January 23, 2025 • 31 mins
As Donald Trump returns to the White House, Akshat Rathi speaks to Yale historian Paul Sabin about whether recent presidential history might hold some lessons on what to expect from the Trump administration’s approach to energy and environmental policy this term. Looking back at the Carter and Reagan years, Sabin explores how present-day Trump priorities– from dismantling government agencies to ramping up oil and gas production–have historical precedent. And Jonathan Lash, who was an environmental lawyer in the Reagan years, explains why he’s feeling déjà vu in these early days of Trump’s second term.
Explore further:
- Past episode with sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson about his visions for climate politics in 2025
- Past episode with President Biden’s climate czar Ali Zaidi on the IRA’s legacy
- Past episode with Congressman Ro Khanna on what Trump’s second term may hold
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Mythili Rao. Special thanks this week to Sharon Chen, Siobhan Wagner, Jessica Beck, and David Fox. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati. This week, back to
the future. Trump is back in the White House. What
(00:22):
will the next four years hold when it comes to
energy and climate policy. There are many ways to answer
that question. One is to look at recent history for
some clues. Trump began his first term by pulling the
US out of the Paris Agreement. He's done that again,
and as he did in his first term, he's once
again taken aim at environmental regulations, but this time he
(00:45):
is going further, declaring a national Energy Emergency and promising
that the US will double down on domestic fossil fuel production.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Certainly feel deja vu. We have heard this, but the
circum stances they're very different.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
This week, as we've been thinking about the Biden to
Trump transition, we thought about traveling further back in time
to replay what took place at the White House more
than forty years ago, when Jimmy Carter's term ended and
the new administration, led by Ronald Reagan promised to remake America.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
They were absolutely committed to the idea that the US
needed to increase its production of oil, gas, and coal,
and that that was indispensable for national security and for
the economy, and any set of policies that got in
the way of doing that seemed like they were designed
(01:42):
to weaken America.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
That's Jonathan Lash. He was an environmental lawyer in the
eighties and wrote a book about Reagan's environmental policies called
Season of Spoils. He spoke with Zero's producer might Lely
Raw about how Reagan right away set about reversing the
Carter administration's positions, particularly on energy and the environment.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
He wanted smaller government, less regulation. He wanted to encourage industry.
He thought the environmental problems have been greatly exaggerated. The
people he brought in were ideological about their opposition to
government intervention, and they began to weed out scientists in
(02:25):
advisory committees who they thought were too environmentally inclined and
bring in industry scientists instead. They wanted to get the
answers that satisfied their political objectives.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
It all sounds a bit familiar, right, but whether it's
Reagan then or Trump now, Lash says that there are
limits to a president's power.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
When we hold an election, we change the people who
are charged with carrying out the laws, but the laws
don't change, and there was this sense then which I
see now as well, that somehow, having won the election,
the decks are cleared. Everything is subject to change to
(03:06):
reflect the new policies. If they are able to pass
legislation that changes the law, that's the way it works.
If the public supports that the law can be changed.
That isn't what happened in his first termament office, and
it isn't what happened when Reagan was elected president.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And so with a new Trump era upon us, I
wanted to hear more about what lessons presidential history might
hold for the next four years. Someone who has studied
these parallels in depth is Paul Saban. He's a professor
of history at Yale an author of several books about oil, environmentalism,
and the Reagan Ears. We talked about whether Bidenomics will
(03:47):
have staying power, what we can learn from the US's
long running commitment to fossil fuels, and how Trump might
be able to go further than Reagan did. Paul, Welcome
(04:17):
to the show.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Now, in conversations I've had with policy experts and thinkers
in the last few months, it seems like there are
two strands of thinking that have emerged. There's one camp
of people who say, when it comes to the direction
of travel on things like decarbonization, it doesn't matter all
that much who is in the White House. If the
(04:41):
economy is moving in that direction, the momentum will continue.
And then there's another camp of people who say it
matters a lot who's in the White House because the
executive branch can put in a lot of rules in
place and set the tone for what happens. When you
look at the transition that took place this week from
a Biden and minister to a Trumpet administration, how momentous
(05:04):
is it from the perspective of energy and climate policy.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Well, again, thanks so much for having me on and
give me a chance to give some historical perspective on
these energy and climate transitions. I think that you have
to see it, as you know, truly momentous. And I'm
one of those who sees the energy and climate space
as being a political and economic one and not just
one that has economic forces sort of unrolling without being
(05:30):
guided by institutional structures. And I think that you know,
we're likely to see a dramatic reversal of many federal
policies that have been put in place in the last
four years that have been trying to accelerate an energy transition.
So certainly there are underlying trends, you know, and the
dropping cost of solar power, wind power, things like that.
New technologies and batteries have been really remarkable advances. But
(05:52):
those are taking place in the context as well of
a political and legal structure that I think has a
lot of impact on their development.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
So is it true then that Bidenomics, which is this
idea that you're going to try and put in place
things like the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure build
that will bring meaningful jobs back into the country. Do
you think Bidenomics just becomes a footnote because of what
Trump's likely to do.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
You know, that's just going to be a fascinating issue
to follow as we go forward. I mean, one of
the really distinctive aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act has
been the location of where these investments have gone, and
many of them have really gone into Republican districts in
the South, and I think it's still unknown, you know,
what's going to happen with that in terms of the
(06:42):
narrow majorities in the House of Representatives in particular as
to whether you know, Republican representatives from those districts are
going to prioritize defending these new factories, these new jobs
in their districts, or whether there will be sort of
strong armed into prioritizing shifting money into you know, tax cuts,
(07:02):
and that's going to be most likely, you know, one
of the major debates of the coming year. And so
it's really an experiment in political economy to see whether,
you know, the power of local jobs and industries can
outweigh this national climate that's pushing for sort of a
national policy newly focused on tax cuts.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
So let's take a historical lens to see if we
can learn anything about what's coming under this Trump administration. Obviously,
recently there's been a lot written about President Jimmy Carter's
life and legacy. He recently passed away, but also he
sort of foreshadows a little bit of what Biden Trump
(07:44):
looks like.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Now.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
One thing that gets repeated is Jimmy Carter installed solar
panels on the rooftop and then Reagan removed them. There's
also the fact that Carter to some extent got booted
out because of inflation issues, just like Biden, also in
anticipation of what his successes might do. Carter issued more
than one seventy what are called Midnight regulations just before
(08:08):
Reagan took office, and Biden has done I don't know
if it's one seventy but quite a bit. Are there
lessons from the transition from Carter to Reagan that can
give us some insight into what we're going to see
now from a Biden to a Trump.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Great question, and I think it's really fascinating to look
back at the car to Reagan transition, and it's think
it's important to put in an even larger, broader context
of sort of a back and forth that's been going
on in American politics really for more than a century
between a more developmentalist oriented governance of the Department of
the Interior and other agencies that might have strong ties
(08:46):
to Western political leaders and Western states, and a more
Eastern centered managerial approach. And this goes back all the way,
you know, to Teddy Roosevelt in the progressive era, people
like Albert Fall and the teapot Dome scandal in in
the United States. So I guess the point that I'm
emphasizing there is that part of what we're going to
see is a continuation of this back and forth in
(09:09):
approach to public lands and public resources and regulation. And
that happened in the early Reagan years with the appointment
of someone like James Watt, who is kind of coming
out of the West wanting to return greater access to
resources to companies into states, as opposed to Carter's more
restriction oriented approach. And so we'll certainly see that with
the Trump appointees to Interior and other agencies in their
(09:33):
efforts to open up public lands and to oil and
gas drilling especially. There are other things that are maybe
more distinctive to the Carter Reagan shift that we'll see,
which is, you know, the appointment to agencies like EPA,
where you have people coming in who really have some
a questionable commitment to the mission of the agency. You know.
(09:53):
An Gorsich was the person appointed in the early Reagan years.
She had come out of the Colorado State legislature and
being a lobbyist in Colorado and had been a pretty
vocal opponent of clean air regulations and then was put
in charge of the EPA and one of her responsibilities
was to try to cut back on the EPA budget
and pull back on the new super fun law. So
(10:15):
I think we're going to see definitely going to see
those kinds of things happening in the new administration. You
can tell just by the people who are being appointed
that they are have really, you know, ambivalent relationship to
the mission of the bureaucracies that they're going to be running,
and so it's a question about how much they're going
to try to really sort of undermine from within and
(10:38):
how much they're going to try to pursue some of
the objectives of those agencies.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So in your book Public Citizens, you write about how
citizen advocacy movements of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,
well they remade America but then also perhaps had unintended
consequences and paving the way for our Reagan era conservative
movement that was aimed at slashing regulations. There is also
(11:06):
a parallel there to now, because Elon Musk is supposed
to run this Department of Government Efficiency that is aimed
at doing exactly that, shrinking the size of government. Are
you experiencing deja vu that is very strong? And what
consequences might this have for the kind of success these
(11:29):
agencies are these new efficiency movements can have.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
I mean, that's a great question, and certainly, yeah, there
is a lot of deja vu looking at the early
Reagan years, and so just to put the broader context
on the public citizens and kind of the idea of
the CITs and activists, the argument there was that the
attack on the new Deal administrative state in the nineteen
seventies comes not just from the right, but also from
the left and people like consumer activist Ralph Nader and
(11:55):
others who come to see government agencies as being a
big part of the environmental problem and they start, you know,
suing them and attacking them and criticizing their close alliance
with companies and seeing that, you know, again that they're
part of the problem. But one of the key distinctions
between the liberal attack on the agencies and the conservative
attack on the agencies, and this gets back to what
(12:17):
I was just saying, is that the liberals, you still
believed in the federal government, They still believed in regulation.
They just wanted it to serve what they saw as
the public interest. But the difference was that when the
Reagan you know, regulators came in, they had a much
more as I said, much more ambivalent relationship to the
agencies and to whether they really supported their missions. In
(12:38):
many cases, they were coming in in the early nineteen
eighties with what they saw as a mandate or a
mission of rolling back the social and environmental regulation of
the nineteen seventies, and that includes clean air regulation, water regulation.
Occupational safety and health was also a big area that
they were quite hostile to. And so, you know, what
(13:00):
what was happening under Carter was, in my view, an
effort to try to balance some of the reforms of
the federal bureaucracy with the continued implementation of regulation to
protect the air and the water. Carter was trying to
juggle these two things and see how you could build
trust in government by making government be more efficient and
more effective. But he still believed very strongly in environmental regulation. Now,
(13:25):
the difference with Reagan, and I also think the parallel
with Trump, is that you have these folks like Musk
who are coming in, you know, really hostile to the
bureaucracy as a whole, questioning legitimacy and its mission. And
that's kind of what happened with Reagan as they came in,
you know, with the idea that they were going to
slash regulations, they were gonna dismantle different programs. What interestingly,
(13:49):
had worked in the federal government before he came into
the Interior Department, and he was a bit of a
bureaucratic warrior and really wanted to kind of reform the
agency from within, and saw h self as having, you know,
six months a year to do all of the dramatic
changes that he could during this short period of time.
So it was a very aggressive effort to try to
transform their bureaucracy. And what happened as a result is
(14:12):
that there was a massive backlash to the Reagan efforts.
There was very little consensus building or coalition building around
regulatory reform, and there were hearings in Congress, and there
was litigation and the irony of the Reagan efforts at deregulation.
So they actually accomplished very little. And part of the
reason why they accomplished so little is because they didn't
(14:35):
do what Carter was trying to do, which is trying
to balance the legitimacy of government with deregulation. So, I mean,
I think we can all agree on the idea that
government should be more efficient. It should be more effective.
But we also maybe you know, can still agree we
want clean air, we want clean water. What Reagan did
was sort of separate those two things, and that made
it actually quite difficult for the Reagan administration to accomplish
(14:55):
its goals.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Now, taking a look at foreign policy, Bergram, who is
Trump's pick for Interior Department, as the ability to open
up federal lance to oil and gas drillings and has
said that he would like to use American energy as
a tool for quote unquote world peace. Have you heard
(15:18):
that before? And how exactly can fossil fuels be used
for world peace?
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Well, I mean, I think this is a very interesting
area to you know, to explore and thinking about. You know,
energy independence, you know, was a big theme of the
nineteen seventies, and and Carter was strongly behind that. And
you know, Carter's remembered as a big environmentalist for his
renewable energy initiatives, but he also was quite in favor
of domestic drilling and coal development and synthetic fuels. And
(15:44):
so this is part of the sort of complicated legacy
of the nineteen seventies and also part of why we
didn't get off fossil fuels earlier, which is that there
was a kind of competing objectives of national security, low
prices for consumers as well as reducer consumption. So I
think I think there's a there are some legitimate strategic
(16:06):
conversations that could be had about the role of reducing
oil prices and energy abundance in sort of the grand
strategies around the globe and what that's meant for the
Arab States or for the Russian Russian expansionism. Low energy
prices I think have been really challenging for Russia, So
I do think we'll see a continued effort at that.
(16:26):
I think what's so complicated about our current moment. People
want to think about us as being in an energy transition,
but we have this complex situation where we're both producing
more fossil fuels than ever before in history and also
you know, accelerating the energy transition with renewables. Whether that
is actually a path to where we want to go
as a society, I think is a real open question.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Well, China as a threat did not exist in the
Reagan Ears at least, if anything, those desire to want
to engage with China. But if you look at the
current moment With recent foreign policy priority for the US
under Biden has been to try and not lose their
foothold in the market for electric vehicles or for green technologies,
(17:10):
where China is excelling. And the way Trump talks about
China now it sounds like he is interested in competing,
he wants America to win. But then he also calls
the energy transition investments as the green new scam. And
so does this mean under Trump the US loses the
(17:30):
opportunity to catch up with China, if it ever was
going to catch up with China and green technologies.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
First, I guess I would just highlight the complexity of
the US China relationship and what it means for the
energy transition as having some similarities to what I was
describing in the nineteen seventies, which is just that the
US has been in this position of both trying to
reduce emissions by accelerating the adoption of solar energy and
wind technologies and batteries and all these things, but at
the same time trying to do a kind of energy
(17:59):
and dependence through domestic manufacturing, which has meant that we've
been putting tariffs on solar imports from China and trying
to protect renewable energy industries, which is in turn sort
of slowing the energy transition. So it's again the sort
of complicated two step or multi dimensional aspect of this
energy transition in terms of what happens going forward. So
(18:20):
I think what's fascinating about the Trump situation is that
is this tension between his rivalry with China and his
hostility towards renewable energy businesses. But I think the bigger
challenge here is that the economic opportunities that are happening
in renewable energy are increasingly happening around the world and
not necessarily centered in the United States or or necessarily
(18:41):
even in China, and so we're kind of competing for
exports to other places around the world. And I think
it will be challenging for the United States to catch
up as a manufacturer of these different technologies. The United
States has not been dominating manufacturing in recent decades. So
the idea that even with tariffs and other kinds of
protections and subsidies, that we're going to become a leader
in these technologies, it's a little dice as to whether
(19:05):
the United States can actually pull that off, because there
are so many pressures that have already exerted themselves, and
so many synergies around manufacturing in China where they're able
to connect the batteries, the cars, the panels, all sorts
of synergies around manufacturing. It's going to be difficult. And
I think that's not so much around Trump's hostility even
(19:26):
but really about the long much longer term trend around
industrial manufacturing in the United States that make it quite challenging.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
But you made this point that historically there has been
you know, on the one side, affordability of energy, which
has ended up in pursuing more fossil fuel policies versus
trying to reduce emissions, which has led to some amount
of renewable deployment as things we can compare. But really,
if you look at the history of US energy consumption,
(19:57):
US has kind of made its choice for decades because
every president in the last many decades and let's just
look at this century, from Bush to Obama to Trump
to Biden, has increased the extraction of fossil fuels. And again,
of course Trump wants to continue the trend. This is
(20:18):
something that you've looked at. You're an expert in this area.
Am I reading it wrong that the US really just
wants and is very happy with its abundant fossil fuels
and you know, the renewable energy transition, Well, that's something
we have to do because we have to show the
world that this is I think the US is.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Very is very committed to cheap energy, and the politics
of energy prices are very harsh in the US. You know,
high gas prices lead to discontent, and that's not just
in the United States. It's really around the world that
you see examples of that. I mean, I think it
is important to put fast increased fossil fuel production in
the context of significantly rising renable energy development, because renewable
(21:03):
energy is shaving off growth in fossil fuels, and you
do see the shuddering of some coal fire power plants,
and that a lot of the growth in power production
has been with solar and wind production, and international energy
agencies predictions have repeatedly underestimated the rapid growth of renewables
and also the cost declines in renewables. So I think
(21:26):
the bet that some people are making, and this is
really a bet about what's going to happen, is that
these cost declines are eventually going to push fossil fuels
out of use in a variety of scenarios, and that
what we should be doing in the short term is
having energy abundance for prosperity and growth and technological development,
but that we are inexorably headed towards a renewable future
(21:47):
because solar energy is going to basically just outcompete the
fossil fuels eventually. Now I'm a little less optimistic about
that and think that it's much more likely that without
policy intervention, that we will continue to have a robust
fall fuel sector paired with a growth of renewables, and
the growth of renewables will have a significant impact on
(22:07):
our climate future, and you know, we'll shave off the
growth of fossil fuels perhaps, but I do tend to
believe that without policy intervention we won't be able to
get to net zero or anything remotely close to it.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
After the break, more of my conversation with Yale historian
Paul Stateman. And if you've been enjoying this episode, please
take a moment to rate and review the show on
Spotify or Apple. It helps other listeners find the show. Well,
I'll maybe ask you now to suspend some of your
(22:51):
beliefs and wear a Marga hat and think about what
Trump's going to do in the next four years where
we know with certainty that there will be more extreme
weather impacts driven by worsening climate change. Now, if you
were asked with your Marca hat on to give advice
to the Trump administration on how to deal with the
(23:14):
next four years, whether they want to call it climate
change or not, or whether they want to call it
energy transition or not, what advice would you give them?
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Well, I guess there are the advices then the predictions.
You know. I think it's important to note that, you know, Texas,
for example, is the leader in you know, renewables, solar
and wind, and Elon Musk is very involved in the
renewable energy economy in a variety of ways. And so
there are ways in which you could see that MAGA
and the Trump Bees coming around on renewable energy as
(23:46):
an American industry that they want to support, and that
it is actually you know, coming out of Texas, and
there are all these ways in which it's a good thing,
and they could get behind aspects of it, and maybe
you know, Musk being a MAGA supporter now will lead
to a widespread conservative embrace of tesla and electric vehicles
and things like that. It's a little hard to predict.
(24:06):
I mean, it is clear though that the international perspective
that Trump will want to be hostile, you know, rhetorically
hostile to clear energy and environmental policies and international collaborations.
I think what's going to be fascinating. It will be
fascinating to the extent to which there are other natural
you know, other disasters like the fires or the hurricanes,
and what that they might provoke. I think my concern
(24:28):
about that, though, is that the disasters don't necessarily lead
to climate policy. What they tend to lead to instead
are disaster aid strategies in which there's sort of a coping, adapting, subsidizing, compensating.
Fires don't necessarily lead to climate policy, certainly not under
a Trump administration. So it's unclear exactly how those things
(24:51):
are going to be brought together. And the extent to
which continued signals of climate change lead to political pressure
on the Republican party to take action, we have not
yet really seen that converting into pressure on Republican politicians
in a substantial way. And until that happens, it's going
to be hard to see major policy change.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Are there more Carter to Regin transition parallels that you
can draw with Biden to Trump, Well, I.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Think there are or one one similarity and one difference
that I think is really important to mention. One is
about the role of the liberal public interest organizations. And
we saw this during the first Trump administration with the
idea of the resistance. But it's it is very clarifying
for these public interest organizations, the litigating groups in natural
(25:43):
Resource Defense counsel or other other groups, you know, wanting
to sue the government and try to block things. It's
very that's what they were set up to do. They
were founded during the Nixon administration and their initial legal
docket was all about suing agencies. So that's what they
are prepared to do. And when Reagan came into office,
they soared in membership. I think the Sierra Club grew
(26:03):
by some thirty percent a year during the early nineteen eighties,
Donations flooded in. They sued and vilified you know, James
Watt and others. And we saw that again with the
first Trump years, where there was just a wave of
lawsuits to try to block immigration issues, environmental issues, and
things like that. So we can see that. I think
it's in some ways easier for these groups to know
(26:25):
what they're supposed to do than under the Biden administration
when they are in this awkward position of being both
allies and opponents rivals trying to pressure the government. So
I think we will see real clarity about mission and
again and it unifies them.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Now.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
There are also some very significant differences from the early
Reagan years, the first being that there is a Republican Congress,
and the Democratic Congress under Reagan led the way in
holding hearings and challenging and exposing and resisting Reagan's efforts.
And so we have a narrow majority of the Republicans now,
but it is it is a majority, and it makes
(27:01):
it difficult for any of those kinds of hearings to
take place, and it will be much more difficult for
the Democrats to push back. The Supreme Court. Also, while
it was not a tremendously liberal court under Reagan, it
was a lot more liberal than the current court, and
so that again is not going to be able to
play the same role in the litigation that might unfold.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Thank you so much for your insights, Paul.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. These are great questions,
and it's we'll have to see how this sol unfolds.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
History can teach us many things, but it rarely can
predict what happens next. In twenty twenty four, the Democrats
made the election all about how democracy will fail if
Trump is elected. But the people choose him anyway, and
that's the power vested in people in a democracy. Their
choices are supreme, but also they can choose to make
(28:02):
different choices in the future. So I wanted to leave
you with one more thought from Jonathan lash, the environmental
lawyer from the eighties who mightily spoke with.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village,
and my parents had a house with a little tiny
We were right in the city, but had a little
tiny backyard down in greench Village, and they had some
lawn furniture out there, and if they wanted to go
out and sit on a summer evening and have a
drink at the scrub the oily soot off all the
(28:34):
furniture before they did it just accumulated. If you went
to the top of the empire, state building. You could
see the Chrysler building, but you never saw New Jersey
and all of that has changed now the air is
just much much cleaner. You don't you have to go
to New Delhi if you want to get that kind
(28:55):
of exposure. And that's a tremendous success of the environmental
laws at the same time as we had extraordinary economic growth.
It didn't destroy economic growth in the country, but it's
also reduced the urgency of people's sense about these issues.
You rarely see people becoming engaged in protests around direct,
(29:19):
immediate exposures, other than in some places where there are
large scale refineries that are creating human health risks. Climate
change is a much bigger, slower, more distributed impact, and
I think although all the polls show that there's a
very high level of concern about climate change, it isn't
(29:42):
as immediate as the problems that people were facing in
the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Or is it. On that note, thank you for listening
to zero and now for the Sound of the Week.
A protest from the eighties.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
Two men are members of Greenpeace and environmental group. I
climbed these in.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Freezing weather to protest acid rain caused by pollution.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Jim Styles is one of the men who climbed the
six hundred and forty foot stack.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
He still thinks the protest did some good.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
I just get the feeling that before we did this,
there were an awful lot of people who had just
never even heard of acid rain or heard of it
in passing and didn't think much of it. And now
people realize that there are people who care about this,
people who are very concerned with the destruction that is
taking place right now.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
If you like this episode, please take a moment to
rate or review the show on Apple podcasts on Spotify.
Share this episode with a friend or with someone who
still dresses like it's the eighties. You can get in
touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer
is Mighty Lee Rau. Bloomberg's head of podcast is Stage
Palmer and head of Talk is Brendan Newnan. Our theme
(30:46):
music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Sharan Chan,
Jender Louis, and Jessica beck I am Akshatrati back So
means
Welcome to zero. I am Akshatrati. This week, back to
the future. Trump is back in the White House. What
(00:22):
will the next four years hold when it comes to
energy and climate policy. There are many ways to answer
that question. One is to look at recent history for
some clues. Trump began his first term by pulling the
US out of the Paris Agreement. He's done that again,
and as he did in his first term, he's once
again taken aim at environmental regulations, but this time he
(00:45):
is going further, declaring a national Energy Emergency and promising
that the US will double down on domestic fossil fuel production.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Certainly feel deja vu. We have heard this, but the
circum stances they're very different.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
This week, as we've been thinking about the Biden to
Trump transition, we thought about traveling further back in time
to replay what took place at the White House more
than forty years ago, when Jimmy Carter's term ended and
the new administration, led by Ronald Reagan promised to remake America.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
They were absolutely committed to the idea that the US
needed to increase its production of oil, gas, and coal,
and that that was indispensable for national security and for
the economy, and any set of policies that got in
the way of doing that seemed like they were designed
(01:42):
to weaken America.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
That's Jonathan Lash. He was an environmental lawyer in the
eighties and wrote a book about Reagan's environmental policies called
Season of Spoils. He spoke with Zero's producer might Lely
Raw about how Reagan right away set about reversing the
Carter administration's positions, particularly on energy and the environment.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
He wanted smaller government, less regulation. He wanted to encourage industry.
He thought the environmental problems have been greatly exaggerated. The
people he brought in were ideological about their opposition to
government intervention, and they began to weed out scientists in
(02:25):
advisory committees who they thought were too environmentally inclined and
bring in industry scientists instead. They wanted to get the
answers that satisfied their political objectives.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
It all sounds a bit familiar, right, but whether it's
Reagan then or Trump now, Lash says that there are
limits to a president's power.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
When we hold an election, we change the people who
are charged with carrying out the laws, but the laws
don't change, and there was this sense then which I
see now as well, that somehow, having won the election,
the decks are cleared. Everything is subject to change to
(03:06):
reflect the new policies. If they are able to pass
legislation that changes the law, that's the way it works.
If the public supports that the law can be changed.
That isn't what happened in his first termament office, and
it isn't what happened when Reagan was elected president.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
And so with a new Trump era upon us, I
wanted to hear more about what lessons presidential history might
hold for the next four years. Someone who has studied
these parallels in depth is Paul Saban. He's a professor
of history at Yale an author of several books about oil, environmentalism,
and the Reagan Ears. We talked about whether Bidenomics will
(03:47):
have staying power, what we can learn from the US's
long running commitment to fossil fuels, and how Trump might
be able to go further than Reagan did. Paul, Welcome
(04:17):
to the show.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Now, in conversations I've had with policy experts and thinkers
in the last few months, it seems like there are
two strands of thinking that have emerged. There's one camp
of people who say, when it comes to the direction
of travel on things like decarbonization, it doesn't matter all
that much who is in the White House. If the
(04:41):
economy is moving in that direction, the momentum will continue.
And then there's another camp of people who say it
matters a lot who's in the White House because the
executive branch can put in a lot of rules in
place and set the tone for what happens. When you
look at the transition that took place this week from
a Biden and minister to a Trumpet administration, how momentous
(05:04):
is it from the perspective of energy and climate policy.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
Well, again, thanks so much for having me on and
give me a chance to give some historical perspective on
these energy and climate transitions. I think that you have
to see it, as you know, truly momentous. And I'm
one of those who sees the energy and climate space
as being a political and economic one and not just
one that has economic forces sort of unrolling without being
(05:30):
guided by institutional structures. And I think that you know,
we're likely to see a dramatic reversal of many federal
policies that have been put in place in the last
four years that have been trying to accelerate an energy transition.
So certainly there are underlying trends, you know, and the
dropping cost of solar power, wind power, things like that.
New technologies and batteries have been really remarkable advances. But
(05:52):
those are taking place in the context as well of
a political and legal structure that I think has a
lot of impact on their development.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
So is it true then that Bidenomics, which is this
idea that you're going to try and put in place
things like the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure build
that will bring meaningful jobs back into the country. Do
you think Bidenomics just becomes a footnote because of what
Trump's likely to do.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
You know, that's just going to be a fascinating issue
to follow as we go forward. I mean, one of
the really distinctive aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act has
been the location of where these investments have gone, and
many of them have really gone into Republican districts in
the South, and I think it's still unknown, you know,
what's going to happen with that in terms of the
(06:42):
narrow majorities in the House of Representatives in particular as
to whether you know, Republican representatives from those districts are
going to prioritize defending these new factories, these new jobs
in their districts, or whether there will be sort of
strong armed into prioritizing shifting money into you know, tax cuts,
(07:02):
and that's going to be most likely, you know, one
of the major debates of the coming year. And so
it's really an experiment in political economy to see whether,
you know, the power of local jobs and industries can
outweigh this national climate that's pushing for sort of a
national policy newly focused on tax cuts.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
So let's take a historical lens to see if we
can learn anything about what's coming under this Trump administration. Obviously,
recently there's been a lot written about President Jimmy Carter's
life and legacy. He recently passed away, but also he
sort of foreshadows a little bit of what Biden Trump
(07:44):
looks like.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Now.
Speaker 1 (07:45):
One thing that gets repeated is Jimmy Carter installed solar
panels on the rooftop and then Reagan removed them. There's
also the fact that Carter to some extent got booted
out because of inflation issues, just like Biden, also in
anticipation of what his successes might do. Carter issued more
than one seventy what are called Midnight regulations just before
(08:08):
Reagan took office, and Biden has done I don't know
if it's one seventy but quite a bit. Are there
lessons from the transition from Carter to Reagan that can
give us some insight into what we're going to see
now from a Biden to a Trump.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
Great question, and I think it's really fascinating to look
back at the car to Reagan transition, and it's think
it's important to put in an even larger, broader context
of sort of a back and forth that's been going
on in American politics really for more than a century
between a more developmentalist oriented governance of the Department of
the Interior and other agencies that might have strong ties
(08:46):
to Western political leaders and Western states, and a more
Eastern centered managerial approach. And this goes back all the way,
you know, to Teddy Roosevelt in the progressive era, people
like Albert Fall and the teapot Dome scandal in in
the United States. So I guess the point that I'm
emphasizing there is that part of what we're going to
see is a continuation of this back and forth in
(09:09):
approach to public lands and public resources and regulation. And
that happened in the early Reagan years with the appointment
of someone like James Watt, who is kind of coming
out of the West wanting to return greater access to
resources to companies into states, as opposed to Carter's more
restriction oriented approach. And so we'll certainly see that with
the Trump appointees to Interior and other agencies in their
(09:33):
efforts to open up public lands and to oil and
gas drilling especially. There are other things that are maybe
more distinctive to the Carter Reagan shift that we'll see,
which is, you know, the appointment to agencies like EPA,
where you have people coming in who really have some
a questionable commitment to the mission of the agency. You know.
(09:53):
An Gorsich was the person appointed in the early Reagan years.
She had come out of the Colorado State legislature and
being a lobbyist in Colorado and had been a pretty
vocal opponent of clean air regulations and then was put
in charge of the EPA and one of her responsibilities
was to try to cut back on the EPA budget
and pull back on the new super fun law. So
(10:15):
I think we're going to see definitely going to see
those kinds of things happening in the new administration. You
can tell just by the people who are being appointed
that they are have really, you know, ambivalent relationship to
the mission of the bureaucracies that they're going to be running,
and so it's a question about how much they're going
to try to really sort of undermine from within and
(10:38):
how much they're going to try to pursue some of
the objectives of those agencies.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So in your book Public Citizens, you write about how
citizen advocacy movements of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,
well they remade America but then also perhaps had unintended
consequences and paving the way for our Reagan era conservative
movement that was aimed at slashing regulations. There is also
(11:06):
a parallel there to now, because Elon Musk is supposed
to run this Department of Government Efficiency that is aimed
at doing exactly that, shrinking the size of government. Are
you experiencing deja vu that is very strong? And what
consequences might this have for the kind of success these
(11:29):
agencies are these new efficiency movements can have.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
I mean, that's a great question, and certainly, yeah, there
is a lot of deja vu looking at the early
Reagan years, and so just to put the broader context
on the public citizens and kind of the idea of
the CITs and activists, the argument there was that the
attack on the new Deal administrative state in the nineteen
seventies comes not just from the right, but also from
the left and people like consumer activist Ralph Nader and
(11:55):
others who come to see government agencies as being a
big part of the environmental problem and they start, you know,
suing them and attacking them and criticizing their close alliance
with companies and seeing that, you know, again that they're
part of the problem. But one of the key distinctions
between the liberal attack on the agencies and the conservative
attack on the agencies, and this gets back to what
(12:17):
I was just saying, is that the liberals, you still
believed in the federal government, They still believed in regulation.
They just wanted it to serve what they saw as
the public interest. But the difference was that when the
Reagan you know, regulators came in, they had a much
more as I said, much more ambivalent relationship to the
agencies and to whether they really supported their missions. In
(12:38):
many cases, they were coming in in the early nineteen
eighties with what they saw as a mandate or a
mission of rolling back the social and environmental regulation of
the nineteen seventies, and that includes clean air regulation, water regulation.
Occupational safety and health was also a big area that
they were quite hostile to. And so, you know, what
(13:00):
what was happening under Carter was, in my view, an
effort to try to balance some of the reforms of
the federal bureaucracy with the continued implementation of regulation to
protect the air and the water. Carter was trying to
juggle these two things and see how you could build
trust in government by making government be more efficient and
more effective. But he still believed very strongly in environmental regulation. Now,
(13:25):
the difference with Reagan, and I also think the parallel
with Trump, is that you have these folks like Musk
who are coming in, you know, really hostile to the
bureaucracy as a whole, questioning legitimacy and its mission. And
that's kind of what happened with Reagan as they came in,
you know, with the idea that they were going to
slash regulations, they were gonna dismantle different programs. What interestingly,
(13:49):
had worked in the federal government before he came into
the Interior Department, and he was a bit of a
bureaucratic warrior and really wanted to kind of reform the
agency from within, and saw h self as having, you know,
six months a year to do all of the dramatic
changes that he could during this short period of time.
So it was a very aggressive effort to try to
transform their bureaucracy. And what happened as a result is
(14:12):
that there was a massive backlash to the Reagan efforts.
There was very little consensus building or coalition building around
regulatory reform, and there were hearings in Congress, and there
was litigation and the irony of the Reagan efforts at deregulation.
So they actually accomplished very little. And part of the
reason why they accomplished so little is because they didn't
(14:35):
do what Carter was trying to do, which is trying
to balance the legitimacy of government with deregulation. So, I mean,
I think we can all agree on the idea that
government should be more efficient. It should be more effective.
But we also maybe you know, can still agree we
want clean air, we want clean water. What Reagan did
was sort of separate those two things, and that made
it actually quite difficult for the Reagan administration to accomplish
(14:55):
its goals.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Now, taking a look at foreign policy, Bergram, who is
Trump's pick for Interior Department, as the ability to open
up federal lance to oil and gas drillings and has
said that he would like to use American energy as
a tool for quote unquote world peace. Have you heard
(15:18):
that before? And how exactly can fossil fuels be used
for world peace?
Speaker 3 (15:23):
Well, I mean, I think this is a very interesting
area to you know, to explore and thinking about. You know,
energy independence, you know, was a big theme of the
nineteen seventies, and and Carter was strongly behind that. And
you know, Carter's remembered as a big environmentalist for his
renewable energy initiatives, but he also was quite in favor
of domestic drilling and coal development and synthetic fuels. And
(15:44):
so this is part of the sort of complicated legacy
of the nineteen seventies and also part of why we
didn't get off fossil fuels earlier, which is that there
was a kind of competing objectives of national security, low
prices for consumers as well as reducer consumption. So I
think I think there's a there are some legitimate strategic
(16:06):
conversations that could be had about the role of reducing
oil prices and energy abundance in sort of the grand
strategies around the globe and what that's meant for the
Arab States or for the Russian Russian expansionism. Low energy
prices I think have been really challenging for Russia, So
I do think we'll see a continued effort at that.
(16:26):
I think what's so complicated about our current moment. People
want to think about us as being in an energy transition,
but we have this complex situation where we're both producing
more fossil fuels than ever before in history and also
you know, accelerating the energy transition with renewables. Whether that
is actually a path to where we want to go
as a society, I think is a real open question.
Speaker 1 (16:47):
Well, China as a threat did not exist in the
Reagan Ears at least, if anything, those desire to want
to engage with China. But if you look at the
current moment With recent foreign policy priority for the US
under Biden has been to try and not lose their
foothold in the market for electric vehicles or for green technologies,
(17:10):
where China is excelling. And the way Trump talks about
China now it sounds like he is interested in competing,
he wants America to win. But then he also calls
the energy transition investments as the green new scam. And
so does this mean under Trump the US loses the
(17:30):
opportunity to catch up with China, if it ever was
going to catch up with China and green technologies.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
First, I guess I would just highlight the complexity of
the US China relationship and what it means for the
energy transition as having some similarities to what I was
describing in the nineteen seventies, which is just that the
US has been in this position of both trying to
reduce emissions by accelerating the adoption of solar energy and
wind technologies and batteries and all these things, but at
the same time trying to do a kind of energy
(17:59):
and dependence through domestic manufacturing, which has meant that we've
been putting tariffs on solar imports from China and trying
to protect renewable energy industries, which is in turn sort
of slowing the energy transition. So it's again the sort
of complicated two step or multi dimensional aspect of this
energy transition in terms of what happens going forward. So
(18:20):
I think what's fascinating about the Trump situation is that
is this tension between his rivalry with China and his
hostility towards renewable energy businesses. But I think the bigger
challenge here is that the economic opportunities that are happening
in renewable energy are increasingly happening around the world and
not necessarily centered in the United States or or necessarily
(18:41):
even in China, and so we're kind of competing for
exports to other places around the world. And I think
it will be challenging for the United States to catch
up as a manufacturer of these different technologies. The United
States has not been dominating manufacturing in recent decades. So
the idea that even with tariffs and other kinds of
protections and subsidies, that we're going to become a leader
in these technologies, it's a little dice as to whether
(19:05):
the United States can actually pull that off, because there
are so many pressures that have already exerted themselves, and
so many synergies around manufacturing in China where they're able
to connect the batteries, the cars, the panels, all sorts
of synergies around manufacturing. It's going to be difficult. And
I think that's not so much around Trump's hostility even
(19:26):
but really about the long much longer term trend around
industrial manufacturing in the United States that make it quite challenging.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
But you made this point that historically there has been
you know, on the one side, affordability of energy, which
has ended up in pursuing more fossil fuel policies versus
trying to reduce emissions, which has led to some amount
of renewable deployment as things we can compare. But really,
if you look at the history of US energy consumption,
(19:57):
US has kind of made its choice for decades because
every president in the last many decades and let's just
look at this century, from Bush to Obama to Trump
to Biden, has increased the extraction of fossil fuels. And again,
of course Trump wants to continue the trend. This is
(20:18):
something that you've looked at. You're an expert in this area.
Am I reading it wrong that the US really just
wants and is very happy with its abundant fossil fuels
and you know, the renewable energy transition, Well, that's something
we have to do because we have to show the
world that this is I think the US is.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Very is very committed to cheap energy, and the politics
of energy prices are very harsh in the US. You know,
high gas prices lead to discontent, and that's not just
in the United States. It's really around the world that
you see examples of that. I mean, I think it
is important to put fast increased fossil fuel production in
the context of significantly rising renable energy development, because renewable
(21:03):
energy is shaving off growth in fossil fuels, and you
do see the shuddering of some coal fire power plants,
and that a lot of the growth in power production
has been with solar and wind production, and international energy
agencies predictions have repeatedly underestimated the rapid growth of renewables
and also the cost declines in renewables. So I think
(21:26):
the bet that some people are making, and this is
really a bet about what's going to happen, is that
these cost declines are eventually going to push fossil fuels
out of use in a variety of scenarios, and that
what we should be doing in the short term is
having energy abundance for prosperity and growth and technological development,
but that we are inexorably headed towards a renewable future
(21:47):
because solar energy is going to basically just outcompete the
fossil fuels eventually. Now I'm a little less optimistic about
that and think that it's much more likely that without
policy intervention, that we will continue to have a robust
fall fuel sector paired with a growth of renewables, and
the growth of renewables will have a significant impact on
(22:07):
our climate future, and you know, we'll shave off the
growth of fossil fuels perhaps, but I do tend to
believe that without policy intervention we won't be able to
get to net zero or anything remotely close to it.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
After the break, more of my conversation with Yale historian
Paul Stateman. And if you've been enjoying this episode, please
take a moment to rate and review the show on
Spotify or Apple. It helps other listeners find the show. Well,
I'll maybe ask you now to suspend some of your
(22:51):
beliefs and wear a Marga hat and think about what
Trump's going to do in the next four years where
we know with certainty that there will be more extreme
weather impacts driven by worsening climate change. Now, if you
were asked with your Marca hat on to give advice
to the Trump administration on how to deal with the
(23:14):
next four years, whether they want to call it climate
change or not, or whether they want to call it
energy transition or not, what advice would you give them?
Speaker 3 (23:24):
Well, I guess there are the advices then the predictions.
You know. I think it's important to note that, you know, Texas,
for example, is the leader in you know, renewables, solar
and wind, and Elon Musk is very involved in the
renewable energy economy in a variety of ways. And so
there are ways in which you could see that MAGA
and the Trump Bees coming around on renewable energy as
(23:46):
an American industry that they want to support, and that
it is actually you know, coming out of Texas, and
there are all these ways in which it's a good thing,
and they could get behind aspects of it, and maybe
you know, Musk being a MAGA supporter now will lead
to a widespread conservative embrace of tesla and electric vehicles
and things like that. It's a little hard to predict.
(24:06):
I mean, it is clear though that the international perspective
that Trump will want to be hostile, you know, rhetorically
hostile to clear energy and environmental policies and international collaborations.
I think what's going to be fascinating. It will be
fascinating to the extent to which there are other natural
you know, other disasters like the fires or the hurricanes,
and what that they might provoke. I think my concern
(24:28):
about that, though, is that the disasters don't necessarily lead
to climate policy. What they tend to lead to instead
are disaster aid strategies in which there's sort of a coping, adapting, subsidizing, compensating.
Fires don't necessarily lead to climate policy, certainly not under
a Trump administration. So it's unclear exactly how those things
(24:51):
are going to be brought together. And the extent to
which continued signals of climate change lead to political pressure
on the Republican party to take action, we have not
yet really seen that converting into pressure on Republican politicians
in a substantial way. And until that happens, it's going
to be hard to see major policy change.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Are there more Carter to Regin transition parallels that you
can draw with Biden to Trump, Well, I.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Think there are or one one similarity and one difference
that I think is really important to mention. One is
about the role of the liberal public interest organizations. And
we saw this during the first Trump administration with the
idea of the resistance. But it's it is very clarifying
for these public interest organizations, the litigating groups in natural
(25:43):
Resource Defense counsel or other other groups, you know, wanting
to sue the government and try to block things. It's
very that's what they were set up to do. They
were founded during the Nixon administration and their initial legal
docket was all about suing agencies. So that's what they
are prepared to do. And when Reagan came into office,
they soared in membership. I think the Sierra Club grew
(26:03):
by some thirty percent a year during the early nineteen eighties,
Donations flooded in. They sued and vilified you know, James
Watt and others. And we saw that again with the
first Trump years, where there was just a wave of
lawsuits to try to block immigration issues, environmental issues, and
things like that. So we can see that. I think
it's in some ways easier for these groups to know
(26:25):
what they're supposed to do than under the Biden administration
when they are in this awkward position of being both
allies and opponents rivals trying to pressure the government. So
I think we will see real clarity about mission and
again and it unifies them.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
Now.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
There are also some very significant differences from the early
Reagan years, the first being that there is a Republican Congress,
and the Democratic Congress under Reagan led the way in
holding hearings and challenging and exposing and resisting Reagan's efforts.
And so we have a narrow majority of the Republicans now,
but it is it is a majority, and it makes
(27:01):
it difficult for any of those kinds of hearings to
take place, and it will be much more difficult for
the Democrats to push back. The Supreme Court. Also, while
it was not a tremendously liberal court under Reagan, it
was a lot more liberal than the current court, and
so that again is not going to be able to
play the same role in the litigation that might unfold.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Thank you so much for your insights, Paul.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. These are great questions,
and it's we'll have to see how this sol unfolds.
Speaker 1 (27:39):
History can teach us many things, but it rarely can
predict what happens next. In twenty twenty four, the Democrats
made the election all about how democracy will fail if
Trump is elected. But the people choose him anyway, and
that's the power vested in people in a democracy. Their
choices are supreme, but also they can choose to make
(28:02):
different choices in the future. So I wanted to leave
you with one more thought from Jonathan lash, the environmental
lawyer from the eighties who mightily spoke with.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village,
and my parents had a house with a little tiny
We were right in the city, but had a little
tiny backyard down in greench Village, and they had some
lawn furniture out there, and if they wanted to go
out and sit on a summer evening and have a
drink at the scrub the oily soot off all the
(28:34):
furniture before they did it just accumulated. If you went
to the top of the empire, state building. You could
see the Chrysler building, but you never saw New Jersey
and all of that has changed now the air is
just much much cleaner. You don't you have to go
to New Delhi if you want to get that kind
(28:55):
of exposure. And that's a tremendous success of the environmental
laws at the same time as we had extraordinary economic growth.
It didn't destroy economic growth in the country, but it's
also reduced the urgency of people's sense about these issues.
You rarely see people becoming engaged in protests around direct,
(29:19):
immediate exposures, other than in some places where there are
large scale refineries that are creating human health risks. Climate
change is a much bigger, slower, more distributed impact, and
I think although all the polls show that there's a
very high level of concern about climate change, it isn't
(29:42):
as immediate as the problems that people were facing in
the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
Or is it. On that note, thank you for listening
to zero and now for the Sound of the Week.
A protest from the eighties.
Speaker 4 (29:56):
Two men are members of Greenpeace and environmental group. I
climbed these in.
Speaker 3 (30:00):
Freezing weather to protest acid rain caused by pollution.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Jim Styles is one of the men who climbed the
six hundred and forty foot stack.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
He still thinks the protest did some good.
Speaker 4 (30:10):
I just get the feeling that before we did this,
there were an awful lot of people who had just
never even heard of acid rain or heard of it
in passing and didn't think much of it. And now
people realize that there are people who care about this,
people who are very concerned with the destruction that is
taking place right now.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
If you like this episode, please take a moment to
rate or review the show on Apple podcasts on Spotify.
Share this episode with a friend or with someone who
still dresses like it's the eighties. You can get in
touch at zero pod at Bloomberg dot Net. Zero's producer
is Mighty Lee Rau. Bloomberg's head of podcast is Stage
Palmer and head of Talk is Brendan Newnan. Our theme
(30:46):
music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Sharan Chan,
Jender Louis, and Jessica beck I am Akshatrati back So
means
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com