Why Is the Fossil Fuel Industry Funding Anti-Trans Politics?

0:00 If you're going to talk about the intersection between restrictive gender norms and climate obstruction in the Year of Our Lord twenty twenty five, you have to also look at the crossover between anti trans groups and anti climate groups, because folks, that ven diagram is a circle. Welcome back to carbon Bros. A collaboration between drilled and non toxic.

0:26 I'm Amy Westervelt.

0:27 I'm Daniel Penny.

0:29 Today we're bringing you a conversation with Vivian Taylor, one of the key researchers behind a story you might have seen earlier this year in at Most and Heated about the fossil billionaires funding anti trans campaigns. Vivian has been working on both trans rates and climate issues for a very long time, so we figured she was the perfect person to talk to about all of it.

1:01 So Hi, my name is Vivian Taylor. I am a climate policy and environmental health policy expert. I am a former researcher who worked at the climate tank Climateexus before it went away in twenty twenty four. I am also a long time transgender rights activist. I have in various ways been working on trans rights issue since I got out of the Army in twenty ten. From twenty thirteen to twenty fifteen, I was the executive director of the Episcopal Churches International LGBT Rights Ministry. I also have been working in North Carolina against discrimination focused on transgender people and specifically working against the promotion of laws to criminalize homosexuality and transgender stuff. While I was the executive director

2:16 of the Episcopal Churches International LGBT Ministry. This was back in twenty fourteen when You've Gonda passed an anti homosexuality law lobbied heavily by white American Christians. So I did a lot of work with people when You've Gonda there pushing back against the criminalization of homosexuality in that country, which led to just terrible suffering. A lot of people were killed, a lot of sexual violence, a lot of people imprisoned for no reason, terrible, terrible stuff. And so since then I have had, even in my environmental work, a very strong focus on trying to understand the criminalization of homo sensuality and the criminalization of transgender people and how that ties into all of this. So in my

3:19 climate work, I'm also always done environmental health work. I cannot tell you how much I believe that people should have access to clean drinking water, and that if they don't have clean drinking water, it's going to hurt and kill them, especially poor people, especially kids, especially people with disabilities and ill message like, look, we just got to get people clean water. I don't care on God you believe in or don't believe in. What moral code do you have? What wonderful exciting velocophy you have one way or another. We got to give people water to do it.

4:01 His job. So I've worked on this lot.

4:04 In twenty twenty one, I came to work at you think tank Climate Nexus, and I was working on our climate finance team and also our Climate U health team, and there was a huge amount of cross over because climate change is just extraordinarily expensive, not just that it destroys our infrastructure, which it does, but also like hotter weather is dangerous, wetter weather spreads more disease. So I did a lot of research enough how this was being communicated about, And starting in twenty twenty one, I was working every day on a climate finance newsletter that was going out to a couple of thousand reporters and policy makers and so on. Just following all this and every day I would have to go through and collate and

5:06 ride up summaries.

5:08 And one of the things I noticed very quickly was that this inti woke narrative that was typically focused to feel mongering around transgender people, this is all getting used to hammer the idea that we should like invest in soulwar and we should add batteries to the electrical grid to make it more reliable and more efficient lands it is hard to make direct or given that we should ignore climate change and just keep pumping money into fossil fuels forever, Like it is getting hotter every single year.

5:56 We are having high tide blooding in places that we have never had high time flooding before. And it's happening regularly because the c levels are already rising. You know, it's not an Emperors new clothes thing, like we're all wearing the impers new clothes when it comes to climate change, and kind of the only way you can get people to do that is if you keep them distracted. And so with all of this really in Kent's anti trans rhetoric and specifically rhetoric around criminalizing trans people and beginning to really push back on gay people's right to marry gay people's right to have jobs like teachers or other roles that come with a high level of trust and responsibility.

6:53 I begin to wonder, is this just something I'm noticing while you listen the blue car rule? Like you had a blue car, you see blue cars everywhere? Am I just a gay person? And so I see anti gay stuff everywhere? So we started looking into it. And so what we did was we just identified forty of the most prominent groups that have been leading the charge all anti transgender rhetoric and activism and pushing anti trans lulls that are leading into anti homosexuality walls. And what we found is there was a huge amount of funding from the fossil fuel industry. Eighty percent of these groups we're receiving fossil fuel industry money. Wow. What we have seen is the fossil fuel industry trying to protect itself from,

7:49 you know, people being upset with there being more flooding, word extream weather, more heat ways. Possil fuel industry doesn't want to deal with people upset about that stuff. So instead, fossil fuel industry has been funding this massive societal upset about transgender people, and that has heard everybody.

8:18 It's interesting because I feel like there was this moment where people started really freaking out about Project twenty twenty five, and for a lot of people, it was like the first time they heard of the Heritage Foundation and all that, Right, So there was this whole focus on Heritage Foundation and Product twenty twenty five and whatever. We did this jumbo spreadsheet of like all the different organizations involved and where they're funding was coming from, what other issues they advocated for, and you know who worked for them, where else those people worked and all that stuff. And there too, it was just very clear that it's like, oh, a lot of the same funders that are funding anti climate stuff

8:58 for funding in entire work, and a lot of the organizations are working on both those issues. And a lot of the organizations that had been anti abortion organizations almost exclusively for a long time, you could totally see there they kind of won their battle, right, and they've like built up all this infrastructure and have all this funding coming in and they're not just going to dismantle that, And they a lot of them had just pivoted to anti trans and anti climate. It was like those two things were seen as this like the next battle front or whatever.

9:37 It's very disturbing. It is, yeah, but I mean I think one of the good thing was to remember what it was just transfeedble cithing, fossil duel industry. Your reality is that trans people are probably just general works.

9:57 But if we all to gander to work for a world where we both have a survivable environment.

10:11 And a lack of think a treat towards all minority group, we all come together that we have the ability to just choose a world. And look, we all we all know that we have to choose a world. There's room for everybody. Like, look, I'm not trying to push my religion. I have a master's of divinity too. Two thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, Saint Paul, in the earliest Christian text that we still have a copy of, written the Book of Galatians, said, in Jesus Christ there is no Jew or Greek slaver free, no male or female. Two thousand years ago found coundation of the religion. And so many people today still believing we were saying, well, we gotta do something where Richard Poor, no matter your don't

11:11 you know your ethnicity or race whatever, No matter of your gender. Well people whoa, whoa, And that's together role in the hammership. Why God, you know. And I don't mean to get religious, but I'm just saying, we have thousands of years of being like, No, the most important thing is you take care of the poor, You take care of the sick. When there are people who've been in prison, you have to think about their needs and be good to them, even if they've done something you don't like. We gotta like not have racism and sexism and classism. We just gotta work together and like not hurt for sick people.

11:55 Yeah.

11:56 Yeah, Well, we have the answers and much like the answers to do something meaningful about climate change that will result to a high quality outcome for every human being on the planet.

12:10 We have the ability, and we can't butt these wealthy fossil fuel companies use their billions of dollars to split us up and turn us against one another and keep us all in the place where we're being hurt.

12:27 Mm hmmmm.

12:28 I find that every time I look at this, I'm kind of shocked at the fact that really a lot of these right wing organizations in their way are more intersectional than climate organizations. Like they're working on anti climate, anti trans anti women, anti reproductive rights, anti everything all at once. Right, you've worked in climate spaces for a long time. Why is this so hard for climate organizations to wrap their head around? Because I don't think actually, if it's just the people who can care about climate change, you win not either. I mean, I think people are scared.

13:05 I think that there's a really intense campaign right now too. They hate you should not be.

13:18 Talking about climate change. You should not admit that climate change is real. You should not be trying to do anything about climate change. Yeah, and when people are under that much pushback, Yeah, I think people get scared that of we talk about racism, we talk about sexism, and we talk about homophobia. Well, that's going to be a step too far. Then no one's going to listen to the climate stars. And then oh well we just need to Yeah, why can't we just talk about.

14:00 Micro micro granted batteries exactly?

14:06 And it's like, well, because like, don't talk about everything. Yeah wait, wait, sorry, guys, we're talking about the environment of the planet. And to talk about the environment of the planet, you have to deal with the people who live on planet. We're animals, too in this little ecosystem.

14:31 Yeah sounds and yet yeah.

14:36 Any way, I'd hit it too, I get. I mean what trying to have a consistent positional justice is very hard. There's things going on in the world where there are more positions. If you take them, there's a chance that you will lose your job, will not be we get another job immediately. You are gonna be bad trouble if you act like a basically moral turse. But you know, I have short and you can say, well, i'm short, I better take care of myself now. Or you can say, well i'm short, may as well just studying the price and try to move the world forward to a better place.

15:37 But I mean, it's easy for me to say yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think we gotta we gotta just keep working. We gotta keep remembering what the consequences of this stuff are. When I was in the Army, I had a number of buddies who are firefighters, who was in an aviation unit, and so we had to have our own like firefighting squad, and I got to know a number of these guys. I about to hear a fair amount about firefighting, and like, let me tell you, I have never met a firefighter who's like, you know, I don't care about who are fairmblings in a burn? Goldings?

16:23 Why here an apartments Goldings alten fire. I just don't care about these people in there. You know, Oh, there's a kid hiding in the calls that because she's too afraid of the fire. And if she hasn't found in the next forty five second, she's gonna roast light and shaken. No, that's not how firefighters are. They are so focused on those people. They're so focused on those families. They are so focused on like, well, no, you have just putting the water like this, because if you're spreading the water like that, it'll totally destroy the house. But if you spread out like a gift.

16:56 Then they can rebuild and say, oh you'll you ought to think about not just a family right now, you know, the family's economic outcomes over the next ten years.

17:07 When I hear a man talk not protecting a family's economic out comes over the next ten years, I didn't think.

17:17 Well, whatever's man's religions, whatever's politics, are these guys seem to be on track for what I'm looking for.

17:28 Out of a firefighter. And I think that's kind of what we're doing when we're thinking about environmental health, Like, look, I love batteries, but guess what, if you just talk about the technology, you just sound like a cell phone man. And if you can just focus on the effects on people, I think that's what the difference. We gotta love one another.

17:56 You got to stop attacking minority groups, and we move to a direction that protects the health and happiness of all people. We're gonna be okay.

18:09 Carbon Brose is an original series from Drilled and Non Toxic written by me Amy.

18:14 Westerveldt and by me Daniel Penny.

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