, as if it’s rock solid. And we, we have all these built, we all, all of us, when whenever we talk about polls, we say, you know, caveat, caveat, caveat. There’s all these reasons why these numbers can’t be trusted. But then we write entire pieces based, based on those as, and give the impression that these numbers can be trusted. And so there’s a, there’s a paradox built into our, our political journalism that I myself have, have fallen into that paradox many times.

(Music Break) | 10:48

AW | 11:38 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to John Stoehr from The, Editorial Board. So John, we’re talking about polling. How much do you think polling takes into account a ground game? And how important do you think having non-paid volunteers who are enthusiastic about their candidate knocking on doors by the millions matters ultimately? 

JS | 11:59 – Oh, I think it’s really the only thing that does matter. That, you know, people on the ground who are really, who are trained, who are motivated, who have a vision, that’s the thing that really matters most. I think polling is problematic for, you know, a couple of reasons. One is just technology. Most people have smartphones these days, and so much of polling rep, is based on landline conversations. And that’s going to skew the results, I think, in one way or the other. 

AW | 12:30 – And the methodology changes so much because of technology changing and other tweaks that they want to make. Pollsters will try to make up for that. And then the Nate Silvers and the Harry Entens and Elliot Morrises of the world will end say, well, we have decades of polling data to look back upon. And, and that is a bedrock, but it’s, those methodologies shift every election. So you can’t say the 1948 Gallup poll is somehow analogous to the 1988 Gallup poll, right?

JS | 12:59 – I mean, you can put some trust in the polls, right? And even Nate Silver will say, well, it’s just a poll and we’ll see how it works out, . But the thing is that all of our conversation is built on, on these, on this, what we give the impression that it’s firm. You know, that this is solid data and it’s, it’s not that solid. And every time we have an election, it reveal, it reveals like how unsolid it was, you know, in 20 18, 20 20, 20 22, you know, 2022 for instance. You know, there was supposed to be the red wave. And historically speaking, that was what everybody anticipated. I did, sort of too. The red wave meaning, you know, whatever parties in the off in the holds, the, the White House, the following midterm is a reaction to that somehow, right? So Republicans were supposed to wait, have a red wave, and what in fact happened was they had a trickle, right? They did take, take the house, but it was by a slim, uh, majority. So much of our conversation, we as journalists have to be confident about what we’re saying, right? Confidence is like basically our realm, the coin of the realm, , right? If we are not, if we don’t feel confident, look confident, sound confident, then you know, people probably are not going to pay attention to us. And there it is, right there. If people are not paying attention to us, we don’t really matter . So we have to sound confident and we have to base it on something. And the, and, and the paradox is that a lot of this basis is quite mushy. And I don’t know what the solution is. I really don’t. I mean, how are we supposed to have conversations if we can’t base it on something? I, I, I don’t, I don’t know what the solution is. But I think it’s important, really important that we acknowledge that it’s not as, as, as solid as it is and maybe have more conversations about how not solid it is. You know, at least as much as we have, we assume that it is solid.

AW | 14:53 – Well, people want to feel one way or another, they want to get that dopamine hit. They want answers. They want either someone to make them feel better or they want to blame somebody if it doesn’t go their way in the end. So that’s part of this self-perpetuating cycle of the, the media, the analyst class, and the pollsters and the consumers of media. I think it’s called limbic politics. I don’t know if you’ve heard that expression. 

JS | 15:20 – No, I have  

AW | 15:20 – Because it, like, it appeals to somebody’s limbic system. 

JS | 15:23 – Oh, okay. Sure. All right, well, all right. And all the power to them. I had somebody the other day tell me that if we just set aside politics and so on, we treat each other with human decency. And they just set us, set politics aside. And I said, it’s the reverse. Human decency is political. It is political to see another person as a human being. That is the bedrock of liberal politics. It is the bedrock. And once you start seeing another person as not a human being, that’s when you start drifting toward fascism. 

AW | 15:55 – And that’s why I think door knocking is so critical, because you’re there and you’re making your best pitch, and you have to be polite and you say, thank you, have a nice day. You say why you’re passionate about it, and you make them not look at you as the other. 

JS | 16:10 – Yeah. You’re demonstrating your humanity. You’re like, here I am. I’m another person. I disagree with you, but I am another person at the same time. Right? And you’re forcing them to deal with that cognitive dissonance, right. To, to, because in their minds, to disagree is kind of is, is, is that’s the, you stop being a human being once you start disagreeing with them. Right? So you get them to like, no, I’m a, I can disagree with you, and I’m a human being at the same time. Right. That is in itself inherently political. I, I don’t, I really don’t like it when people say, let’s just set aside politics. I mean, Jesus Christ was a political actor.

AW | 16:51 – Explain. 

JS | 16:52 – He was, he said, love God with all your heart and soul and doing unto others as you would have done unto you. It’s absolutely a political statement. It’s a revolutionary political statement. That’s why he’s Jesus Christ , you know, he changed the world with that kind of thinking, you know, because prior to that, it was basically, my tribe, your tribe, I kill you or you kill me. That, you know, and that’s what Trump and his people are trying to return us to this idea that this democracy is ours. Everybody else is an animal and is worthy of extermination. That’s what they’re saying. You know? And, you know, that’s their politics. Yeah. We keep looking at that as if they’re politicizing democracy. No, that’s a kind of politics that we need to meet with another kind of politics, the good kind, the kind that’s for everyone that’s universal. Where equality is the bedrock of our morality and our, our discussions about how to negotiate and organize society and parcel out all the limited resources, right? That’s , that’s what we, what we need. 

AW | 17:53 – So this last week, how is it going to shape how you look at November 5th? 

JS | 18:00 – Well, first of all, let’s just make sure that everybody understands that a lot of Americans don’t believe in democracy, period. Let’s just, universal democracy. They don’t believe it. So we shouldn’t be surprised when millions and millions of Americans vote for Donald Trump. We just, just get over that. So, let’s just say we’re on election day, and it looks like Kamala Harris is winning. What we will decide probably is that she ran the, probably the perfect campaign. 

AW | 18:25 – It feels that way. 

JS | 18:27 – It is a great campaign. It it’s almost full. I can’t think of a mistake that she’s made. 

AW | 18:32 – The one mistake that I think she made was listening to the advisors who said, not going back, because that wasn’t like enough futuristic thinking, and it was not positive enough. But I think it was back to that limbic politics where it’s, you got to have those three syllables, that it’s a chant. And people, I mean, I remember in 2008 when Obama had, yes we can, and going to see him speak, and we’re like, oh, he’s going to say, yes we can, and then we can all say, yes, we can. And it was this like kind of self enforcing feel good moment. And I saw that emerging in the early days of the Harris campaign, where she was saying, not going back and everyone go, not going back. But then they quashed it. They were like, nah, that’s not going to be our slogan. So I thought that was a slight misstep, but I agree with you. It has been a flawless campaign thus far. 

JS | 19:15 – Everybody can quibble about little things, but other, I don’t think structurally speaking, it’s the strong campaign you can expect from somebody who started in July. Come on. That’s right. So the reverse on election day, it, and I think this will be the case of, we’ll, we’ll see that he’s, that Trump is losing, we will finally come to the conclusion that he has run the worst campaign ever in our lifetimes. In our lifetimes. Anyway, maybe historians can go back farther, but the worst campaign, like, we don’t even talk about self-inflicted wounds with him, because there’s so many of them. There’s so many. We just toss it in the pile of more of the same. We, we won’t think of it until he loses. When he loses and all the dread is gone, then we’ll look back and say, of course, of course he was going to lose. 

AW | 20:01 – It’s all of it together. 

JS | 20:02 – All of it’s all, it was the worst, all of it. Now, I could be proven wrong next week. I’m sorry if I am proven wrong. I’ll say that to your audience right now, but I’m doing the best I can. I don’t think I’m going to be wrong though. I think we will see that she ran a great campaign and she won because of that. He ran a terrible campaign and he lost because of that. 

AW | 20:23 – Well, I know that there’s a lot of reason to be trepidatious, but there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful. John, Stoehr, The, Editorial Board, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

JS | 20:32 – Thanks, Alex.

(Music Break) | 20:35

AW | 21:17 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Daniel Nichanian. He is the editor-in-chief and founder of Bolts Magazine. Daniel, welcome back to Sea Change Radio.

Daniel Nichanian (DN) | 21:27 – Thanks for having me.

AW | 21:29 – I wanted to have you on briefly before election day. We spoke six months ago, and you broke down a lot of races in an, in-depth fashion for us. But today, I just wanted you to give us an update on where things are on some of these down ballot races and explain the tool that you and your colleagues have come up with at Bolts Magazine. It’s really cool. This is your cheat sheet to the 2024 general election. 

Daniel Nichanian (DN) | 21:54 – Yeah, so, you know, we are , it’s, it’s the final stretch before a presidential election, but that also means that under the hood of the election, everyone is watching. There’s really thousands, frankly, of, of elections, for offices that are all very important, you know, from prosecutors to school boards, to attorneys general. I think a lot of people care about these issues. For instance, you know, there’s conservative efforts to take over school boards and issues like that, but there’s so many different races in the country, so many states, so many counties. Where should people look? What are the most important, interesting, consequential things happening on the ballot? So at Baltimore, we really try and help a national audience, you know, get interested in what’s happening at the local level in these local offices. We have created, um, a cheat sheet with more than 500 races happening at the state level, at the local level, at the county level, organized, thematically organized by type of office. So, you know, if anyone’s interested, you should go to smag.org, smag.org and look up on our, on our homepage. You will easily find this, this cheat sheet. And then you, you can just explore. We could spend three hours here just going one by one through all the very interesting stuff here. But it’s really up to people to find the stuff that they care about. You know, if you care about criminal justice, if you care about education, if you care about voting rights, the most, the, the places you’re going to go on this cheat sheet is going to be different. And, and that’s really hopefully a tool for people to be able to find interesting things where you are, there’s at least one election at the state or local level in every single state, and this cheat sheet and that, and that was very important for us to show that there’s important stuff happening, uh, really everywhere in the country. 

AW | 23:39 – And it seems like it would be a really useful tool for people who may not have thought that their vote is going to count as much because they’re not in one of these seven battleground states for the presidential election. But getting under the hood with the cheat sheet makes somebody who lives in a non battleground state realize that their vote means a lot. 

DN | 23:59 – No, you’re absolutely right. I think, interestingly, the thing that’s most decides whether a state has a lot on the cheat sheet isn’t whether it’s a swing state or not, it’s typically, you know, some, some states that have odd year elections, places like Virginia and New Jersey that are big states have a lot of their local election state elections. They’re going to have them in 2025. Not, not on even your, if you’re in one of those states, you might find a little less in this, though. There’s still interesting stuff that we, we found. But, you know, anywhere else, even a state that is very blue or very red has very important, uh, ballot measures as well. For instance, there’s a number of states that are red states this year that are voting to require paid sick leave, for instance, there’s a measure in Alaska, there’s a measure in Missouri, to require paid sick leave. That’s not necessarily the type of issue that would pass in those states through the state assembly of the State House that are run by Republicans. So those ballot measures are very important. Just one other example. A lot of people that are living in red areas of Florida, they have important school board elections on their ballots with candidates endorsed by the, the governor there, or by moms for liberties that have endorsed conservative candidates for school board. And it hasn’t obvious, always been obvious for these candidates to take over school boards, even in places that lean red. So again, you know, you can, you can look what’s happening in your area, and I’m sure that there’ll be some interesting things.  

AW | 25:33 – So we’re expecting pretty high turnout relatively because of the presidential election. How do you see that maybe impacting some of these less well-known down ballot initiatives and races? 

DN | 25:47 – That’s a good question because actually, uh, a lot of states, it’s been a thing in recent years reform that a lot of states have adopted to try and move their elections that are happening at 3D random times of the year in odd number of years, to move them to sync with the presidential race, or at least the, the midterms to increase the number of people who are going to vote. You know, like 60% of people vote in November of a presidential year and maybe 8%, 10% if you just schedule an election. So when you think about a mayoral race, when you think about city council races, the electorate for places that are having those elections now, the, the electorate is more likely to lean a little more young. For instance, on issues waiting to renters and the rights of renters, you know, like an electorate that’s, that’s more large at, at a city council level. If more people are voting, it’s like clearer that, that there’ll be an electorate that’s more young, that has more experience with trying to rent and the issues that can come with that, and that, that type of difference in, in who is voting can, can have an impact on obviously who wins and, and what happens after. Uh, in, I live in Washington DC and there’s an interesting, um, initiative in DC to switch elections in the district to, um, rank choice voting, that that would be a big change in, in DC And that’s also a change that a lot of other states are voting in. So if I do a search for rank choice voting on our, on our cheat sheet, I will, um, you know, quickly, quickly see that Oregon, Alaska, Arizona and other states have measures that might bring that innovative way of voting in their state. 

AW | 27:27 – Yes, I was going to ask about rank choice, voting’s influence on a voter being more educated. 

DN | 27:32 – There’s a gap in information around certain local races, but right now, Republicans as a whole have really turned against the idea of rankers voting in recent years in places like D.C. actually, it’s Democrats voting against it, but Republicans have proactively tried to ban even local places, local cities, local counties, from implementing rankers voting. And that’s also what we’re seeing this fall. 

AW | 27:53 – Daniel Nichanian is the founder and editor in chief of Bolts Magazine. Daniel, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

DN | 28:00 – Oh, it’s been really fun. 

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by George Benson, Jimmy Cliff, and Seu Jorge. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

There is a large swath of politically aware Americans out there who would like to follow the exhortations of Michelle Obama and “do something,” but the prospect of knocking on people’s doors can be a little daunting. This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, Elizabeth Chur, has fully embraced the art of political canvassing, however, and learned to have fun with it. In her new book, The Joy of Talking Politics With Strangers, Chur shares her experiences walking the pavement for policies and candidates she feels passionate about, talks about how to convert non-voters into voters and gives us plenty of valuable tips for canvassing success.

Narrator| 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Elizabeth Chur (EC) | 00:17 – There’s something about us as volunteers that we’re allowed to go off script a little bit. And to the extent that I can get away from the canned marketing script and make a person-to-person connection, I think really goes a long way to lower people’s defenses, engage with them, and build rapport, which is really important.

Narrator | 00:39 – There’s a large swath of politically aware Americans out there who would like to follow the exhortations of Michelle Obama and do something, but the prospect of knocking on people’s doors can be a little daunting. This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio Elizabeth Chur has fully embraced the art of political canvassing, however, and learned to have fun with it. In her new book, The Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers, Cher shares her experiences walking the pavement for policies and candidates she feels passionate about. Talks about how to convert nonvoters into voters and gives us plenty of valuable tips for canvassing success.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:35 I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Elizabeth Chur. She is a swing left San Francisco volunteer, a voter engagement trainer, and author of the new book, the Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers. Elizabeth, welcome to See Change Radio.

Elizabeth Chur (EC) | 01:50 – Thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:55 – The subtitle of your book is How to Save Democracy One Conversation at a Time. It’s a really good guide for people who want to be knocking on doors maybe for the first time or haven’t had success doing it before.

EC | 02:09 Thank you so much. I wrote this book partly because it’s the book that I wish I had when I was starting out. I was not a political activist before 2016. I phone banked maybe every four years for one or two shifts, and I definitely voted in every election, but I figured, you know, I was good and other people that were far more qualified would take care of the heavy lifting, of knocking on doors and making phone calls. And I figured, they’re just smarter than I am. They’re more capable, they’re more informed and they would just handle it. And the 2016 election was a, like a buck vice water in my face. because it really did not work out that way. And I realized that it’s up to each of us as citizens to step up and participate. And so, you know, I started with post carding and then I moved on to phone banking and I eventually mustered the courage to go actually knock doors in person. And I learned a lot along the way. And I think one of the biggest surprises was how much I enjoyed it. And I really wanted to share that with other people because I think there is this fear of talking with strangers and particularly talking with them about politics. So there’s sort of two things. I mean, I share a lot of logistical tips, like how to navigate maybe potentially challenging conversations with people that say I don’t vote, or how to address fears that a lot of my friends have. Oh, well, isn’t that scary? You know, and talking to them about that sort of like being a guide. But I also wanted to kind of share some of my own journey as, uh, becoming an activist and kind of what’s helped, sustain me in this work. Both, you know, on the logistical side, like self-care, but then practical tips about what to bring and different ideas to help get the most out of each conversation. Because I think this is, it’s rewarding work. It can also be challenging and I think maybe if some people can learn from some of my mistakes, there’s a greater chance that they’ll want to try it and then keep coming back to do more of it.

AW | 04:16 – Yes. Why don’t you talk about some of the mistakes that not only you’ve made, but maybe second-guessed some of the trainers that have given you your marching orders to go in and say X, Y, and z when you get to a house and, and maybe you’ve had to improvise a little bit. Why don’t you talk about that improvisational process if you can?

EC | 04:35 – Absolutely. I think one of the things that I’ve learned when I started, I thought again that I had to be an expert on all the policy positions, how they voted on every single thing like water policy. I mean, things that I really didn’t necessarily know all about. And what I realized in talking with people is that it’s much better to be a good listener than a great talker. And one of my chapters is called 80% them, 20% me. And I think there’s this misconception that we’re supposed to go there and just go down our talking points and somehow persuade them by the power of our charismatic words to either vote or vote for our candidate. And what I really found, I mean, there’s some people that are hardcore Democrats and they’re going to vote no matter what. They’ve been voting since longer than I’ve been alive. But there are other people that are undecided or they’re just turned off by politics altogether. And what I have found has been most effective is the power of deep listening and really being, bringing non-judgmental curiosity to each of those conversations. So it’s a lot less important what I think it’s much more important, what they think, and to really be curious about what their experience is, what’s important to them, what their hopes are for the future, what’s difficult for them. And not only does that give me a better sense of where they’re coming from, but during this whole time, I am listening very carefully and in the back of my head I’m taking notes so that eventually I will circle back. And now that I have a better sense of who they are, I might be able to offer a few things that directly relate to their priorities rather than assuming I know their priorities from the get go. And those conversations, have a much higher likelihood of making a connection and actually moving someone closer to voting and to voting for the candidate that I’m supporting. 

AW | 06:23 – So how do conversations vary based upon what stage an election might be? If you’re talking to somebody from a voter persuasion standpoint versus a getting out the vote perspective? 

EC | 06:36 – My goal well is to win elections for sure. And I think my experience is that I could knock on a ton of doors and leave a bunch of flyers and maybe just talk to the people that are already committed or have already voted. And that might feel good. I could check a lot of boxes, but I personally do still take a very deep approach, even when we’re getting close to an election. And I’ll tell you why. I have spent time after elections in California. We have up to 30 days if, uh, to what’s called cure ballots. And so if someone forgot to sign their ballot envelope or there’s a signature mismatch with the signature on record, they have to sign an affidavit to certify that they’re, they did vote and please count it. And I might spend all day getting two forms, basically making sure two ballots are actually counted. I’d rather spend a little more time on the front end before the election. If I can spend half an hour talking with somebody. And in that conversation help them move from, I’m not voting to, yes, I’ll vote and I’ll sit down with my two 20 something children who also don’t vote, and I’ll share all this information with them and we’ll vote together as a family. To me, that is a half hour well spent. 

AW | 07:56 – And for people who say they don’t vote often, those turn into some of the most productive conversations, don’t they? You explain in your book, but why don’t you share that with our listeners? 

EC | 08:06 – Absolutely. You know, I think beneath this label of I don’t vote is a wealth of life experience, and it may be different for each person. So again, if I bring my non-judgmental curiosity to kind of just scratch beneath the surface, see what’s underneath that. Because often when people say they don’t vote, that’s kind of a generalization for all kinds of things. Maybe frustration that they fear that they feel about the direction the country’s going, the sort of helplessness that they feel, the cynicism. And I just had a conversation with somebody yesterday who said he probably wasn’t going to vote and he hadn’t voted since 2018. And full disclosure, I often in these conversations wonder if I’m wasting my time if I should just say, thank you very much and move on as we, you know, have been instructed to do. But I just hung in there and I kept listening and I did a lot of mm-Hmm, . Mm-Hmm, , oh wow. Oh, that sounds hard. Tell me more about that. And there is something incredibly powerful about letting people vent, about giving them time to be heard. And I felt like we were going in circles, but I kept asking questions. I asked what he did for work, I asked what he liked the most about it, what was the hardest about it. I asked him what his hopes were for his children who were in their twenties. And he said that basically it was hopeless and things were just going to get worse. And they had dropped out of school and they didn’t have jobs. And it was basically all over for them. And I said, well, do you have grandchildren? And he said, yeah. I said, how old are they? And he said, oh, two and three. And I actually, you know, have a young child also and I asked what his hopes were for them and he didn’t really say a lot, you know, so there was a lot of asking different questions. It was hard to get traction. But you know, he did mention that he had bought a home for the first time four years ago. And so I mentioned about, uh, and how high the cost of housing were. So, you know, that is like a little bit of an opening there. So I talked about the Democrats’ vision to help first time home buyers, with that down payment. And I asked how that might help him, you know, and he still was giving me pushback on that, you know, and we shouldn’t be giving out free things, you know? And I said, oh, you know, I’m, I’m not saying just giving out free things, but you know, just helping people get ahead. Anyway, this conversation went on for a long time and I can’t tell you the exact moment when something shifted, but I think part of the reason that just, it went on for a long time and, you know, he did say quite a bit into this conversation that no one had ever knocked on his door before. And he also said he had never had a conversation about politics ever before. And his wife said, don’t bother with voting, nothing’s going to change, you know, so this is kind of the environment that he’s in. Like the people aren’t really talking about politics with him. And it was amazing because there’s something that just shifted. And by the end of that conversation, he said that he would probably vote and he would probably vote for our candidate, you know, and then he would probably sit down with his two kids, you know, who were old enough to vote too. And that was amazing.

(Music Break) | 11:16

AW | 12:24 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio. And I’m speaking to Elizabeth Chur. Her new book is The Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers, How to Save Democracy One Conversation at a Time. So Elizabeth, you were talking about this person that you spent a little extra time trying to convince, and they had never had people knocking on their doors and engaging with them. On the flip side, what about people who seemed to be turned off by all these people coming to their doors wanting to talk politics? 

EC | 12:53 – Sure. I have had people say, for example, you’re the third person who’s called me this week and they’re just sick of it. And I, and I’ll say, I try to bring a spirit of humility, not entitlement and gratitude and curiosity. So I’ll say, oh, I’m so sorry, uh, but I’m so curious. What did you tell the other people? I want to hear what you told those other people. So it, you know, it sort of takes it away from this adversarial thing to, I’m genuinely curious and I didn’t get to hear because your opinion’s important, I want to know. And that person stayed on the line with me and we ended up talking for about 20 minutes. And oh, and then she was suspicious. This was phone banking, so a little bit different, but she was wondering where I was calling from and I never, I never lie. I said, you know, I am calling from the Bay Area. And she said, but the area code is from Southern California. There’s all these scams. And, and I said, well I am calling from the Bay Area, I’m, you know, calling through the system. I said, but I have spent time in your town before. And this was during the pandemic. And I said, and I hope to go back there once things, calm down with the pandemic. But when I do go back, do you have any restaurant recommendations for me? I always like to ask locals because they know the best places to eat. And she told me Superior Dairy. And I said, well, what would you recommend getting there? And she said, I think she said like the chocolate fudge sundae, you know, . And so anyway, that may seem superfluous and has nothing to do with politics, but there’s something about us as volunteers that we’re allowed to go off script a little bit. And to the extent that I can get away from the canned marketing script and make a person to person connection, I think really goes a long way to lower people’s defenses, engage with them and build rapport, which is really important. And another volunteer of mine who has assisted with some of our workshops, he compared it to talking with the neighbors who just moved in next door. You know, you would sort of just have this kind of relaxed conversation, get to know them a little bit. And again, this might just seem fluffy and a waste of time, but I got to tell you, for people that, and start out being really bristly and hostile, it can really open up a lot. 

AW | 15:04 – And you can often have very productive conversations with people whose names don’t appear on your designated canvassing lists. That’s an opportunity. Right? 

EC | 15:15 – Absolutely. I have a whole chapter called “Talk with the one in front of you.” You know, like , if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. And I feel like that’s similar to, uh, canvassing and even phone banking with the wrong numbers, but there is an opportunity there, especially when a lot of people aren’t home. And that can be just frustrating. Again, I’m not really that interested in just leaving door hangers all day. But if someone answers the door and they say, oh, we just moved in, they don’t live here anymore. I’m like, oh, thanks for letting me know. I’ll mark that down. By the way, are you eligible to vote? And we will have a conversation. A lot of times if they just moved in, they haven’t re-registered, they don’t know where the polling place is, they may not know, you know, where the Dropbox is, you know, and I can engage with them also and kind of find out more. So again, this is not being recorded in the app because there’s no place to list that kind of thing. But again, what is my goal? I want to win elections. And this may be the only way we reach out to this person. because they’re not going to be on other canvas lists, you know, because they moved in, they haven’t re-registered perhaps. 

AW | 16:14 – So the data you collect may not be great for the campaign or party, but the outcome may be just as vital.

EC | 16:21 – That’s right. You know, and, and again, I’m not here to check boxes. I’m here, I want to win this election, and, and the person is right there. And oftentimes, you know, we can have a productive conversation. There might be other people in the household. And, I, I would say probably, I would say, I don’t know, 20 to 30% of my conversations every day are with people that aren’t on my list. You know, I might just see them, on the street, you know, and start talking with them. I’ve had a lot of conversation about people that moved in people that are visiting their friend or their, their parent, but they, you know, they still live in the district. So I feel like those are golden opportunities that I, I don’t want to waste. 

AW | 17:00 – Elizabeth, let’s talk about what political topics you like to start with personally. Uh, I found that abortion is not a good one because it’s divisive and you end up talking about things like religion. It’s just not a great icebreaker. 

EC | 17:16 – So I let them set the agenda at the beginning. because remember I like to bring non-judgmental curiosity, and it’s 80% them, 20% me. So I like to start out by saying, “Hi, my name is Elizabeth Chur, I’m a volunteer with the Democratic Party and the Rudy Salas campaign who’s running for Congress. I’m just wondering, he’s asked us to reach out to everyone in the district to ask, if you were president, what two or three things would you change?” And, you know, that can open up then, then they set the agenda, they tell me which things. And hopefully one of those things is a connection point, you know, but if none of them are or, and again, sometimes people say, I have no idea, and they’re, they drawing a blank. So I might ask the same question in a slightly different way. Well, if you were in an elevator with the president for two minutes, what would you tell them? You know, sometimes total blank. There’s different ways to ask this thing, you know. Well, if, if you could, if someone gave you three magic wishes to just make life better for your friends and your family, what would you, what would you do? Sometimes people, especially I would say men, there’s this thing about not losing face. They don’t want to say that anything is wrong or anything. Everything’s fine, everything’s fine. I got this, you know. But if it’s not about them. 

AW | 18:24 – Or vice versa, sometimes they’ll say it’s all bs. What’s the point? Just a lot of cynicism. 

EC | 18:32 – Absolutely. But I think partly underneath that cynicism is frustration, grief, and underneath that, I think can be hope. And I know it might be really hard to get there, but one thing we talk about, so I’ve done a number of volunteer trainings, including one that focuses exclusively on I don’t vote people, it’s called you. And the 34% had to have meaningful conversations with high potential voters. And the 34% refers to the 34% of eligible voters who did not vote in 2020, which is a mind blowing figure. It’s one third of the electorate. And they did not cast a ballot in a, an election that had the highest turnout in over a century. And high potential voters is a reframing of what is usually referred to as low propensity voters, AKA people who barely or never vote. So instead of looking at them and these people that don’t vote,  I can look at them as high potential. And that comes from a Notin Osorio who’s this messaging expert for the Democrats. And so part of what we focus on, my collaborator and Dr. Jackie Tulsky, she is an expert in using something called motivational interviewing, which was developed to engage with people who had problems with drug and alcohol use to engage them about, maybe wanting to change their behavior. Because the, the traditional approaches of, you know, the doctor, you go see the doctor, like, you need to quit smoking. It’s terrible for you. That usually doesn’t work very well. The lecturing, you know, all the facts, you know, the PowerPoint lead balloon. But if they say, so what she, she tells a story in the training about a patient of hers who was a heavy crack cocaine user. Obviously, crack cocaine is not good for you, right? We know that it’s obvious, right? But he said it was fine, you know, nothing fine. But then she find she was, she worked with him for 10 years, no traction. Finally, she took this motivational interviewing training and she came in with a different approach. And she said to him, what, what do you like about using crack cocaine? And he told her all these things that he had all these ideas, energy, you know, he felt like he could do anything. She’s like, wow. He had never said any of that. And then she said, well, what, if anything isn’t so good about crack cocaine? He’s like, oh, you’re broke. You feel awful. You know, no money for the rest of the month. Like, all these things and all those things are motivations to change possible reasons he might want to change. And so we try to take that same approach with voters. So, you know, trying to find what would they change about the country, about their lives, about the economy, if they were in charge, if they were running things. And if you can start them talking about, even if it comes out and really kind of bitter, like, well, you know, I would do it this way or, you know, but that’s never going to happen. But there’s a little thread, a little, a little crack in that wall of cynicism about their vision, about how things could be better. And you want to try to find that. 

AW | 21:32 – Here’s what you write in the book. All of us contributing what we can is what will make the difference between despair and hope between the death of democracy and its rebirth into its next incarnation between the triumph of cynical greed and the emergence of a more just kind and inclusive society. I really like that. 

EC | 21:51 – Thank you.

(Music Break) | 22:07

AW | 22:41 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Elizabeth Chur. Her new book is The Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers, How to Save Democracy One Conversation at a Time. It seems to me like effective canvassing is like effective parenting, where instead of a top down, scolding approach, it’s always better to let the person find the solution for themselves. It really has to feel like it’s their idea. 

EC | 23:10 – Absolutely. And this is another thing that I think is counterintuitive, but it’s incredibly effective when they are the lead of the change. They’re unstoppable, you know? And I can be there to listen, to reflect back, to ask some questions like that. Gentleman that I talked with yesterday who said he had never talked about politics with anybody, which is unbelievable to me. But that is the world he’s in. He’s busy making a living and providing for his family, but reflecting that, providing some information but not pushing it, not trying to make him do things. And I have to say, I have a little bit of a difference of opinion with some of the vocabulary. I am not persuading people and I’m not convincing people I am, you know, asking, you know, gently sort of eliciting. And, but you know, the questions I ask are strategically, um, kind of engineered to try to get them to talk about, um, what they would want to be different. So, I am strategic in that way, but I also ultimately respect that they have autonomy, that they are the captain of their ship. If they choose not to vote, that’s their right. If they choose to vote for somebody that I’m not going to vote for, for that is their right. And I am not here to shame them or argue with them. Um, I respect that, um, don’t agree with it, but I respect that. And, but I feel like counterintuitively, by not pushing so hard on my agenda and really leaning hard into what’s important to them, um, and then underlining points of alignment or opportunities maybe to take a different path in terms of voting or maybe considering voting for Democrats for the first time. Um, those are ways that I can help shepherd that process. 

AW | 24:57 – Let’s talk about tactics for recruiting friends and family to join you in your canvassing efforts, Elizabeth. Any tips? How do you get people to come along with you? 

EC | 25:08 – I think sometimes the most inspiring recruitment tool is a good example. So by telling them about some of the amazing experiences I’ve had, I’ve actually had several friends step up to Canvas for the first time, and then they would actually bring some of their friends. So there’s a ripple effect outwards. And I think, again, it’s so interesting, but it’s very parallel to the approach I take with voters that I can’t make people do things shocking but true. But what I can do is, kind of make it, to tell them kind of about what I enjoy about it, what I find deeply satisfying. And that’s partly why I chose the title of this book, the Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers. I think so much there is this sense of like, oh yeah, I probably should do that. I know I should do something, but Oh my God, I don’t want to. And it’s just awful. And it’s just toxic. It’s just horrible. And, you know, and I think trying to force myself to do things out of shame and guilt is not very effective. And maybe in the short term, but not in the long term. But if we can do a better job about telling people about how amazing this can be, and this is one of the most deeply rewarding experiences that I’ve ever had in my life. And it’s sort of dangling the carrot and basically saying, you want in on this? This is amazing. This is transformative. And I think there have been some people that have been inspired to step up. Not everybody, but I, I know, and I think ultimately that kind of spirit of joy, um, is going to be what is going to sustain me and hopefully others for the long haul. 

AW | 26:39 – So positivity, not guilt. 

EC | 26:42 – Yeah. And not sort of a toxic positivity or this naive positivity. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it is hard work. You know, I had sweat rolling down my back yesterday when I was, you know, and it was hard. And sometimes I have a headache and sometimes it’s frustrating. But, you know, I registered two people to vote this weekend, you know, without even trying. I wasn’t there to do voter reg, but this is, these are just people I ran into. I had conversations with people who said, you came all the way from San Francisco. probably have to vote this time, just because it’s so, you know, I see what you’re doing. You know, um, people who tell me like, you know, no one’s ever knocked on their door before. I mean, those are truly meaningful to know that, you know, I’m just one person. I’m a drop in the ocean. But in these close races, me and other people like me, I think can be the tipping point for not just this race, but consequentially. Like who will control the House of Representatives, um, you know, who controls the school boards. And I think just getting back in touch with how each of us has agency to create change is incredibly inspiring. 

AW | 27:52 – The book is The Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers. Elizabeth Chur. Elizabeth, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

EC | 28:00 – Oh, it’s been such an honor. Thank you. 

Narrator | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by O’Donel Levy, Stephen Stills, and The Meters. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

Death is a topic that most of us prefer not to think too much about. While we must all acknowledge its inevitability, on a day-to-day basis, it feels better to keep it up on a shelf in a box, out of reach from quotidian life. Then again, there are decisions to be made, and they really do need to be made in advance of those inexorable metamorphic events. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn about the burgeoning green funeral industry from the CEO and Founder of Recompose, Katrina Spade. We look at the environmental problems associated with conventional burial and cremation, hear about the rather unusual modern history of embalming in the US, and go deep on the subject of human composting.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Katrina Spade (KS) | 00:13 – Green Funerals are growing. There’s a lot of interest in bringing and looking at new ways of  caring for bodies after death that aren’t polluting and aren’t toxic.

Narrator | 00:26 – Death is a topic that most of us prefer not to think too much about. While we must all acknowledge its inevitability on a day-to-day basis, it feels better to keep it up on a shelf in a box out of reach from quotidian life. Then again, there are decisions to be made and they really do need to be made in advance of those inexorable metamorphic events. This week on Sea Change Radio, we learn about the burgeoning green funeral industry from the CEO and founder of Recompose Katrina Spade. We look at the environmental problems associated with conventional burial in cremation, hear about the rather unusual modern history of embalming in the US and go deep on the subject of human composting.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:34 I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Katrina Spade. She is the founder and CEO of Recompose. Katrina, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Katrina Spade (KS) | 01:46 – Thank you very much.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:48 – Before we dive into the services that your company offers, why don’t you explain from an environmental perspective, what’s been the problem for a few dozen centuries in the way humans bury their dead? Why can we do better from an environmental standpoint?

Katrina Spade (KS) | 02:09 – So the way we currently bury our dead, I’ll call that conventional burial started around the Civil War, and that’s when modern embalming was invented by a couple of entrepreneurial young people, , who said, look at this market of potential clients. They actually went out to the battlefields in the south and pre-sold the service of embalming to soldiers who might die. And that was a way to get those bodies back from the south to the north after death. And they used arsenic, I think at the time. Now it’s a formaldehyde-based process or solution. So interestingly, I mean, people have still do and have for millennia had their dead out to say goodbye to them, but they’ve looked dead as opposed to looked embalmed. So it’s perfectly fine and pretty common in other parts of the world to have a dead person who’s un embalmed be out for a goodbye and a viewing and a what is relatively new like it since the Civil War, is this idea that we should pump the body full of embalming fluid to preserve it as long as we can. That practice is not religious based. It’s not, it’s not even really like a deep cultural basis in, in terms of its history. It’s, uh, really was this very practical way of getting soldiers back to their homes.

AW | 03:30 – It also coincided with the birth of photography as well, I imagine. So people would want to capture a photo with their loved one before they buried them, right? 

KS | 03:42 – Great point. I mean, I just say again, you don’t need to embalm someone to get a picture of them when they’ve died.

AW | 03:47 – But they look a little better this way.

KS | 03:49 – I don’t know. I think you, you could say “better.” I could say “different.”

AW | 03:53 – That was the pitch in the 1880s or something, right?

KS | 03:55 – Yeah, that was absolutely the pitch. Well, and, and you know what’s fascinating is President Lincoln was embalmed when he died. And they put him on a train and took him on a 13-city trip and it was amazing marketing for the process of embalming. Because everyone got to see Lincoln looking pretty preserved . Right. Um, you know, just looking at that history is pretty interesting. And then that just, that became convention in the United States and Canada and nowhere else in the world do we embalm on any regular, in any regular fashion. But here in the US we think, oh, well that’s just what you have to do. And I want to say to your listeners, if anyone says you have to be embalmed, they’re telling you something that’s untrue and you should push back if you don’t want that for your person. Like, it’s not required by law in almost every circumstance.

AW | 04:44 – But embalming is just one of the pieces from an environmental standpoint that’s not very conscious when it comes to handling our dead, correct?

KS | 04:53 – Oh yeah. I get excited about that history because I think it’s so fascinating. Um, I can touch on the environmental pieces a little more, but I think one of the sort of overriding themes is that we’ve held death at a distance for some time. It’s, it’s a natural, well, I don’t want natural, but it’s, it’s a thing that is pretty culturally familiar for us. Be like, I don’t want to talk about it. And all of that distance we’ve put between us and the end of life has, has allowed a fair amount of myths and, um, untruths to be pushed not by everyone in the industry because there’s some wonderful funeral homes and funeral directors out there, but like, you know, it’s kind of allowed this per idea that like maybe embalming is required. Like we shouldn’t think too hard about, about what’s going on in this industry. Okay. So the environmental harm is, is partly about embalming. 

AW | 05:48 – Sorry, I had gotten you off of embalming, but why don’t you explain why embalming is bad for the environment? 

KS | 05:54 – Thank you. Well, embalming today is, is a formaldehyde-based liquid that the person’s body is, and I’ll be a little bit graphic here. So for anyone listening we’re, uh, drained of its natural body fluids. And then those body fluids are replaced by formaldehyde-based solution, and that’s meant to preserve the corpse, which it does for some time. Nothing can preserve a body forever, but it’s, um, but it’s meant to preserve the body for some time, maybe years. And  formaldehyde is not good for the environment. It’s not great for the funeral directors who are using it either. As a side note, it’s a carcinogen. And so that’s unfortunate as well. Then you think about that body being buried embalmed into a casket. It’s usually made of hardwood or metal. And then that casket is typically, buried into a concrete box so that you can mow over a nice flat cemetery and that mowing goes on forever and the watering of the cemetery goes on forever and it takes up a fair amount of land. So that’s, that’s the environmental perspective on the burial side. 

AW | 07:08 – Sticking with embalming for a second, does the embalming leak out of the coffin situation? Or is, or is that unique to certain practices where they don’t necessarily entomb it in concrete, let’s say? 

KS | 07:23 – I think it depends on moisture in the ground, how strong the concrete was, et cetera. I think again, you know, nothing stays forever. So even a metal casket will start to degrade underground. Even a concrete box will start to degrade underground. For me, it’s almost less the risk of formaldehyde say in the ground water, then it is about asking ourselves why we’re doing that and is it meaningful, clearly isn’t great for the planet to be burying formaldehyde laden bodies in the ground and all that stuff, right?

AW | 08:02 – Especially when you think of the ashes to ashes, dust to dust idea of the re regeneration and recycling ourselves, that is eliminated when you introduce carcinogens to the equation. Correct. 

KS | 08:14 – Exactly. And so then what’s happened in the United States is over time cremation for various reasons has become more popular than burial. So today in the US almost 60% of people choose to be cremated. Burial is actually kind of going away slowly but surely, I think. And we’ve got this replacement of cremation, which takes, um, fossil fuel to burn a body, um, uses, I can’t remember the, the sort of equivalent miles driven by a car that are equivalent to cremation particulates, mercury, and importantly carbon are emitted into the atmosphere. And the, the carbon footprint between cremation and burial are interestingly the same, about 540 pounds of carbon per person. And again, i I, this is how I started the work I started to say, but why, why are we cremating someone? If you have anything left to give at the end of life in this body that will might be not much at the time. Why not give it back to the planet rather than burn it up or bury it in a formaldehyde solution? Right. 

AW | 09:25 – If you can explain the lifecycle of conventional burial, that would be helpful. 

KS | 09:29 – Yeah. So we had a lifecycle assessment done in a few years ago looking at conventional burial. The inputs and conventional burial are that casket manufacture and transport, the concrete manufacture and transport, the ongoing mowing and maintenance of the cemetery itself, then the headstone manufacture and transport. When you put all of that together, you get the carbon footprint of conventional burial. 

AW | 09:53 – Go on. Sorry, I interrupted you. You were talking about cremation versus conventional burial. 

KS | 09:59 – So on the cremation side, you’ve got the input of fossil fuels to burn a body. It’s a little more straightforward in terms of the tallying, and that makes up the carbon footprint on the cremation side. And interestingly, both conventional burial and cremation, when you look at those next to each other with their carbon footprints, they’re about the same. And so when you start at that, if the first question, you know, is like, how can you avoid those emissions so that you can re like reduce or eliminate that 540 pounds of carbon? And then the second thing is, and I’m now going to start, you know, waxing poetic about human composting . The second thing is how do you actually add benefit to the, the, the whole equation? And you do that through sequestering carbon. So, so when you look at conventional burial, cremation on one side and over here you have human composting where you’re actually transforming bodies into soil, you’re sequestering carbon in the process and you’re also avoiding those emissions, then, then the equation becomes about a metric ton of carbon per person because you’ve got the avoidance of emissions plus the sequestration of, of carbon.

Music Break | 11:23

AW | 12:22 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Katrina Spade. She is the CEO and founder of Recompose. So Katrina, why don’t you spell out the services that your organization offers the public and give us a little bit of the competitive landscape as well. What are some of the options out there for people who don’t live in the Seattle area where you’re based? 

KS | 12:45 – I have good news for people who are looking at options. Green funerals are growing. There’s a lot of interest in bringing and looking at new ways of caring for, for bodies after death that aren’t polluting and aren’t toxic. So Recompose has a facility in Seattle, Washington and we offer the service of human composting as an alternative to cremation or burial. And with that we also offer opportunity for ceremony ritual and marking that moment, you know, in a beautiful place to, um, to go with the important how we care for the body itself. We have been open since late 2020 and have served over 450 people with this service. Um, the process wasn’t legal when we started out. It’s now legal in 12 states and counting. But it’s only available in a handful of places. Seattle being one of them. One thing that’s pretty cool but does reduce the carbon benefit is that quite a few of our clients actually come to us from out of state, which takes one last plane ride after you’ve died. And it’s actually pretty common for bodies to be flown around interestingly. Um, but we have quite a few clients that come to us. It’s so important to them to have this service that they come up to Seattle for their death care. 

AW | 14:07 – So why is it illegal in 38 states? And maybe you can expand a little more on how you treat the body and how that’s different from conventional burial. 

KS | 14:18 – Yes. Human composting is a really highly managed, um, process that happens where we are taking the concept of natural decomposition and encouraging it and making the perfect environment for microbial activity to break a body all the way down into soil or compost. And we do that inside of buildings or a building here in Seattle. And inside of specially designed equipment, composting is always managed by human beings. Natural decomposition ha happens out there in nature in the woods by itself. Composting is when you take that and then you manage it even better by making sure you’ve got the right ratio of carbon and nitrogen and moisture. So very specifically at Recompose, we have a vessel that’s a stainless steel vessel. We lie, uh, lay a mixture of woodchips, alfalfa and straw into the bottom of that vessel and place the person’s body on top of it and then add more of that plant material in. So the person’s body’s really cocooned in this woodchips alfalfa and straw mixture. Over the next 30 days. The person’s body is decomposing naturally. We’ve created this perfect environment for that to happen. And we’re con constantly reading out like what is the temperature inside that vessel? Those when temperatures rise, we know that the microbial activities happening and the work is being done and then we take the soil out after about a month. Our team sorts for things like non-organic materials, if you have a titanium hip that’ll be recycled. And also for large bone pieces, which we then reduce mechanically. Everything is then placed back into a curing container for a couple of, a couple of weeks of curing, which is a compost term. And then the soil is ready to give back to family or be donated to conservation efforts. 

AW | 16:23 – And how do they receive it? What is a, a human composted heap or bag or body? Like what, what, what is the form that one receives it in? 

KS | 16:32 – Well, one of the things that makes this so different from something like cremation where you’re familiar with the size of the cremated remains you might get back is that because we use so much plant material to successfully compost a body, we’re giving back about a cubic yard of soil that is enough to fill a pickup truck. 

AW | 16:50 – Wow. 

KS | 16:51 – Yeah. It’s kind of a lot.

AW | 16:53 – How many pounds are we talking about for like 150 pound person? 

KS | 16:56 – We’re talking about maybe like four, 800 pounds. I know we’re making a lot of, we’re creating a lot of compost out of a person, which is part of the reason why we have this great land program where you can donate that soil to conservation efforts up here in the Pacific Northwest. But we also bag it up really nice. I mean, honestly it’s like a lot like, um, the bags you’d get at a nursery and people use it for their home gardens. They use it to plant a tree and honor their loved one, and they might donate half and take a couple of bags home. 

AW | 17:30 – And why is this illegal in so many states? Why do governments drag their feet to accept this as a standard operating procedure when it comes to handling our dead? 

KS | 17:40 – So most states list out burial, cremation, or donation to a body, to science as like the three legal methods of disposition. So when we started thinking about this back in the early teens, we decided we really needed to create statute that would add human composting as another option. And we started in Washington state, and to be honest, 12 states in a couple of years was way faster than we thought this would actually change. I mean, the funeral industry hasn’t changed in a long, long time and people are a little bit afraid of talking about death sometimes. And so that combination made us think it would take longer to get this many states legal. But we’re seeing a real interest in this idea as my goal long-term is like as a replacement for cremation. 

AW | 18:33 – And is there a path for another 30, 35 states to come aboard?

KS | 18:39 – Once we get a bill in front of committee, it typically does pretty well and is quite bipartisan. Or once a bill gets to the senator to the house, same thing. Pretty bipartisan. It’s, um, it’s not terribly controversial. Um, that said, we haven’t seen any ballot initiatives. It’s been all legislature. So we’re actually creating new statute. So usually we have to take like, um, existing death care statute. Okay, what do you do for cremation? And then we’re, you know, adjusting it to make sense for human composting. Make sure the regulations are gonna provide, um, enough oversight to make a really safe final material. because we’re giving this back to family and friends to use on plants and trees. Right? So there is some regulation that goes with it as well. So it’s pretty straightforward, but it’s not like, um, rubber stamp yet.

Music Break | 19:40

AW | 20:35 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Katrina Spade. She’s the CEO and founder of Recompose. So Katrina, you were talking about how your company handles the human composting process. How did you learn how to do this and are you still refining your process? 

KS | 20:56 – I’ve learned so much over the last 10 years or so. When I started thinking about this, I was in graduate school for architecture. I was thinking about the funeral industry, looking at the options we had and, and wondering why there wasn’t something better and more environmentally friendly, frankly. And, um, over the years it’s been about finding the experts who can help move this huge project forward that started with legal experts and then moving towards, um, biology and engineering, how to create a system that would safely and effectively compost a body. Um, when I was in grad school for architecture, again, I was thinking about how to bring, how to design a more sustainable option for the care of our bodies. And my friend Kate called me on the phone one day and said she knew she, I was thinking about death care. She knew I loved composting, I guess. And she said, have you heard of this practice that farmers use to compost cows, whole cows? And I thought, well, I mean, it was a light bulb moment. Of course, if you can compost a cow, you can compost a human being. So that’s the biology and the research behind all of this is based on livestock composting. And there’s a lot of research that’s been created around that process. And of course it’s, it’s similar to how you compost a human being. 

AW | 22:19 – When people think of grieving and mourning over a, a a lengthy period, a lot of them are informed by pop culture, TV movies where you see somebody talking to the gravestone. We grow up with that imagery. Like when somebody dies, you go to their grave and you cry over them, and then you place flowers every few months and you visit them if you want. And you have conversations that sometimes can be very eloquent on in movies and stuff, . But how does that reality differ in a green burial? Or does it, there’s also status involved in there has been since Pharonic periods, right? People pay a lot of money to have their family get a good spot in a cemetery, for example. Right. 

KS | 23:05 – I agree with you that pop culture really loves to show someone graveside. And when you were saying that, I was thinking to myself, I don’t think I actually know anyone who’s been buried. So all the people who I’ve known and loved who’ve died except for my mother-in-law, who was buried in a very different manner and in natural burial, which I can get into, but not in a cemetery. I don’t know anyone who has a headstone in a cemetery. I don’t think that, you know, that, that I knew when they were alive. And I don’t think I’m alone in that. It’s, it’s really wonderful when, when we can have some sort of ritual, some sort of marking of the moment when someone’s died and some way to re remember them. And for our clients, what we see is it’s about planting, it’s about, um, growing new life. It’s actually about the natural ecosystem and that being part of that ecosystem and really not just being part of it. Like, oh, right, I’m in the world, but when I die, my molecules are going to cycle right back into something huge. And so I think that we don’t really have a graveside equivalent exactly, but we do have, we’re seeing a lot of ceremony in the planting of the tree, gathering friends and family planting that tree or, um, you know, one client we have has a rose garden that her husband’s soil has been nourishing. And so that rose garden is, is very, has significant meaning to her. And that’s her, you know, headstone, if you will. 

AW | 24:38 – So you’ve explained the human composting process. Can you give us an idea of the options that may be out there beyond human composting? Just you mentioned the natural burial process. If you can summarize the green funeral space for us in the brief time we have, that would be helpful. 

KS | 24:58 – Yeah. Overall natural burial is something that’s been done for millennia, and it still happens all over the world today. It’s when the body is placed directly in the ground without that concrete box. Typically in a wooden, you know, wooden ca coffin or, um, sometimes a shroud instead of a actual box. Sometimes that natural burial happens in conservation pl places and sometimes it happens in a relatively normal cemetery, but it’s very much about not embalming. Letting the body go back to the earth directly still takes land. So I would argue it’s not really a solution for our urban populations, but it’s a pretty beautiful idea in my opinion. So the other thing that people might have heard of is called alkaline hydrolysis or acclamation. And this is a process where the body is dissolved in of similar piece of equipment to a cremation retort, but it’s dissolved using a, a liquid solution of that’s high alkaline. And then what families get back is actually the bone that has been reduced after the process is done and the rest goes to wastewater. And it’s, I believe, something like 80% less energy than cremation with flame. Sometimes that’s called water cremation too. 

AW | 26:21 – And can you give us an idea of the price variance within all of these options? 

KS | 26:28 – So cremation by fire is typically going to be the least expensive option, and you should be able to find that for under a thousand dollars if it’s very much a direct, what they call direct cremation, um, burial in the conventional manner with embalming and a casket. And a headstone typically is starting around $12,000, if not more. It’s an, it’s the most expensive option. And if some places it’s really hard to find a plot to buy a plot in New York City, I’m not sure you really can. And so that’s going to be even more expensive if you can figure out how to do it. Um, natural burial really ranges. So my best recent understanding is probably going to be around seven or $8,000 for the place, the plot and, and the process and working with the funeral home. Um, and then for Recomposes service, we’re at $7,000 for the process of human composting, and that includes care of the body, um, the paperwork by our funeral directors, the transformation into soil and option to donate that to conservation efforts or take that soil home. 

AW | 27:39 – So if human composting and natural burial are, are in the same ballpark financially generally? 

KS | 27:45 – Yep, you got it. 

AW | 27:46 – She’s the CEO and founder of Recompose and people can go to Recompose.life to find them online. Katrina, Spade – Katrina, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

KS | 28:00 – Thank you for having me. 

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Blue Oyster Cult, Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss and the Grateful Dead. To read a transcript of this show, go to Sea Change Radio dot com stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

This week on Sea Change Radio, we take a break from worrying about the election and look beyond these shores. First, we speak to Ayoola Dominic, the CEO and Co-Founder of Koolboks – an innovative refrigeration solution for the large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa that don’t have reliable access to electricity. We get an in-depth look at the company’s technology, learn about the challenges they’re facing and discuss the relationship between Koolboks and the Clinton Global Initiative. Then, we revisit part of our 2023 conversation with author Tim Killeen who has chronicled efforts to curb deforestation in the Amazon.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Ayoola Dominic (AD) | 00:17 -So what Koolboks has done is we’ve integrated for the first time in freezers, lithium-ion batteries. So what happens is when you have power, you can connect them to the grid, and when we don’t have power you can actually charge with the solar panels.

Narrator | 00:35 – This week on Sea Change Radio, we take a break from worrying about the election and look beyond these shores. First, we speak to Ayoola Dominic, the CEO and Co-founder of Koolboks, an innovative refrigeration solution for the large swaths of Sub-Saharan Africa that don’t have reliable access to electricity. We get an in-depth look at the company’s technology, learn about the challenges they’re facing, and discuss the relationship between Koolboks and the Clinton Global Initiative. Then we revisit part of our 2023 conversation with author Tim Killeen, whose chronicled efforts to curb deforestation in the Amazon.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:37 – I’m joined now on Sea Change. Radio by Ayoola Dominic. He’s the CEO and Co-founder of KoolBoks. Ayoola, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Ayoola Dominic (AD) | 01:47 – Thank you so much, Alex, for having me.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:49 – It’s a pleasure to have you. Why don’t you explain to us what Koolboks is, and if you can summarize what your product is all about, that would be great.

Ayoola Dominic (AD) | 01:58 – So I’ll, I’ll start with, uh, a bit of a context. So in, in Sub-Saharan Africa, you have over 600 million people that lacks access to electricity and therefore lacks access to refrigeration. Um, as compared to Europe and America, where you have a hundred percent penetration in refrigeration in Sub-Saharan Africa, you’ll be shocked to know that it’s only 17%. I repeat only 17% of the people have access to refrigeration.

Alex Wise (AW) | 02:30 – We’re talking permanent refrigeration, like you have a refrigerator running 24 7, right? 

Ayoola Dominic (AD)  | 02:36 – Correct. And you obviously, we know what that means in terms of food wastage. About a third of all food is wasted before it gets to market. And we’re talking small restaurants, we’re talking small bars, and these are things that normally we would take for granted in the West, but it’s a real problem in Africa. So, um, looking to solve this problem, myself and my co-founder, like three years ago, designed to found a company called the Koolboks. And the goal was to make refrigeration affordable and accessible to everyone that needs it. So using the sun and water, which is abundant in Africa, we created a solution that is able to generate refrigeration for up to four days, whether or not you have power, whether or not you have sunlight. And this we did by storing energy in the form of ice as opposed to just storing energy in the form of batteries. But of course, looking at the peculiarity of the customers we serve, then the big question, I mean, what good is the technology if no one can afford it? So what we did was we integrated in our units a pay as you go technology enabling individuals and small businesses to be able to pay as low as 10 to $15 every month to own a refrigerator. And today we’ve deployed in over 6,000, um, units across 26 countries in only three years, and we’re still doing more actually. So that’s what we do, basically. I dunno if that is pretty clear, Alex.

AW | 04:12 – Well, let’s break down the technology a little bit more if you can. How does it differ from a very well insulated, cooler? Cooler technology has really come quite away. People who go to concerts or festivals can put, uh, ice in their cooler and it’ll still be cold three or four days later, correct?

AD | 04:29 – That’s a very good question. Actually, the concept was going from that same concept like, so what we have today is, um, what we adopted from the concept of cooling in vaccines. So we just took them and adopted them for restoration. So, um, the only basic difference here would be that beyond thick insulation, you have what we call face change materials, we can call it ice, but it’s not really ice, but is liquid with, um, that is able to retain temperatures for longer hours because they are water mixed with esters. And these are able to conserve, um, temperatures for longer hours. So that you would say is the basic difference between the two, apart from the insulation, the fact that we actually use what we call, um, uh, face change materials, basically. 

AW | 05:26 – And you mentioned the price is monthly, but what is the overall cost and how do the most vulnerable populations get access to it? 10 to $15 a month may not sound a lot to somebody in the west, but it could be very expensive to somebody in Sub-Saharan Africa. What is the overall cost of this unit? 

AD | 05:45 – Now? The average cost, thank you for that question is around a thousand dollars to about $1,300, and this could be spread over, um, over three years, sometimes over four years. So that’s the average person and the average income is usually around 30 to $50 a month rather some 30 to $50 a day depending on the, on the size of the units, basically?

AW | 06:14 – The income that it produces, you mean?

AD | 06:17 – The income of the small, because our, our, we’re focused on small businesses that require refrigeration for income generation. So we’re talking about bars, small restaurants, and the average income daily is like $30 a day on their average, depending on the size. And, uh, if you multiply that by maybe 20, that’s about $600 in a month, um, for the active days. And they get to pay about, I mean, 15 to 20 to $30 per month for the refrigerator. 

AW | 06:47 – And, and how do they get delivery of the refrigerator? What’s your distribution model, Ayoola? 

AD | 06:53 – Great question. So we do work through partners, existing solar distributors in different countries. Uh, these are distributors that have distribution network and they deal with the kind of customers we want to deal with. And that’s how we’ve been working with them. So we have big players, um, that are big in solar. They sell solar panels, they sell solar home systems as well. We leverage on their network to be able to reach our customers, basically. 

AW | 07:21 – And, and you mentioned the space age technology. Why don’t you break that down a little bit more for us? What do you have in the units in terms of lithium ion batteries and solar panels? Explain how this all works if you can. 

AD | 07:34 – So basically, today we have different customers and there’s different customers have different needs. So some, like rightly observed, just want to cool. There are the beverage dealers. They don’t want to get their bottles broken, so they just want to cool. And then you have customers that wanna freeze, and these are customers that require longer cooling hours, like freezing, we require longer freezing hours. So in that situation, they will need external lithium batteries. So for customers that want to cool the ice batteries, which you rightly observed, uh, is enough, is sufficient for them. But then when we’re talking about respecting the cold chain, that means literally we have to have lithium battery. So what Koolboks has done is we’ve integrated for the first time in freezers, lithium batteries. So you actually do know that you have lithium batteries in those freezers. So what happens is when you have power, you can connect them to the grid, and we don’t have power you can actually charge with solar panels. And beyond that, we also have the, the ice batteries combined, combined with the lithium batteries to give them optimum energy efficiency. Beyond that, we also have the pay-go technology, which enables us to understand the temperature in the refrigerator, understand the billing of the customer, understand when the customer opens or closes the freezers. The location of the freezers is extremely vital, particularly for after sale services. So, so I don’t know if that explains your question, or maybe I’m not answering your question precisely. 

AW | 09:10 – No, and you did, but also it, it, it goes back to answering my initial question about how it differs from coolers. Like a, a cooler, you can’t freeze, you can’t produce ice. So that actually can perpetuate the cooling cycle for much longer. I imagine if you’re making ice, then it has a lot more use than just an ice box, a traditional what a lot of refrigeration was in North America in 1900, let’s say. Right? Sure. So people would get big blocks of ice and put them in coolers, and that would suffice for, for back then. But producing that ice is a game changer. 

AD | 09:50 – Exactly. 

AW | 09:51 – But explain a little bit more how solar works in all of your technology, if you can, Ayoola. 

AD | 09:57 – Awesome. So during the daytime, when you have the sun, the energy from the sun, which is solar energy, ice is made in that compartment, which is the ice batteries. So that at nights when the sun is not available, again, the energy stored in the ice, keep the product cool for the next couple of days. So that’s what solar does. So solar basically helps with the solar energy that is being connected, that has been converted to electrical energy to drive the compressors and also keep the refrigerator cool.

(Music Break) | 10:35 

AW | 11:21 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to the CEO and Co-founder of KoolBoks, Ayoola Dominic. So Ayoola, if you can explain where you are as a business right now and your relationship with the Clinton Global Initiative, that would be helpful.

AD | 11:37 – Awesome. So we currently are just closed the funding of around, uh, $5 million Series A in equity. It’s part of a $21 million total funding round. And currently we are at the point of scaling. I think we’ve tested the product. We think we have a product market fit and we’re trying to scale at the moment. So with the Clinton Global Initiative, we’ve been invited to, um, to the program. I had about two speaking sessions on the product itself and the impact we’re trying to create, uh, without product. And this is my first time here basically, and we hope that we’ll be invited again next year. 

AW | 12:22 – And you’re trying to do more than just be a cooler or, or a freezer for, for these populations that don’t have electricity, you’re trying to provide really a bridge to more modernization. Why don’t you explain if you can. 

AD | 12:37 – So for, for us, basically we, I mean, we provide the energy and then they, um, in an in environment where energy is cost, whenever they have it, they try to take advantage of it, even if it’s to charge their phones, to light up their houses. As long as they have that energy, they are extra excited and that’s what we do. Uh, but beyond, beyond that, actually, what, what we’ve also seen is that with the data we’re collecting, we’re actually becoming a data hub for connection of customers. Because now data is at the core of what we do. Um, we have over 6,000 robots out there sending data every day. We know when they open their freezers, we know when they close their freezers, we know where the location of the freezer is, uh, we know the tempera changes refrigerators, and we’re talking about different people in the different value chains. So we’re looking at small holder farmers that are into livestock, why not connect them with a frozen food seller who buys directly from them at the best price? And we’re talking about frozen food seller. Why not connect that frozen food seller to a consumer who wants to buy units? Right? So because now we have everyone on that single platform and we’ve got data appliance manufacturers, we’re talking about lg, Samsung, why not connect them to customers that would like to get their appliances? So that’s how we’re seeing Koolboks. We’re morphing from what we call just a typical appliance manufacturer to a data hub where we get to empower our customers. And that’s what we’re beginning to see. We’ve seen customers request best prices for livestock. We’ve seen appliance manufacturers come to us to request for data. We’ve seen coaching manufacturers come to request for data because they want to expand their services and they want to get the best services. So that’s what we’ve been seeing, and that’s basically the future of Koolboks.

AW | 14:37 – And you, you’re talking about customers requesting information and how do you reach these customers and how do you gain awareness of your product in, in more remote areas?

AD | 14:49 – Yeah, basically through, uh, word of mouth radio does a huge amount of work. Uh, we do, uh, on ground awareness programs where we go to different markets. Uh, but now another trend we’re beginning to see that works really well is the internet, uh, because our customers are not necessarily in rural areas. They are customers in per urban areas that have challenges with electricity as well. So we’re beginning to see a huge uptake with per urban uptakers, particularly in cities like Lagos, a city like, uh, um, Kampala, uh, and these are cities that still have challenges with electricity. 

AW | 15:23 – So these are very densely populated cities that just don’t have a very developed electrical grid. 

AD | 15:32 – Exactly. The population sometimes is way more than what the grid can afford, can accommodate rather, and therefore, there’s a load shedding, which has to be applied so as to ensure that people have power. 

AW | 15:48 – And you mentioned how this keeps refrigeration up to four days, but what happens after four days? 

AD | 15:55 – Yeah, after four days, we believe that you, you must have at least sunlight or you probably would’ve found a grid to connect to. 

AW | 16:04 – So it’s four days without sunlight. 

AD | 16:06 – Correct. 

AW | 16:07 – Assuming that there’s sun every few days, it lasts 365 days a year. Correct. Okay. I misunderstood that. I thought it was just like a four-day period, but it can last without the sun for four days. Is that right? Correct. So where do you envision this going, alum? 

AD | 16:24 – Yeah. like I mentioned earlier, uh, I mean, Koolboks to a lot of people, um, might be just selling products, just selling freezers, but we’re a bit more than that. We’re actually there to ensure that people, or we believe that people should be able to make money, uh, from, from natural resources. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And beyond that, we are looking beyond Koolboks. We are looking at ensuring that we’re able to convert other refrigerators, um, to solar and doing so. We believe we’ll be able to have access to, um, more people and be able to reduce the problem of food wastage globally. But the global goal of Koolboks at the end of the day is to ensure that we reduce food wasted to the barest minimum across the globe. 

AW | 17:20 – The company is Koolboks, that’s K-O-O-L-B-O-K-S. Ayoola Dominic, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

AD | 17:29 – Thank you so much, Alex, for having me.

(Music Break) | 17:46

AW | 18:38 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by author and conservation scientist, Tim Killeen. Tim, welcome to See Change Radio.

Tim Killeen (TK) | 18:46 – Nice to meet you, Alex. 

AW | 18:50 – It seems like anybody who, who studied the Amazon has to be very attuned to the interplay between the indigenous population there, the very fragile ecosystems and the market forces, the economics that are pushing and pushing constantly this area to the brink. Why don’t you give us a little bit of an overview on some of the policies that led us to where we are now. First, let’s focus on some of the more deleterious policies, if you can.

Tim Killeen (TK) | 19:21 – The rubber boom at the turn of the 19th, 20th century, was really what transformed the Amazon before there was diseases and stuff like this and missionaries and things, but you know, with the rubber boom, there was this big influx of European and migrants went into the region to exploit rubber. Uh, there was a second boom during World War ii, and so this really seriously negatively impacted the indigenous people. This is, you know, they were already impacted by the, you know, the great die off following the Colombian exchange. But then this, you know, it kind of happened all again in the rubber booms. And then what really, uh, got things going was in the 1960s and seventies, all of these countries, their governments, many of military governments at this point in time decided that they had kind of dual issues of, of over, they were concerned about the population growth and inequality, and there was a big agitation for land reform. And so one of the ways they responded to those threats was to open up the Amazon build highways into the Amazon and give land away to everyone wanted to go down there and knock down the forest and cultivate plants or grow cows or whatever. And, and so that started in the late sixties, really picked up speed in the seventies, exploded into the eighties, and just, it’s continued on after on, there’s been ups and downs with the rates of migration. There was a massive, you know, millions of people moved into the Amazon in the 19, late in the 1970s. It kind of dropped off in the 1990s, and now it’s kind of an internal growth, lots of internal migration. And, oh, starting about 1990, about 1990, I guess, uh, we started having the cultivation of intensive crops like soybeans. So it’s a combination of policies, investments in infrastructure. I’m a scientist, so I study nature, but there are other scientists who study crops and cultivation. And so they, they developed very successful varieties of soybeans and breeds of cows that were well adapted to the region and, and started generating very significant amounts of cash flow that, uh, benefited the people who were, were moving into the area, benefited the economies of the country. And so things kept going. They got outta hand. And now we have this before station crisis, which has been evolving for, you know, at least 35, 40 years. And, uh, like I said, ups and downs and, uh, and, and the, in the late aughts and the early teens, uh, there was an enormous, uh, decrease in deforestation due to policy changes in Brazil. But then, you know, there’s been kind of a backlash and things are going in the other direction again. And, and, uh, people were very concerned, me amongst them. , I’m very concerned about the fate of the Amazon. 

AW | 22:09 – So Tim, we’re talking about the policies that led to the deforestation in the Amazon. What are some of the ones that you cover in the book and that we all should be aware of? 

TK | 22:19 – Yeah, no, the, the most, the most obvious and, and, uh, infamous one was the decision to build highways and the Brazilian, uh, military government in the 1970s, uh, they actually had, uh, deliberate policies to build. They, they say, you know, uh, people without land should live in the land without people is, was their view of it. And so they built highways specifically into remote areas, and specifically along their frontier areas, like a border between Bolivia and, and, uh, Brazil or the border between a Brazil and, and sa Venezuela. They specifically created colonies. They called them colonies back then, and people to move there. First they encourage small holders as a way to, uh, relieve some of the social pressures and some of in their, in their, uh, more settled areas. But then they realized that it was more profitable, if I can say that to give away land to, uh, large landowners. And so they fostered then a, uh, an additional policy in, in addition to the one that giving land to, to poor people, they get started giving a land away to corporation and, um, you know, literally giving it to them, in fact, actually giving them money to develop it. There was a, there was an institution called Sudan and Brazil, and, and where they provided tax credits and, and subsidized loans to people who’d go in and that help them, you know, build a local road, you know, from first they built the, the, the interstate highway system. And then they started building local roads and gave money to people who were willing to cut down the forest and grow cows. Basically, both the large and small scale and similar type things happened in Bolivia, Peru, and, and Columbia. Um, simultaneously they were developing their mineral assets. There’s parts of Peru that are, just have these terrifically rich iron ore deposits. There’s other parts with copper reserves, nickel, uh, aluminum. There’s very large aluminum deposits, uh, situated. Just, you know, basically in the tur above, right near the Amazon River, some of the largest aluminum mines in the world, in the Amazon and bide mines actually. And similar things happen in Peru, uh, where they have big copper mines, and those are up in the Andes, but they’re part of the Amazon because they’re the Amazon basin. I treat them as being part of the Amazon. And that water flows downhill and goes into the Amazon. And certainly culturally, the Indian, the indigenous people, the of the Highlands, or now migrating massively into the, the lowlands of the, of the Peruvian Amazon have been doing it for 20 or 30 years. Most of the small holders, most of them poor people moving from rural areas. And, and where there’s a lot of land tension, and there’s been very conflicting whether there was the Civil War in per, during the, during the 1990s with the Ciera Lumino. So, so part of the policy response to that type of, of social upheaval was, Hey, go to the Amazon and, and we’ll give you land. And so these were policies that seemed coherent to their leaders of the time, and they’re having the consequences now of this ever increasing population of farmers and ranchers, uh, that are settling along highways or mining. There’s also this massive, uh, informal gold mining community. And all of the countries, all nine countries have very large population of what they call wildcat miners. These are smaller operations still industrialized. I estimate there’s about 450,000 people engaged in the, in the, in the small scale mining industry. And that’s, uh, and generating a lot of, a lot of money. And so it’s a part of this phenomenon. And of course, governments, if, you know, they don’t foster it, they certainly tolerate it, you know, because they’re, you know, there’s so many of them and they’re well organized and, uh, you know, local unions and stuff. And so it’s difficult to, uh, say, oh, no, we don’t want you to do that, because these people are, they vote and, uh, they’re also, uh, volatile. They, they’re, they’re willing to, uh, you know, blockade roads and stuff to, uh, protect their production systems. So those are, you know, one set of policies. And, uh, there’s other, you know, like Brazil has this policy to generate electricity through, through dams. So they built lots of dams in the Amazon, which have their own, uh, impact and not on deforestation, but they certainly lay a impede the, the, the river system or the, the aquatic ecosystems that are dependent upon the river. There’s all kinds of migratory fish. You build a dam, you mess with their life, life cycle. And, and so that’s another group of policies this time, energy, um, it that disrupt, you know, uh, an aquatic system that also discovered, uh, oil. And, and Texaco, for instance, in the 1950s, discovered oil and Ecuador. And Ecuador is a member of OPEC. And so they’ve, you know, all, most of their oil comes from the Amazon, Peru, similar Columbia, Bolivia, you know, even, and Brazil’s got this very large natural gas fed field right in the heart of the Amazon. And, um, they generate money for the state and tax revenues and royalty revenues. Uh, but, you know, uh, a lot of toxic chemicals and secondary impacts, of course, you have, you know, if you have an oil well, you need to have a road to the oil well, so people settle along the road. So just all these things kind of feeding off one on the other. And we end up with the situation where we have an Amazon, there’s probably about 20% deforested, 18, 19% they figure, which doesn’t seem a lot, but it’s, you know, it’s also highly fragmented. If, if you look at the, you know, the penetration of the roads and the, and the area that’s, you know, maybe more like 40% of the Amazon has been impacted by some sort of human activity. 

AW | 27:57 – Tim Killeen, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

TK | 28:01 – Thanks for having me. 

AW | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by The Clash, T-Bone Walker, and Paul Simon. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

This week on Sea Change Radio, more of our discussion with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier. In this part of the conversation, we talk about the importance of a political campaign’s so-called “ground game,” look at the predictive value of early voting numbers, and examine whether Donald Trump would actually have steamrolled Joe Biden as so many were assuming. Then, we take a peek back at our 2019 interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin to learn a thing or two about leadership.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

TB | 00:17 – And so on one side, Americans were saying, no, we don’t want either of them. And so one side says, okay, we’ll give you someone else. We’ll give you someone who is going to wage a historic candidacy and can break the glass ceiling and, and is running a joyful, hopeful campaign. And on the other side, you’re going to still have that guy.

Narrator | 00:36 – This week on Sea Change Radio, more of our discussion with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier. In this part of the conversation, we talk about the importance of a political campaign’s so-called “ground game,” look at the predictive value of early voting numbers, and examine whether Donald Trump would actually have steamrolled Joe Biden as so many were assuming. Then, we take a peek back at our 2019 interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin to learn a thing or two about leadership.

AW | 01:30 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tom Bonier. Tom is a Democratic strategist and he’s with the Tara Group and TargetSmart. Tom, welcome to Sea Change Radio.

TB | 01:38 – It’s great to be here.

AW | 01:40 – Tom, any podcast you might listen to or any piece you’re reading, almost always to the t prefaces it with, this is a very close election. You have to say that it seems like a contractual obligation. I was completely wrong in 2016. I, if I owned my home, me too. I would’ve bet my mortgage that Hillary Clinton was going to win. So everybody should take my analysis with a huge grain of salt. And I’m not discouraging anybody from going out and knocking on doors like I’m going to do. We should not take anything lightly. We keep talking about Pennsylvania being the crux of this election, but I think there’s much more to this election than just Pennsylvania. I don’t think this is going to be as razor thin as everybody is assuming.

TB | 02:23 – Well, I think there’s a good amount of evidence pointing in that direction. You know, again, as I said earlier, I, I understand the tendency for some people to talk about it being incredibly close. And let’s not take anything for granted that Donald Trump could win. Don Donald Trump could win. But if we’re going to assign probabilities to that, that’s a much lower probability outcome. Then there’s the probability of Harris winning by a narrow margin, and then there’s a probability of Harris winning by a wider margin. And I’m not going to assign percentages to any of those. But I would say in aggregate there’s a far higher percentage of Vice President Harris winning because of all that data, uh, that, that you mentioned in terms of the intensity and the gate and engagement. We are looking much more like 2008, you know, where you have a candidate who’s inspiring and enthusiasm and energy running against a candidate who is not running a very vigorous campaign and is deeply flawed, which John McCain was, and with Sarah Palin, I’m not saying McCain and Trump are the same, that’s a sacrilegious thing to say at this point, given, especially how Donald Trump has attacked John McCain…

AW | 03:35 – But he was a known quantity. 

TB | 03:37 – That’s right. And in terms of the contours of the, the candidates and, and the candid season campaigns, there are similarities there. And so yeah, from that data perspective in 2016, again, everyone was wrong , uh, but, it didn’t lend itself to that type of analysis because we didn’t have a good parallel for a Trump type candidate at that point. Now we have two cycles already under our belt. 16 and 22 compare against. Important thing to remember at this point in the 2016 campaign, uh, Hillary Clinton was in the poll averages somewhere around 43 or 44% of the vote. She was still winning by good margin, but there were huge undecideds. What’s remarkable about the polling in this race is there are almost no decided undecideds, which kind of makes sense, right? Trump is such a known quantity at this point, as is Vice President Harrison. There is such polarization that it’s hard to imagine someone saying which candidate should I support? And then it becomes a question of intensity, enthusiasm, and engagement. If you wanted me to make the argument for Trump having the advantage in that, I don’t know what data point I could point to at this point.

AW | 04:49 – Well, that’s why I think the 2022 midterm is such a valuable lesson to learn from, because we don’t have a lot of similar races historically where a Democrat comes on the ticket in July, right? Usually there’s some exhaustion, there’s candidate exhaustion. There was, particularly in 2016, there were a ton of candidates in the, in the field. And the Democrats picked somebody who had been vilified by the right for two and a half decades. Everybody had an opinion about both Trump and Hillary Clinton, and you still had these undecideds. Kamala Harris has a lot of upside still. There are still people who are getting to know her through things like these debates. She’s campaigning furiously, she’s going into pockets of Northern Pennsylvania and introducing herself while Trump is not, I read that he has three field offices in Pennsylvania while the Harris Walls campaign has over 50. So we’re talking about these measures of intensity. Uh, how do you measure that in your ultimate analysis, Tom? 

TB | 05:54 – It’s exactly that element in looking at the field apparatus. It’s the fundraising. It’s asking yourself the question, to what extent does each campaign have the ability to wage the ground game that is necessary to win a close election if it is close? And that is the field offices, it is the money, it is the volunteers, and it’s the number of events they’re having. You know, Hillary Clinton, uh, uh, took a lot of grief after 2016 for not doing enough in Wisconsin at the end. 

AW | 06:28 – And then the emails thing came up with Comey. But that, you don’t see something like that coming along. Kamala Harris is so new to people in terms of evaluation. They’re not exhausted from her. I think most people are exhausted by Trump. And you could see during the debate, Harris was, was hammering away. That issue was like, enough of this, we’re not going back to that. We’re turning the page from this. 

TB | 06:51 – And keep in mind she’s benefiting not just from the newness, but the newness plus the sort of comparison to the, the preexisting status quo. So you had, you had the Biden Trump rematch and all the polling showed. The one thing that Americans agreed upon is they didn’t want rematch. 2020 was grueling and exhausting, and people just in general didn’t want to see. And I, you know, to be clear, to me, that’s not a criticism of President Biden. I think President Biden has been a incredibly good pre president and that history will smile upon him in many ways, even though he is imperfect like every president. But I think Vice President Harris is benefiting very much from that comparison, . And so on one side, Americans were saying, no, we don’t want either of them. And so one side says, okay, we’ll give you someone else. We’ll give you someone who is going to wage a historic candidacy and can break the gr glass ceiling and, and is running a joyful, hopeful campaign. And on the other side, you’re going to still have that guy. And I think that’s why you’ve seen this big flip in the polls and why you see this asymmetrical distribution of intensity and enthusiasm is they’re still left with the same old guy who is connected to the same old politics. And you know, we’ve seen this happening in North Carolina with the scandal in the governor’s race. It’s just Republicans keep nominating people in statewide competitive races or races that should be competitive, who have molded themselves in the image of Donald Trump. And they keep suffering for it. And I think a lot of Americans are just kind of sick of that. 

AW | 08:26 – And Democrats are rightly, I think, in retrospect, looking at this election through a fear-based lens, which was why I think Biden stepped aside. But in retrospect, I really do think that Biden versus Trump was going to be a lot closer than people were assuming. You weren’t seeing Trump over 50% in almost any poll. He was just not becoming more popular. It’s just there were a lot of people on the fence and they weren’t automatically going with the incumbent. And that really worried Democrats, rightly so. Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that Trump was going to win in a landslide. It was probably going to be pretty close. Do you agree? 

TB | 09:04 – I think so, because when you look at the polling and you look at where President Biden was underperforming, like why he was trailing Donald Trump there, it was largely the same voters who are now reacting with enthusiasm, younger voters, women, voters of color. I think there was a general calculus there at the time that, look, these voters, they are voicing their opinion that they would prefer different candidate, but if it comes down to it in November and they have to choose Biden or Trump, they’re not going to Trump. You know, there was a fear of them coming home, uh, not coming, uh, out to vote. But, um, but in terms of the vote choice, it was incredibly unlikely that they would vote for Trump. So yeah, I, I think there was a case to be made that it would’ve been a very close election, but it was one that President Biden still could have one. 

AW | 09:52 – And the downside was so scary that one could see stepping aside as being a heroic act in many ways. We did hit upon just briefly early voting. So, which early states, which early voting states have the most transparency in terms of you getting data? And what are the bellwether early voting states you’ll be looking at moving forward? 

TB | 10:15 – Yeah, it’s, it’s the one data set that we haven’t talked about yet. And in the end, probably the most important and predictive, because it’s actual people voting. And to be clear, we have data that we get in basically real time, at least once a day in some states, twice a day, updates on who cast the ballot. And I want to be clear, the data tells us who voted not how they voted, or for whom the secret ballot is a secret ballot, and that is sacred. But we can just see on the file, this is someone who came out to vote today. 

AW | 10:42 – And is this uniform state-by-state uniform?

TB | 10:45 – We have to go state by state. The thing that is uniform is every state does provide that type of data to us. Some, again, it’s twice a day. Some it’s once a day, but we’re getting it everywhere. And so, you know, to your question of where we’ll be looking at everywhere, of course we’ll be focusing on the battleground states, and then there’s some of the battleground states where it’s a larger share of the electorate. 

AW | 11:06 – But there are some states that start voting like in a week or two while there’s others that don’t start for another four or five weeks. 

TB | 11:13 – That’s right. So like, you know, Pennsylvania is a state where people have been able to request their mail ballots for a while, and uh, now they’re able to begin returning them. North Carolina is a state that was supposed to start a little while ago. It’s generally the first battleground state to allow mail balloting. But, uh, they somewhat famously, uh, had, uh, a court challenge because RFK Jr had to get himself off the ballot in fear that he would take votes from Donald Trump. And so the North Carolina, a very conservative state Supreme Court, uh, allowed that and delayed the ballot in there. It will happen, but it’s, it’s later. So, um, you know, yeah, they don’t, they don’t all start at the same time. They don’t all have the same type of ballot. Important to keep in mind. You’ll see a lot of people comparing the early vote numbers to 2020, and what they’ll say is, oh gosh, look, fewer Democrats are voting early than did in 2020 Republicans are winning.

AW | 12:10 – That speaks to what we were talking about with the CNN voter registration, that there’s a lot of Gen Zs who are unaffiliated. 

TB | 12:17 – Yeah. And, and there are a lot of younger voters who voted early. I mean, there’s a lot of, everyone who vote over a hundred million votes were cast before election day in 2020 because it was a pandemic and that was over two thirds of ballots cast. It won’t be nearly that high of a share this time around, partially because some states have rolled back the advances they made states like Georgia that four years ago mailed every single voter a ballot. They won’t do that this time. They’ll do it if you request it. So you’ll have fewer people doing that. But also you’re going to have, especially younger voters pivoting back to voting on election day. Whereas remember, if people want to go back there, Donald Trump told his supporters four years ago that voting by mail was fraud. 

AW | 13:00 – Now he’s pushing everybody to do it.

TB | 13:02 – Right, I guarantee you that his advisors were furious about that four years ago, because that’s traditionally been a big Republican advantage where they could get their voters, especially seniors out to vote before election day, check them off, get them out to vote. It’s an easier way of voting. And he told them it’s fraud.

AW | 13:19 – And then he was just whining about Louis DeJoy his choice for postmaster general not doing his job and getting in these ballots in time on time.

TB | 13:27 – That’s right. So now he’s telling, you know, he tweeted, Donald Trump tweeted out the other day that people need to vote early. And so they’re trying to get, they’re trying to reverse that misinformation, which is funny that he’s for once battling his own disinformation. But you will see more Republicans voting early. And so what you’re going to see is Republicans will tout stats, I’m sure that say, well, look, more of us are voting early than last time, and fewer of them that won’t concern me. I’ll be looking at some other data points. The 2022 elections, even though the turnout was much lower, looking at the early vote, proportionate proportion of the, the overall final vote will actually be more indicative than the 2020 vote. 

AW | 14:06 – What kind of proportions were you looking at? 

TB | 14:08 – Well, just in terms of what, what percent of the vote before election day was Democrats versus Republicans looking at those partisan proportions and Yeah. Looking at other demographic indicators. I, I believe whereas look in Pennsylvania in, uh, 2020, the mail voting, which is really the only way of voting early there you can, you can cast an in-person mail ballot in Pennsylvania, but it’s still a mail ballot. Democrats were winning over 70%. Joe Biden won over 70% of mail ballots in 2020 in Pennsylvania in 2022. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was a much smaller share of the electorate. And even though Governor Shapiro and John Fetterman won by bigger margins than Joe Biden did, they want a smaller share of the mail vote because Republicans were beginning to come back to it. So that’s my point. Looking at those proportions, it’ll look more like 2022 than, than it will 2020. 

AW | 15:03 – Well, I could talk to you for another few hours and I know we can’t do that, but I really appreciate you taking the time. It’s a very busy time of the year for you, and I hope we can talk again when the election’s over, when you can take a, a deep breath and we can kind of recap and hopefully take a little victory lap together. Democratic strategist, Tom Bonier, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio. 

TB | 15:27 – Thank you.

Music Break | 16:02

Alex Wise (AW) | 16:26 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She is a biographer, historian and political commentator. And her latest book, which just came out in paperback, is entitled “Leadership in Turbulent Times.” Doris, welcome to Sea Change Radio. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin (DKG) | 16:41 – Thank you. I’m glad to be with you. 

AW | 16:43 – Oh, it’s a pleasure. I’m a big fan of your work. Why don’t you first kind of give us the snapshot of what inspired you to reinvestigate or, or look through a different lens at these four presidents? 

Doris Kearns Goodwin (DKG) | 16:56 – Sure. I mean, I’ve spent five decades of my life, it seems, living with presidents who are no longer alive, waking up with these dead guys in the morning and producing these big fat biographies about their lives from the time they’re born until they die, and their families and, and a real narrative history. And each time I moved from one president to the next, I sometime would feel guilty like I were leaving an old boyfriend behind. Because I’d have to take all of those books out of my study, bring the new guy in. So when I finally finished Teddy and Taft, the last big book that I wrote, I started to think about who am I going to write about next? And instead I thought, what if I just look at the people I was closest to and knew the best spent the most time with through the lens of leadership? It’s just, it’s something I’ve been interested in since grad school at Harvard, when we’d stay up at night debating the questions, are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? So I ended up going to the two Roosevelts, Abraham Lincoln and LBJ, and really just focusing on how did they become leaders? How did they get to adversity and how did they finally lead and turned out to be so much fun to try and compare them, contrast them, see what they had in common. But these guys, I think, have a lot to teach any current president about what leadership is. 

AW | 18:10 – The only person out of those four that you actually knew was LBJ. And, and it sounds like you have fondness for him. 

DKG | 18:18 – No, I, it certainly developed it. I mean, he, I was a White House fellow and I was 24. He chose me to come, even though he knew I’d written an article against him, how to remove Lyndon Johnson in 68. Because I’d been against the war in Vietnam and said, oh, bring her down here for a year and if I can’t win her over, no one can. So I did end up working for him and then going to the ranch to help him on his memoirs. And it was a great experience that I think led to my becoming a presidential historian.

AW | 18:42 – And you didn’t know Abraham Lincoln, I believe, but reading your, your depiction of him makes me feel much closer to knowing this, this person who we think of in mythical terms. A lot of times in history, when you read about Abraham Lincoln’s early life, it’s almost in these apocryphal, kind of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree kind of stories. But you actually give us a much clearer picture of the hard scrabble life that this man had. It’s, it was pretty stark. He came from very humble roots, to say the least. But you say that after he walked a hundred miles to get to this town where he had a job as a clerk looking kind of odd in his ill-fitting clothes and being tall and just kind of a funny looking guy in eight months, he was a state senator. And you, you say that he was likable and that, that made me wonder, how much does being a likable person play into a leader being a success? 

DKG | 19:46 – You know, it’s a really good question. I mean, I think in Lincoln’s case, when he was, you’re right, he was a clerk in a general store, and people knew that he was reading a book in every spare moment he could find. They brought him books to read, they cared about his upward climb, and they respected this young man who was trying to move so far beyond where he had grown up growing up in a land where he said he had only had probably 12 full months of schooling and never stopped reading. You know, reading for him was like breathing. And then when he runs for office, he delivers this incredible hand bill where he says that every man has this peculiar ambition. Mine is to be esteemed of by my fellow man to be worthy of their esteem. So it wasn’t simply, you know, that he was likable, it was that they somehow felt part of his rise to power and he was good to the people in the town. He would help them out. And they saw early on what the country saw much later on that this was unusual character in their midst.

AW | 20:44 – And I, I think of the likability aspect as a parent, I see my daughter respond much better to positivity than top down leadership parenting style. We always think of these people like General Patton as being these tremendous leaders. But I can’t help but think that somebody like an Abe Lincoln, or even when you look at, uh, I hate to use a sports analogy, but looking at quarterbacks who are, have to be the field generals, the leaders of a team, how much do you think that helps somebody inspire people on a mass level as being a president?  

DKG | 21:23 – Oh, it’s really interesting. I mean, I think, you know, when you think about it, you would assume that most of the people that are regarded as great leaders are able to make the team feel that they’re part of something larger than themselves. They treat them well, they share credit, they take blame. Um, and that’s not always true. I mean, general Pat may not have been that way LBJ at times when he was in the, um, in the new National Youth Administration. He was really tough on the people who worked for him. Unlike, it’s sort of going against the grain of what I think is general. I think the positivity that your 12-year-old daughter to respond to is way, the way you would want almost all of the leaders to behave. But every now and then, you can have somebody like a Steve Jobs or maybe a general patent or LBJ in the early days, and even though he could take off the head of somebody in public and yell at them, and then people were asked, why did you stay with him? And he, they felt they were in the presence of somebody who was changing things for the better in the NYA. He was the best national youth director in the country, and they were getting people, jobs, young people, and they felt there was a sense of purpose that combined them. And maybe people who worked for General Patton or Steve Jobs felt the same way. But by and large, that emotional intelligence that involves treating people well, being able to understand them, empathize with them, and being a leader that way is what works most of the time.

AW | 22:46 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking with Pulitzer Prize winning presidential historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. So Doris, there’s two things that throw a wrinkle in my positivity about the future. One is climate change, and there’s really nothing like that that a leader has faced in our country or any other country. And the other is our elections being possibly tampered with. Why don’t we start with climate change? There’s really nothing like that in history. How do you think, uh, a leader like Abe Lincoln or or Teddy Roosevelt might have approached it? 

DKG | 23:22 – I mean, you have to hope that what they would’ve understood is that it’s the central issue of the time. I mean, whether or not for Lincoln, it wasn’t there then, but slavery was the issue that had to be dealt with. And he was able to educate the country and to make them understand why this went against the ideals of who America was gradually. And he was able to change public sentiment about it. And so were the anti-slavery movement. I mean, I think the encouraging thing about climate change, um, you know, so much more about this than I do, is that the people are ahead of the government right now. Certainly the government in power, and I mean, I know I have a godchild who cares so much about climate change. It, it determines what she eats. She only wants to have old clothes. Um, and there’s lots of young people like her that, that I think understand this as a, an existential challenge to the country and where we’ve always made the biggest changes in the country, or when it comes from the citizens up with the anti-slavery movement, as Lincoln said, not him as a liberator that made slavery come to an end. It was the progressive movement in the states and the cities. Um, the social gospel movement, the settlement house movement before Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and the Civil Rights Movement before Lyndon Johnson and the women’s movement and the environmental movement, the climate change movement. So we’ve just got to trust that citizen voices will eventually make their way felt. But the timing is what’s scary, and it’s got to happen quicker than not. And the leadership is certainly not there at the moment. On the contrary.

AW | 24:53 – Yes. And having these voices heard is, is key to any democratic process and, and shifting to elections and them being in doubt. How do you think a, a leader, like, I don’t know, let’s say FDR would have dealt with the possible tampering of an election. Would he have tried to rise above it and gotten turnout so high that it would’ve overwhelmed any kind of questions that people have had about it? Or do you think he would’ve made people aware of gerrymandering and, uh, election tampering in terms of access to the ballot box? I mean, this is something that LBJ had to confront during Jim Crow. 

DKG | 25:34 – During voting rights. Yes, exactly. No, I think you, you’d have to do both. I mean, you have to make people realize that when people are denied the right to vote, you know, by all sorts of means in various states, when you’ve now got ballots in certain states that passed in the midterms, four states, I believe, to draw non-partisan commissions instead of the Congressional way that their boundary lines are drawn. Bipartisan means you’ve got people arguing about getting money out of politics so that, that there’s so much that has to be done. The political system itself has to be reformed. But at the same time, I think, and, and I remember Teddy Roosevelt right before he was running in 1904, his opponent, the Democratic opponent, came out and accused him of having made some sort of deals with corporations by threatening them to, in order to have them contribute to the Republican party. And everybody said, don’t even count insisting, it’s so stupid. And he said, I have to, I have to deal with. And he calls a group of press together and he says, this is a falsehood. This is a wicked falsehood. This is an atrocious fall hood. I want absolute proof that this has done. Which of course, the Democrat couldn’t provide, and he wins the election big. So sometimes I think you have to confront this, but I think the biggest thing is what you suggested. You just have to call for the biggest turnout possible among the people who care about the issues that you care about, especially with climate change. And you’ve got to get young people aboard who feel it a lot because it’s their generation. Older people who care about what’s going to happen to their children and their grandchildren. And then if it’s big enough, then the election tampering is not going to be, we’ve had these elections that have been decided by 10, 20, 30 5,000 people, and if it’s big enough, then that’s, then they’re not going to be able to have that much power to do it.

AW | 27:18 – I know you’ve got to run, but lastly, which of the four presidents that you profile in this book would you like to see be Speaker of the House during this impeachment proceeding? 

DKG | 27:28 – Oh, wow. . Um, well, so you’d want a lawyer, obviously. Probably so. Well, they all, they all work except for LBJ, but I, I think probably Teddy Roosevelt would be the best person to confront this situation today in terms of answering back to what’s going on and being able to fight for the right, as he would say. 

AW | 27:49 – The book is out in paperback. It’s called Leadership in Turbulent Times, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Doris, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

DKG | 27:58 – Oh, you’re so welcome. I’m so glad I could be part of your show. It’s a really important thing you’re doing. 

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to See Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise, additional music by Sidewinder and Steve Earle. To read a transcript of this show, go to see change radio.com stream, or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others, and tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability for Sea Change Radio. I’m Alex Wise.

There’s a lot riding on the upcoming presidential election: reproductive freedom, climate change, healthcare, Supreme Court appointments, just to name a few. But no matter what issue is at the top of your list, the decision that Americans will be making over the next six weeks will have a lasting effect for decades to come. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier about the presidential election. In the first half of our two-part discussion, we look beyond the polls, as Bonier explains other elements that measure voter intensity, examine the lingering impact of the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and dig into voter registration data in key states like Pennsylvania and Florida.

Narrator| 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Tom Bonier (TB) | 00:17 – In any given moment, most Americans aren’t worried about their right to an abortion, but if you ask them what question is a deal breaker for them, that’s just not negotiable. It’s number one by far.

Narrator | 00:32 – There’s a lot riding on the upcoming presidential election: reproductive freedom, climate change, healthcare, Supreme Court appointments, just to name a few. But no matter what issue is at the top of your list, the decision that Americans will be making over the next six weeks will have a lasting effect for decades to come. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Democratic strategist and data analyst Tom Bonier about the presidential election. In the first half of our two-part discussion, we look beyond the polls, as Bonier explains other elements that measure voter intensity, examine the lingering impact of the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, and dig into voter registration data in key states like Pennsylvania and Florida.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:33 – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Tom Bonier. Tom is a democratic strategist and data analyst, and he’s with the Tara Group and TargetSmart. Tom, welcome to Sea Change. Radio,

Tom Bonier (TB) | 01:46 – It’s great to be here.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:47 – I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time. I’ve followed your work for many years. I know that being liberal in 2024 means constantly being afraid, but I find your words to be reassuring in these very murky times. The data that you work with is pointing in encouraging ways for you. Why can that dispel some of the fears that so many liberals are feeling since 2016, really…

Tom Bonier (TB) | 02:15 – Yeah. And, and, and I’ll include myself in the we all of that. I think if, if you don’t have some amount of fear, uh, given the stakes, you probably aren’t paying close enough attention. But as you said, for me, I find solace in data and that goes above and beyond polling. I think most people focus on polling, and as we know, polling, is not always the most reliable indicator of which way the political winds might be blowing. And so what I tend to focus on is more individual level data that focuses on actions people are taking. So that’s generally new voter registrations. It’s election result, in the lead up to an election that might be primary election results. It could be special elections. And then, you know, the other sort of campaign-related information, how they’re raising money. The numbers of activists and volunteers we’re just looking for signs of energy and enthusiasm. We know that the one big part of the equation, of determining who’s likely to win an election, is turnout to state the obvious. It’s turnout and persuasion polls give us a pretty good sense of persuasion and all of that other data gives us a much clearer sense of engagement and turnout.

AW | 03:32 – But as you’ve said, polls don’t tell us who’s going to vote, and you call it measures of intensity. Why don’t you spell that out for our listeners if you can. 

TB | 03:42 – Yeah, and so to even just to drill down on that point, that polls don’t tell us, uh, who’s going to vote. We’re in this period in the election where almost every poll is applying what they call a likely voter screen or a likely voter model. And really all that is, is the pollster’s best estimate. I was going to say guess, but I’ll be charitable and say estimate of what the electorate’s going to look like. And that’s really hard, uh, to get right, because you have to really nail the turnout in terms of women versus men, older versus younger by race, ethnicity, party, uh, ID ideology. There’s a lot of things you have to get right? It’s hard. And so what’s the best place to look for that? Well, it’s, it’s data that frankly, the pollsters don’t have access to. And so, um, you know, again, that’s where it gets to the sort of individual actions that people are taking – whether it’s voting, registering to vote, going out and working for a campaign donating. And so, you know, especially in, in the context of this year and in the 2022 elections, we’ve had some analysis that’s been a bit against the grain. And the reason is because we’ve been looking at data that others haven’t been. And in this case in this year, it’s just seeing voter registration numbers that frankly paint a more positive picture for Democrats than the polls do.

AW | 05:10 – And that goes back to your work in 2022 as well, where so many were calling for a red wave and your data didn’t point to that. Why don’t you unpack that if you can? 

TB | 05:20 – Yeah. So, you know, you think about that election, one of the things that’s, this is not revolutionary, but um, when we look at any election, we want to view it in the context of prior elections, knowing that there’s no perfect parallel. No two elections are exactly alike, but they establish sort of boundaries, uh, that you can plot any given election or the data you’re seeing within those boundaries. And so we had two red wave elections not long before 2010 and 2014 as midterm red wave elections where Republicans did very well. We know what they look like, we see what voter registration looks like, we see what turnout looks like in special elections in primaries. So you’re right, while the polling, to some extent was suggesting a red wave election, certainly almost universally the punditry was, was predicting a red wave election. 

AW | 06:11 – Because that was just what everyone expected happens then every time there’s a midterm. 

TB | 06:17 – Exactly. 

AW | 06:18 – It’s the party that’s not in power gets to just whip everybody’s butt. 

TB | 06:22 – Exactly. Yeah. They use the term, a lot of these media, political data analysts use the term fundamentals as sort of a catchall, nebulous notion that can throw in anything that they think probably is impactful. And, and so yeah, to your point in this case it was, well, historically the party who’s not in the White House just does really well in those midterm elections. So they said, well, of course it’s going to happen. Because it always happens. And we looked at the data and we said, well, look, Democrats are out registering Republicans. And this was, this was all post dos, right? I mean, in my mind.

AW | 06:59 – When was that? Like May of 2022? 

TB | 07:01 – It was leaked in May, uh, and then it actually was handed down June 24th, 2022. 

AW | 07:07 – And, and what, what were you seeing in trend wise from the registration state by state that really kind of stood out to you, Tom? 

TB | 07:15 – Well, what stood out to me was primarily gender gaps, gender and age. And there really was this sort of pre and post Dobbs moment in politics. So we were still very much in that. I think a lot of folks haven’t internalized yet, which is, uh, everything changed. Everything changed, and you saw it in the data. Best example I can give you, the first test of the post Dobbs landscape was a primary election they had in Kansas, or it was on the August ballot. So time, not many people are going to vote, right? Um, it was sort of handpicked by anti-abortion rights, uh, forces to be favorable to them, uh, to put this constitutional amendment on the ballot to remove abortion rights protections from the Kansas constitution. And we looked at the voter registration data between Dobbs and their voter registration deadline. So it’s three week period, and we found that 70% of the new registrants were women. That to me, was the first and clearest possible sign that the landscape had absolutely changed, number one. And then number two to your broader question, that this is not what a red wave election looks like. You don’t see 70% of new registrants. It’s really weird to see, uh, the gender gaps and new voter registrations be much above 52 or 53% one way or another. When you see it, 70%, it tells you this is different. We don’t have a precedent for this, but if you’re expecting a red wave election, you’re almost certainly going to be wrong. 

AW | 08:50 – Now, let’s fast forward to 2024 when we’re not seeing that same kind of outlier from historical patterns. In terms of voter registration, there’s enthusiasm and the Democrats have been registering more voters than Republicans, but there are, uh, abortion is on some very important swing state ballots as well, namely Florida and Arizona. And we don’t really know how that’s going to affect the race for the White House. But those people who registered in 2022 are probably going to vote again. One could assume correct.

TB | 09:27 – Yes. The only reason I hesitate on that, because historically the best predictor of someone voting is them having voted before. And if you voted in a lower turnout election, you are almost certain to vote in a subsequent higher turnout election. So the midterm elections in 2022 are lower turnout than the presidential, uh, elections, which are really the peak of the turnout cycle. The only reason I hesitate is because that same example I mentioned in Kansas, we saw this surge of women registering to vote, especially younger women, like women under the age of 25. They actually voted in that August election at a really unreal turnout rate, that a higher turnout rate than all men, regardless of age in Kansas, that hasn’t happened before. Probably won’t happen again. But many of them actually didn’t come back out in November for the November election because abortion wasn’t on the ballot and because there they weren’t, and this is my sense of this, that the campaigns and Democrats in general weren’t able to draw a connection between how would be, how would a vote in this governor’s race have any impact on abortion rights? They’d already voted on it. And so I think until Vice President Harris took over at the top of the ticket this year, I think you were seeing some of that effect still kind of lingering for Democrats because we actually saw lower registration and intensity numbers among these same groups up until July 21st when the candidate change happened. So, you know, up to that point I look at and say, well, sure, the states that you mentioned, Florida and Arizona, I would expect to see much higher turnout from Democrats in general, especially from women and younger women. But in other states, question is, will they draw that connection? But what we’re seeing in the data now suggests that there’s sort of just this national organic across the board intensity and enthusiasm connected to Vice President Harris’s candidacy that I believe is an extension of this Dobbs effect. It’s people now drawing the connection project 2025 is likely a big part of that too, the Republican plan that would implement a national federal abortion ban. But there’s a lot going on in this, for sure.

(Music Break) | 11:53

AW | 12:51 – This is Alex Wise on Sea Change Radio, and I’m speaking to democratic strategist Tom Bonier. And we saw in the debate, Tom, when Kamala Harris really turned the entire momentum of that contest was when she started speaking about abortion. She spoke from the heart, she used concrete examples, and I just read that approximately a third of women in this country have had an abortion. And that’s not an insignificant number, especially when you consider that if you’re the mother of somebody, you might not have had that abortion, but your daughter had that abortion. You want her to be safe. So there’s a huge percentage of people who are directly affected by this issue. So how does that play into your measures of intensity? That’s a tough thing to kind of derive. We have ground game, we have campaigning, you have all these other things that are not part of the polls, but how do you put them into your methodology? 

TB | 13:47 -First of all, you’re right. In watching the debate, I certainly agree where there was, it was early on in the debate and was very much a turning point because at that, up to that point, the vice president seemed a little bit, almost too rehearsed and was seemingly reciting talking points. And then to have that opportunity very early on to do what we haven’t seen anyone really do yet, which is confront the architect of the Dobbs decision to his face and to, and to confront him with the reality, because he has been trying very actively to sell this idea that Dobbs was actually a good thing and that people like it. 

AW | 14:24 – Everybody wanted it, he said . 

TB | 14:25 – Yeah, , that’s right, that I’m just going to let the states decide. And not dealing with the reality that, you know, we have a very undemocratic process and most states don’t actually have the ability for voters to decide because they don’t have ballot initiatives. And even those that do, it’s not always easy to qualify. And Republicans are trying to block it in those states as well. And so to see her confront him in a way that hasn’t been done before, you know, we actually saw this in the data where we have a, a system that, uh, people are probably familiar with websites like vote.org, that people can go to check their voter registration or actually register to vote that website and many others hit our database. And so we can see if there’s an interest spiking in people registering to vote in real time. And we saw that right in that point in the debate and then moving forward. 

AW | 15:20 – And I imagine afterwards when Taylor Swift used that link as well. 

TB | 15:25 – That was the big spike . I mean the, the, the first spike in the debate was, was big. The Taylor Swift spike was even bigger. Uh, yeah, absolutely. And so, yeah, to me that reinforces the notion that what we have been seeing, that the increases in voter registration that we have been seeing primarily among, or, or at least overwhelmingly among women, younger voters and voters of color, that it is very much connected to. Look, it’s complex and voters hold many issues in their hearts and minds at one time, but that abortion rights is leading the way for many people. As you said that it’s something that, look, this is a, a rabbit hole we don’t need to go down to, but just very quickly, there’s been a lot of bad polling on this issue in 2022. There’s this polling where you ask people, it’s my least favorite question in polls, they’ll ask you, what is your most important issue to your vote? And they said, well, look, people care more about inflation and the economy than they do about abortion rights. Well, it’s just a bad question. In any given moment, most Americans aren’t worried about their right to an abortion, but if you ask them what question is a deal-breaker for them, that’s just not negotiable. It’s number one by far. Uh, and that’s what we were seeing in that data. I think that’s one of the reasons you saw this increase of, of interest during and after the debate. And I think that’s going to just grow and continue through election day, not just in those states that you mentioned with the ballot initiatives, but across the country, one of the biggest, uh, increases in registration we saw in looking around the country was in Louisiana, just by no means a competitive state, but it’s a state that has been hit incredibly hard by the Dobbs decision. Anyone residing in that state who is seeking to get any level of abortion related care would have to travel hundreds of miles, several hundred miles to get that care. So it’s not a surprise to see people reacting as such, even in these deep red states. 

AW | 17:30 – And, and I agree that data that about a abortion, where does it rank on your list of priorities? Uh, I have an unscientific theory on why they might ask that. If you do door to door canvassing, one of the first things you do is you’re trying to warm up the person you’re talking to, and you say you want to listen. So you say, what, what’s important to you? You know, you try to That’s right. Let them be in control of the conversation. So that’s a canvasser who’s trying to influence your opinion and warm up to, but a pollster has to do the same thing if they want a recipient to cooperate with them. Does that make sense?  

TB | 18:06 – No, that absolutely does make sense. And I had the opportunity to sit on a discussion panel at the Reproductive Freedom for All Conference, a few days ago. And, and I sat with two genius women pollsters, who have done a lot of great work on this. One of them is the one who raised the notion that I mentioned a moment ago in terms of, in terms of abortion rights being a, a deal breaker and asking it that way. The other, uh, pollster mentioned a really interesting framework, that I had not heard before, which is if you asked women specifically what was the most important issue for them, they would answer it the same way that you just said it. It’s like, just sort of a warmup. And you’re gonna, if you ask if money is important to you, people are going to say, yes, money is important to them. Uh, but if you reframe the question and said, what issue do you think is most important to women? Bri large, it was by far the number one issue because there’s this sense of association and something bigger there and looking out for others, and that maybe that individual personally is not immediately that moment worried, or it’s not their top number one issue that they’re thinking about this afternoon. How can I get an abortion? But when you talk about women in general, yeah, it’s number one. 

AW | 19:23 – And I think the media tends to put that issue into a little box, which is unfortunate. I think Tim Walz has been very effective making this a more universal issue. Men are affected by abortion rights as well, and we care about personal freedom, and we care about the opposite sex, or we should care about the opposite sex just as much as our own. So it’s, it’s silly in a lot of ways that we push men out of the equation when it comes to this issue. 

TB | 19:53 -There are so many different ways that voters approach this issue, which is I think why you’ve seen such a strong reaction going back to that Kansas election as the first post Dobbs, uh, ballot initiative or constitutional amendment vote. What I was struck by among, you know, many things in the data was that we estimate that about 30% of registered Republicans in Kansas voted against the amendment. Well, the no vote was the pro-abortion rights position. And, to me, that reinforces your point, that there are so many, it, for many, it’s just an issue of personal freedom and discomfort with the federal government coming in and this case, the Supreme Court coming in and taking away a freedom that has existed for half a century at that point. 

AW | 20:41 – And it exists in almost every other country. 

TB | 20:44 – Absolutely. It is an economic issue. It’s an issue that resonates with many people in many different ways. And that’s why, you know, again, in Florida, which has become in some ways more challenging for Democrats in recent election cycles, um, it’s the reason why the, the Abortion Rights amendment there, the pro-abortion rights position is expected to clear well over 60% of the vote. So the same theory playing out in different ways. We’re seeing all of the data pointed in one direction since the Dobbs decision. 

AW | 21:23 – And speaking of Florida, there’s also this cannabis legalization amendment on the ballot in Florida as well, and those are deep pocketed interests. Do you think that could account for a a percent or two in not aligning with what the polling data shows there, which is a lean to the red? I think Florida’s much more of a tossup than the polling indicates. 

TB | 21:47 – I agree. I couldn’t agree more. We saw this exact ballot combination last year in Ohio where they had an abortion rights amendment and a cannabis legalization, and actually the cannabis amendment outperformed in actual votes. The abortion Rights Amendment, it was by less than a percent, it was a fraction of a percent, but it actually ran slightly ahead. You get, you know, one group that has become slightly more problematic for Democrats, uh, in, in the last three to four years is younger white men. And the cannabis issue is one where, um, you know, they’re very much aligned with Democrats on that position. And I, you know, it, it, it’s not the most partisan issue. You’ve seen Donald Trump try to hedge his bets on that and say he supports it just like he did with the Abortion Rights Amendment, where originally he said he would be voting one way in Florida, and then he changed his mind a few days later and said he’d be voting the other way. But I do believe that particular combination of amendments being on the ballot is about as powerful as you can get in terms of reshaping the electorate in unexpected ways.

(Music Break) | 23:52

AW | 24:13 – This is Alex Wise on Seat Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Democratic strategist Tom Bonier. Tom, maybe you can decipher for me a piece that I saw on CNN Harry Enten was doing this piece about voter registration in Pennsylvania, and the math didn’t add up to me. I’m not a data scientist. You are. He was explaining how Democrats are not piling on the new voter registration the way they had been in 2020. There was a positive 500,000 or so Democratic Edge in 2020, and now it was like 128,000. If my memory serves me correct. Republicans have made up huge ground, is what he was saying, but there was a lot more to that story, I think. And was he pushing the horse race of all of this? What have you seen in Pennsylvania in terms of voter registration and why was that CNN piece deceptive? 

TB | 25:05 – Yeah, and he certainly was pushing the horse race, and he’s not alone. There are a lot of people that have been sharing this analysis, and it’s not just in Pennsylvania. People have been talking out in North Carolina, Florida elsewhere, and it’s based on a deeply flawed analysis. The simplest way I can put it, and then I’ll explain a little bit more length, is they’re missing the unaffiliated voters, uh, in this analysis. And here’s the, the, the, the, the simple way that describe the trend. We’ve seen what has happened to the Republican party under Donald Trump. It has become this cult of personality. And so if you are a Trump supporter, you are going to register as a Republican, period. It’s a loyalty thing. Whereas on the Democratic side, there’s not that same sort of notion. It doesn’t mean that they’re less loyal or less avid supporters of the top of the ticket. But when you look at Gen Z, especially, so the youngest chunk of the electorate. 

AW | 26:07 – That’s age 18 to 30? 

TB | 26:08 – Yeah. About that. 

AW | 26:10 – They like to think of themselves as much more open-minded. 

TB | 26:12 – Yes, open-minded, independent in a lot of ways. They are. And what we’ve seen is when you look, when you ask them the question, uh, with which party do you identify Democrat or Republican, they overwhelmingly say, independent. We’re independent. But when you look at how they vote, they overwhelmingly vote for Democratic candidates. And you know, I think every generation you have that to some extent. You just have that more with Gen Z. And so what’s being framed as a great increase in Republican registrations isn’t, I actually just looked at this just before our conversation. Uh, I looked at this in North Carolina because someone had mentioned this and said, well, Republicans are really gaining in registrations over the last four years. Well, four years ago in North Carolina, Republicans were 30% of all registered voters. Now they’re 29.8% . So they actually haven’t came, they’ve dropped a little bit. Why have they dropped? Because there’s just this increase of unaffiliated voters, or e each state calls it something different. Uh, but it’s those who are not affiliating with any party. So, you know, look, that would be very bad news for Democrats if those unaffiliated voters weren’t also voting overwhelmingly democratic. But they are. Certainly, that could change at any point, but it’s really a misleading statistic. It’s disappointing and frustrating to me that those in the media, you know, Harry Enten’s a smart guy, uh, and he knows data as well as anyone. I have to believe that he has some sense of what he’s doing here. But, but again, a lot of times in the mainstream media, we see this, this sort of tendency to try to, uh, push things back to the middle. And, you know, you want people to believe that it’s a 50/50 coin toss in any presidential race. And that’s certainly what we’re seeing now.

Narrator | 27:58 – Tune in next week to the second half of our discussion with Tom Bonier.

Narrator | 28:17 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis, and our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Lettuce, Bob Marley and The Whalers and Eric Clapton. To read a transcript of this show, go to Sea Change Radio dot com stream, or download the show, or subscribe to our podcast on our site, or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others, and tune in to see Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.

If you live in a hilly city (like I do), riding a bike for a quick errand can be an arduous proposition – at least that was true until the advent of electric assist. E-bikes now comprise a healthy 5% share of the bicycle market in the U.S. And as many new owners are discovering, e-bikes can offer a viable transportation alternative, reducing or even eliminating the need for a car. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with e-bike executive Bill Klehm to get a snapshot of the industry, hear where he believes e-bikes are heading, and learn about his company’s unique distribution model.

Narrator | 00:02 – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise.

Bill Klehm (BK) | 00:20 – I do think that the ride share investment that’s now being doubled on is going to drive up the adoption of e-bikes, because more people will be trying them. You know, IBM in 1973 talked about this whole notion of the seven times rule. You don’t truly change until you’ve experienced and can do something seven times. So with that, the more times we can create these experiences, the more opportunities we have to touch a customer and to have them consider our product.

Narrator | 00:52 – If you live in a hilly city (like I do), riding a bike for a quick errand can be an arduous proposition – at least that was true until the advent of electric assist. E-bikes now comprise a healthy 5% share of the bicycle market in the U.S. And as many new owners are discovering, e-bikes can offer a viable transportation alternative, reducing or even eliminating the need for a car. This week on Sea Change Radio we speak with e-bike executive Bill Klehm to get a snapshot of the industry, hear where he believes e-bikes are heading, and learn about his company’s unique distribution model.

Alex Wise (AW) | 01:37 – I am joined now on Sea Change Radio by Bill Clem. Bill is the CEO of e Bliss Global Bill. Welcome to Sea Change Radio.

Bill Klehm (BK) | 01:47 – Well, thank you very much for having me. Um, wonderful opportunity to kind of talk about one of my major passions, and that’s e mobility and e-bikes. So thank you. 

Alex Wise (AW)  | 01:57 – Pleasure to have you on the show. So maybe you can give us a backdrop on the industry and where eBliss Global’s model fits in all of this. 

BK | 02:06 – So, in 2016, there was 60,000 e-bikes sold in the US this year, by all stretches of the imagination, it’s gonna be about 2.5 million. Keeping in mind that Toyota sells about 1.8 to 1.9 million cars. So e-bike industry in the United States has no, has now crossed over to a mass market product. Um, and it is now what I call a market segment of one. So that means that different channels of distribution, different product segments are starting to emerge. And what we, what we’ve done is taken a clean sheet approach to the industry. So in 2003, I started a company and made transmissions. So I made transmissions for the bike and e-bike industry, largely in Europe. So I got to sit around the campfire and watch Europe go from basically nothing to four or 5 million e-bikes a year over the period that I was, I was there with selling product. And so we decided to take a different approach to the US as we see the US taking a similar approach now to Europe in that e-bikes are becoming a fundamental piece of transportation, not just a toy. So one of our taglines is we are, we are transforming toys into transportation. So our, our approach is to take a and redesign the entire experience. So products are interesting, but what products do is create an experience for the consumer. And that experience, in our opinion, for a mass market product means one of no compromises. So customers who are buying these products today aren’t really interested. They aren’t in cyclist enthusiasts, they aren’t people who like chains. They aren’t people who like derailers. They aren’t people who like maintenance. They want to like the experience of riding an e-bike and or a bike. And so we’ve designed our bikes to be as maintenance free as possible. We’ve redesigned the system. We put a VIN on all of our bikes. We trace all manufacturing issues. There’s 73,000 component manufacturers around the world of e-bike components. There’s 73 manufacturers of e-bikes in the us. What we do differently than almost everybody that I’m, I’m aware of, um, is, is I believe that we design and manufacture bikes for consumers to enjoy. And that is to enjoy for a long time. So the majority of maintenance that’s required on our bikes are brake pads and tires. We don’t have chains, we don’t have derailers. Everything is sealed. We put, like I said, a VIN on all of our bikes and trace all manufacturing. Our bikes are UL listed. So that’s our, our approach is we wanted to create an experience for a customer that is an experience where the ownership experience is one that does not have compromises. So that’s, that is our approach to the industry today. 

AW | 05:03 – And your distribution model is interesting. You, you’ve been piggybacking on, you mentioned Toyota, there are car companies that are selling Always Bikes as well. 

BK | 05:15 – So we have, so we have several channels of distribution. So one, we sell a private label, um, group of bikes to a, to a company called Tomberlin that makes, um, very nice low speed vehicles. So neighborhood electric vehicles, um, we’ve private labeled with them. They were our kind of our launch partner so we could get the products right, the supply chain nailed down control distribution. And then what we decided to do is we decided to launch with automotive dealerships. So there are 17,000 automotive dealerships in the United States. Last year they did $1.2 trillion of revenue. The US auto dealer market is the largest distribution system on the planet for tra for selling transportation equipment. They’re the healthiest, um, every single vehicle in the last 150 years save Tesla has been sold to a car dealership. So they already have all the customers. And what we’ve done is we’ve created a line of bikes that kind of look, feel, behave like a car. They’ve got a vin, um, you know, we, we manage maintenance. We, we, we make these things as trouble free as possible from an engineering standpoint. And then we believe that auto dealers, um, we believe auto dealers are very attracted to this. We’ve got dealers in Hawaii, we’ve got dealers in Los Angeles, we’ve got dealers in Michigan, got dealers in New York. We’re rolling out dealers across the United States as we speak and we’ve had an amazing welcome by the 17,000 auto dealers in America. 

AW | 06:48 – And so how would a prospective customer at an auto dealer come to buy one of your bikes?

BK | 06:57 – Sure, absolutely. So there’s, there’s, there’s four primary channels right inside the auto dealer. One is the dealership employees. There’s 1.8 million dealership employees that work at car dealers. So the first thing that we do is we make the dealership employees owners. 

AW | 07:12 – And they’re usually pretty good salespeople.

BK | 07:15 – You know, they’ve sold a few things in their lives, right? But we believe strongly that auto dealer personnel can’t sell something they don’t experience and don’t live they live cars. Um, but what they really are beginning to live are transportation solutions. By the way, just as an aside, there’s 119 million solo rides in a car every day with 30 million of those, or less than one mile. So one of our mantras is we want to own the one mile ride. And that mantra works really well with the car dealers because they understand this whole model, right? Car consumers, you know, they’re, they’re a little bit tired of getting in a car, driving in a traffic jam for a mile. So what we want to do is to help them own the mile. So our job is to provide the auto dealers with a set of solutions that they can sell to their customers as a part of their customer’s garage, right? We call it a hybrid garage. We believe that the garage of the future is going to, is going to have an internal combustion engine vehicle. It’s going to have some form of an electric vehicle, and then it’s going to have some form of urban mobility or e mobility. And that’s where we believe we fit in. So as a car dealer, what you really want to do is to sell them a package of transportation equipment so that the consumer can then satisfy all of their needs to get from point A to point B. 

AW | 08:38 – You mentioned the vehicle, uh, actually before I ask that question, so you brought up Tesla as one of the exceptions to the dealer model. I, I’ve been to a Tesla dealer and was very surprised by the experience in that their salespeople are not car people. Like if you were a 20 year veteran of selling cars at Chevy, I don’t think you would necessarily be able to just slide right into that job at Tesla. It seemed like these people selling the car were just there to as almost like a, it was almost like an Apple genius bar. They were there to just connect people to their phone, to the app, to the car. They were just like, any questions they had, they were like, oh, it’s in the app. It’s, it’s all in the app. . Like they, they didn’t care about the brakes or the, the transmission or whatever might be involved in this, uh, in, in the, in the guts of the car, which is what a lot of car people tend to think of themselves. Like, we, we wanna know about the engines and things like that, but they were just like, Nope. Just, uh, you know, you, you gotta put your Bluetooth on and then you connect it and you’re on, you know, off and running. It was very interesting kind of,  shift from, from a consumer standpoint, which obviously has resonated with people. 

BK | 09:56 – Well, again, you know, so whether there going to be 16 million cars sold in the US new 35, 40 million used cars, 106 hundred 86 million people with cars in the us. So Tesla is still a drop in the ocean. It’s a great drop, right? So, don’t get me wrong, I’m, I’m a huge fan of Elon Musk and the effort that he’s put in to redesign the industry. Um, but I do think, you know, car dealers have the most capital of any distribution system, a $880 billion on their balance sheet. But the other thing that’s happened to car dealers in the US is their margins have been squeezed, right? The average car dealer makes $716 on a new vehicle. The average vehicle is $50,000. So how many businesses would you start to take $50,000 and make 715? Not many. So we believe giving an attractive margin on a 3000, $3,000 on average e-bike, um, we believe that that’s a, uh, we believe there’s a fantastic opportunity. So one, we target the employees. Two, we look for opportunities to bundle an e-bike on a new vehicle purchase. So typically a pickup owner, a Bronco, a Ram truck owner. 

AW | 11:14 – Oh, where they could throw the bike into the car easily without a rack? 

BK | 11:18 – Or you sell them a rack and a, and a and a couple bikes. Again, you’re not going to sell a ton of them, but you know, but it’s 17 million new vehicles sold. You don’t need to sell an awful lot of them to kind of create a tipping point. Mm-hmm, the third, the, the, the third are 1.1 million consumers every day walk into an auto dealership and spend money. 1.1 million people a day walk in and spend money. That is the largest traffic in the transportation, uh, segment in the US that are going in and spending money. So now you offer them an opportunity for a test ride while they’re in the dealership. And now the dealership has an opportunity to sell them. As I mentioned, the numbers 2.5 million e-bike sales this year. Their customers are buying these. So one of my conversations with a car dealer is, do you want to sell them or do you want somebody else to sell them because if you want to sell them, we’ll sell you. The third big subsegment is when you look at the, the demographics of the ridership in America, and you understand that the average 25-year-old, between 18 and 25, only 60% of them have their driver’s license. The young people aren’t getting their driver’s license anymore. 

AW | 12:32 – But they all have a phone. 

BK | 12:33 – They all have a phone, and you know what? And they all ride share and they all scooter share and lots of them are buying e-bikes. So we think that, so that’s another segment that we offer for the dealers to be able to now, so one of my comments to a car dealer is, do you want to be the first person to sell that young person a vehicle? because when they are going to buy a car and they eventually will, don’t you want to be the person that sold them their first vehicle? And, and that pitch has gone over very successfully. Again, one, the product needs to be unquestionable, needs to be low maintenance. Two, it needs to be intuitive because the, the consumer itself, they don’t want to figure out derailers and chain rings and gears. They don’t want any of that stuff. They don’t want noises. They want a experience, right? They want somebody to engineer a product to create an experience. And that’s what we do, right? It’s never what you say to people, it’s how you make them feel. It’s never what the product is built for. It’s how the product makes you feel as a consumer. And our product, we believe is one of the best ones in the marketplace because it makes you feel fun. So that’s important.

(Music Break) 

AW | 14:43 – This is Alex Wise on Sea. Change Radio, and I’m speaking to Bill Clem, he’s the chairman and CEO of e Bliss Global. So Bill, you mentioned earlier about targeting these auto dealer employees. Can you expand on that? Do you give them bikes or just a big discount? How do you target them? 

BK | 15:03 – So, you know, we make it easy for the dealers to, to have the employees join. You know, si similar to when I worked at Ford, I worked at Ford Motor Company for a long time. Love the company, love the industry. But one of the things that we did very successfully is we offered friends and family of the company, um, discounts called a plan B Plan X plan. So very similarly, we offer for the dealership employees an introductory offer for a sub-segment of that dealership employee base, because we want them to be owners. We want them to be able to communicate the experience of riding and experiencing our product to a consumer. Nothing will sell the genuineness of who you are if you are coming from the experience of the product itself. So we think that that’s a, we think that that’s a hugely important step. 

AW | 15:51 – When somebody’s thinking of buying a bike, why would they want to buy an e-bike versus a regular bike, for example, in San Francisco, it’s very appealing with the hills to be able to kind of flatten the world. 

BK | 16:05 – So e-bikes are, you know, so what 20% of the US population has a bike or an e-bike of some kind in their garage. Whether they’ve ridden it or not is another question. But there’s lots of bikes and e-bikes out there. I call them analog bikes versus digital bikes. The e-bikes are the digital bikes. Um, I think one e-bikes, um, have captured the imagination of the consumer because they give the consumer the confidence that this bike is, you know, they can just take off, right? It’s just, it gives them a little bit more, uh, they’re, they’re not intimidated by the hill. Your San Francisco example is a great one, right? They aren’t intimidated by that hill. So the average E-bike rider rides 30 to 50% longer than the average analog bike rider. They get about the same amount of exercise because they ride longer. And the e-bike gives them confidence. It’s kind of that bridge between a motorcycle and a bicycle is what the e-bike is, right? So non-Dept. of Transportation (DOT) approved doesn’t have a license, doesn’t have all that stuff. So those things that consumers see that as a nice interim step.

AW | 17:09 – And also you don’t necessarily have to prepare for a workout with an e-bike. When I first moved to San Francisco, I lived on the top of a hill, a big hill, a San Francisco hill, like a mountain, basically . And if I want, and you mentioned earlier about how you want to try to really focus on that one mile. I wasn’t riding my bike just to go down to the store and get a gallon of milk, you know, I, I, that would be a workout. So once I got an e-bike, that changed, you know, I, I found myself using it much more for errands. And then similarly, people do that with commutes. You know, they don’t wanna get all sweaty if they don’t have like a shower to use at the office. So they may wanna be in their, their business attire, and they can do that with an e-bike. 

BK | 17:52 – So again, you’ve, you’ve done a great job of laying out the case for an e-bike. So the biggest, the biggest hurdle for e-bikes is trial. So if customers, I can’t even tell you how many consumers that we’ve done ride and drive events, and they’ve said the same thing. I’ve been looking at these, I didn’t know what a good one was. I see these things ranging from, you know, $200, $700 to $7,000. What’s for me? So they don’t, they, a lot of times they don’t have somebody to talk to about that. And then quite frankly, the other thing is they haven’t been made, it hasn’t been made easy to test drive the product. And trial is, this is a trial based market. If you, if you are at all in the market for a, for an e-bike and you try one of our bikes, it’s an experience, right? I talk about the feeling, right? The design guys for my bikes, you know, their, so their requirement is the drive train has to feel like it has to feel like the hand of God is pushing you along, right? So that’s, so that’s, that’s the requirement of the design of the system that we’ve created. 

AW | 19:03 – And the lowest hanging fruit for this trial system is this rental network that exists. Lyft is doubling down on, on their investment in this. And I know Uber’s also made big investments in this space. I remember the thing that introduced my wife to e-bikes was we rented a, a Lyft bike and she drove it around the city and was just over the moon about it. It was like, I remember her saying, everything’s downhill. Why don’t you expand on, on the opportunity that these rental bikes afford? 

BK | 19:37 – So one, let me reframe your wife’s comment. Your wife felt confident in that bike to flatten the hills and to have, and to create an experience that she wanted to enjoy. She could see the experience she got on the bike and that experience connected with her. We do think that rental, rental and ride share bikes and these kinds of things, this definitely opens the door. Lyft I think, I’m not sitting in the boardroom, I’m not making financial decisions, but Mike can only assume that they look at the trends of what’s happening in the marketplace. The second thing I think they’re looking at is the safety factor. These scooters with the small little wheels on streets, and they, they, they aren’t all that safe, right? So consumers wiped out, and lots of them in Austin, Texas, I can tell you where I live, you know, the emergency rooms on Saturday and Sunday night have a long line of people that have spilled out on those small wheeled scooters. E-bikes are definitely safer than those are. So I do think that the, the ride share investment that’s now being doubled on is going to drive up the adoption of e-bikes because more people will be trying them. You know, IBM in 1973 talked about this whole notion of the seven times rule. You don’t truly change until you’ve experienced and can do something seven times. So with that, the more times we can create these experiences, the more opportunities we have to touch a customer and to have them consider our product. 

AW | 21:10 – You mentioned the addition of a VIN number on your bikes. Why have traditional bikes not included them? And, and I’m assuming that the advantage of this is reducing property crime or what, why is this important? 

BK | 21:25 – For sure. So one, the 17 characters of a VIN on an automobile are used for several things. One, it’s a unique identifier on the vehicle itself. So you track, you track everything on that car, what was in that car. So there’s a decoder that will tell you what came in that car based on that vin, we do the same thing. So one, where do the, where do those parts come from? One of the largest problems in the e-bike industry in the US today is getting replacement parts with 73,000 component manufacturers in Asia and around the world, getting components is hard. So we put full traceability on every part we make, right? We know every component. We know the operators that touch those bikes. We know what was put together. We have a recording from the bike being taken out of the box and the inventory of parts to the bike being assembled and dropped to the customer. We use that VIN as an anchor point to do that. So when I was setting up the company I went to go see in China, happens to be a very large bike manufacturer, e-bike maker, huge. And when I made the pitch on what we were planning on doing, he said to me, well, why are you putting a VIN on this? This isn’t a car. And when we walked out of the room, I turned to my team and said, okay, we’re not going to go with this guy because they don’t understand the market. They don’t understand what consumers are wanting. Consumers want traceability, they want accountability of the manufacturer. Um, they want to know that the manufacturer thought enough about them as a consumer to trace and track everything associated with that product. I call it a vehicle. So with that vehicle, you know, we take the time to trace all of those elements so that we can manage that customer’s experience. How in the world can you manage a relationship, you know, an extended relationship over time with a consumer if you don’t know how to be able to get consumers the parts and you don’t know what the failures are going to be of those parts and you don’t have all of that stuff in a database where you can talk to customers about it. 

AW | 23:26 – I think one of the challenges that customers face in choosing e-bikes, and, and I would imagine one of the challenges you’re speaking about in terms of maintenance is that the industry in terms of service has really bifurcated itself into analog and digital bikes. There’s a lot of shops who won’t touch an e-bike and vice versa. I remember test driving a Van Moof, which was like a closed loop system, beautiful bikes, very affordable and like, but it was very tech oriented. It everything connected with your phone. But one of the reasons I didn’t buy one was they said, all service is free, but you have to bring it to one of our Van Moof dealers. And to me that seemed like a, if you were out in the middle of nowhere and your bike breaks down, you want to bring it into a local bike shop and have them fix it. Like, I was like, well, how many Van Moof dealers are around? They were like, there’s like two or three in northern California that didn’t seem like that was going to be super convenient if I was stuck on the side of the road somewhere. So you, you mentioned that your bikes are, they’re not just an electrified traditional bike. So how would a consumer deal with getting stuck on the side of the road and being able to come into any bike shop and getting somebody to help them out?

BK | 24:51 – So we believe one that you design and engineer an experience. So all of our bikes go through a full battery of testing. Typically when a manufacturer puts a bike through a test, one test is done per bike. We take one bike and put it through all the tests. So we want to test the entire bike to complete failure. So that’s a, that’s an automotive technique in which the systems and subsystems are tested and validated. So one, we know when the bike’s going to fail and that’s engineered in. So to your point, this is not a bicycle that you put electric components on it. This bike is specifically designed to go through a consumer’s lifetime and experience and should only have to replace brake pads and tires for the usable. So we have a three year bumper to, I call a bumper to bumper tip to tail warranty. Um, again, maintenance of brake pads and tires aren’t covered, but pretty much everything else is lifetime on the frame.

AW | 25:44 – But if you pop a tire, you can go into a regular bike shop. 

BK | 25:47 – With a tire, you go into a bike shop and get your tire patched, right? So again, it’s it, most bike shops will do non-electrical components on replacements like tires, right? Tires are the number one thing that fails. If I can come up with a pop proof tire that’s affordable and has a good experience, I’m going to tell you we will have one. And if I can come up with a way to break the bike without having brake pads, we’ll do that as well. So we think that is what consumers want. Remember we flipped over from 60,000 to 2 million e-bikes. The customers who are buying those, they’re not mountain bikers, right? They’re not going to change their chain ring and they’re not, they’re not going to do any of that stuff and they’re not going to tolerate having to do it. They want an experience. 

AW | 26:31 – They don’t have their own toolkit that they’re traveling around with like a, a cycling enthusiast. 

BK | 26:37 – Yeah. And, and so, so again, that is, so that channel of distribution is a car dealer. So we’re not going to sell E-mountain bikes because those are very technical sales. I love them, but that’s not going to be our market. Our market is the commuter. The second market that we have is cargo and delivery. So cargo and delivery vehicles and replacing those vehicles, cargo and delivery bikes. That’s a, that’s our second segment that we’re going to be approaching here this year. Um, and again, all those fleet vehicles who deliver today, they’re all sold through car dealers. So those same fleets, those same dealerships are calling on those same fleets to sell them now a cargo bike versus a, versus a regular versus a regular cargo van, um, for various usage cases. Back to your other question. So the dealer’s responsible for taking care of the customer. We’ve got a logistics network for service and things like that. Some of our dealers already have service vans that they have on the road today to do remote service, which is a huge trend in automotive. Wonderful thing. They can also sell, deliver and service e-bikes. So again, it just, it allows the dealer, he’s driving the vehicle out anyways. Why not improve the revenue per minute while the dealership employee is running around? 

AW | 27:54 – Bill Klehm is the CEO and chairman of eBliss Global. Bill, thanks so much for being my guest on Sea Change Radio.

BK | 28:00 – Thank you very much. Enjoyed it.

Narrator | 28:16 – You’ve been listening to Sea Change Radio. Our intro music is by Sanford Lewis. And our outro music is by Alex Wise. Additional music by Moby, Harry Manx and Kevin Breit. To read a transcript of this show, go to SeaChangeRadio.com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast on our site or visit our archives to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gavin Newsom, Stewart Brand, and many others. And tune in to Sea Change Radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability. For Sea Change Radio, I’m Alex Wise.