 My name is Zena Spizakis. I'm a mom, an activist, an entrepreneur, and I want to be your next congresswoman. I never thought about running before. I was going to handle things from the business side or as an activist. But when I read that we only have about a decade left to save our planet, I couldn't just sit there, I needed to act. That's why I'm getting to work now. Strong corporate interests, lobbyists, political machines fight every day against the policies that we need to enact in Congress. Like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, common sense gun control, campaign finance reform, criminal justice reform, student loan relief, and equal rights. All these policies will help make America more prosperous, more just, and more secure. It sounds audacious, but we have the ideas, we have the courage, and we have the political will. So will you join our movement to create a better New Jersey and a better America? Yeah! Therein are you. Hello everyone, I'm here with Zena Spizakis running in New Jersey's 9th congressional district against incumbent Bill Pascrell. And she was just recently endorsed by Brand New Congress. She was highly recommended by fellow New Jersey and progressive Rusty and Sione. And she is here to talk about her campaign. Zena, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor. I'm looking forward to it. It should be fun. I'm very excited. And when we kind of first connected we got news that Brand New Congress had endorsed you, which is really exciting. So I don't know if you attended. There was like a Brand New Congress training session or whatnot. Did you attend that? And how did that go? I just got back last night. It was this weekend. And I would say, except for like maybe one, all of the candidates that they've endorsed were there from around the country, including a couple of senatorial candidates, which is new for them this year. So it's not just the House of Representatives, but we're going to change the face of the Senate too, because if we need to get anything done, we need to have both houses changed. But it was exciting. It was a nice, it felt like this is really what the future ought to be like. It was a diverse group, lots of different backgrounds, a number of non-native born, naturalized citizens running as well. I mean, it was just beautiful. And behold, everybody's coming at it from a different perspective. I'm coming at it from a clean energy perspective. Other people coming at progressive values via mass incarceration or whatever else. But it was, I felt like if we put all these people in one room or in one house, we could actually get a lot of things done as well. And the other thing that you should know about Brand New Congress, none of their candidates take any corporate money. I mean, they've sworn off of it. We don't want that influence in our campaign or in our legislating. So yeah, it was great actually. That's really exciting. Yeah, I saw the pictures and it was like, I know this sounds corny, but it was like super heartwarming because I've been talking to these candidates and, you know, I'm a fairly cynical person. I think a lot of people who follow American politics closely, it's easy to get cynical, but seeing everyone from like all different walks of life across the country kind of rise up. It really tells you that like something is happening here. And one thing that I think is very clear about all the Brand New Congress and not just Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, but anyone who's progressive is running. Is there's kind of this like core, you know, ideology, this commitment to like Medicare for all a Green New Deal, you know, student loan debt cancellation and whatnot. But each person as you kind of alluded to, they're all approaching this from different angles. So for you, one thing that I really noticed is you have this really strong emphasis on a Green New Deal and basically saving the planet from climate catastrophe. And in your bio, you talk about how you kind of approached this previously from, you know, the business world. And also part of your inspiration is you have two elementary age children, which is obviously going to affect their future. So talk about why climate change is kind of the issue that you're choosing to make front and center. I think it's obvious to everyone, but I think it's really nice to hear it like from you, why it matters to you. Yeah, well, you know, why it matters to me, obviously, my children, you know, and, you know, everyone's children really, really anyone being born into this world is they're not going to have the same, you know, childhood I have. I mean, I'm in the weird, the weird generation where I remember what it was. I'm probably the last generation. Now I'm aging myself right. I'm in my 40s. I'm the last generation to actually remember what it was like prior to the climate crisis. I'm in the first generation to really feel it. And I'm the only, we're in the only generation really do anything about it. And so, you know, I was, I've been an environmental activist. I, you know, I worked, I working our company is a clean energy startup. And I thought I was kind of doing my part until I read the UN's IPCC report last year, which IPCC stands for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And it's basically a collection of the world's best sciences telling you, well, you've got to cut your emissions by about half in the next 12 years, otherwise, you know, run away, right, run away greenhouse effect. And the thing that terrified me about that, Mike, wasn't the 12 years necessarily is that I study climate models. I mean, I'm getting a graduate degree in energy policy and climate science. And every single climate model that I've ever looked at has completely overestimated the amount of time in which we have to react. So that 12 years to me was something more like, I don't know, I'm making this up five or six. It's going to be a lot shorter than what they think it is. It always has been because there are things that are happening to our climate that scientists can't really predict. We've gotten no way of modeling what's happening out there. And scientists by the very nature are conservative, you know, they don't want to go crazy with their predictions. And so they've been completely off the mark. Things are happening faster than we expected. And, you know, I, as a mother, I just, I can't, you know, I read that report and I sort of looked at mine. I'm in a safe blue district, right? It's a D plus 16. And I'm like, what has he done on climate? Nothing. In fact, he even pushed voted a couple of times to push the keystone keystone pipeline forward. And I'm just, I understand this might not be his expertise and I don't expect him to be studying energy policy or anything like that. But, you know, part of leadership is to actually put a voice to something, even if it might be politically inconvenient. And to be quite honest, they can't, you know, no one in the House of Representatives or in the government, frankly, can claim that they've been ignorant to this. Congress gets regular reports called national climate assessments. They've known about this. And in fact, New Jersey, where we're from, it's expected and it's happening now. It's going to get wetter, faster and warmer, twice as warm faster than the rest of the United States. And that's happening right now. I mean, we had Superstorm Sandy, things are flooding. I mean, it just, we haven't had a good snowfall since my son was a baby. So I just, I said, there's no way. I mean, this is something that's my life's work. But this is how I have to take it up to the next level, because what I was doing was not moving the needle fast enough. And in order to protect our children, I needed to do this. I needed to step up. Yeah, and I think it's really important that you give us your background because you have the expertise here and you've been looking at the data and that IPCC report, I think it really put it into perspective for a lot of people. Myself included, you know, to where we kind of, we've been putting this in the back of our minds, realizing that it's a crisis, but not really knowing how little time we have. And it's so important because as you said, you know, scientists, they are by their very nature conservative. They're not going to come out with claims that are hyperbolic to get you to pay attention. That's not the way that they do things. No. So it's really important that we take things into our own hands and we really, we understand the sense of urgency and really the 12 year timeline, as you said, it really isn't great. I mean, there's one model that predicts that human extinction, if it's going to happen will start by 2050. That is insane. It's, you know, I think we're losing, I don't know how many species a day. I mean, I'm not going to even start quoting about, you know, what's happening in the penguin populations or anything like that. But what happens with these extremes and weather is, and we saw some of this starting in India and in the Saudi Peninsula this summer, plants get stressed out. They're a living organism and they get stressed out. And after a while, if you have these huge swings in weather, it weakens the plant and the plant will not be able to grow food. If the plant can't grow food, we can't feed our livestock, we can't feed ourselves. It starts through prices starts skyrocketing. And it becomes, it becomes an environment. The climate crisis is an environmental justice issue. I mean, in so many, so many ways, you know, even, even here in this country, we think, oh, it's not really going to hit our shores. Our wealth is not going to protect us. It won't. It's coming for us. And, you know, there, I like to give the example last summer in India, there were temperatures and part of India had reached so, such high degrees that entire villages were abandoned because, you know, the livestock was dropping dead because it was too hot. Plants were dying because after a certain temperature, I mean, your plants going to die. Water dries up and there's no food. And you had climate migrants. Okay. We have we've seen hurricane was adoring and that hit just the Bahamas nearest. We had a climate. We had a whole ship full of climate migrants hitting Florida. And what did we do? I mean, the Trump administration, of course, sent them away. I mean, predictably, but that's going to, if you look at the entire planet, the equatorial regions of our planet is going to cause hundreds of millions of people to be displaced. They're not going to head south. They're going to head north. They're going to head north into the US and to Canada. They're going to head north into Europe and into Russia. And you can imagine what kind of conflict you're going to see when that when those people start finally. I mean, we couldn't handle a refugee crisis coming out of Syria, which some people claim had some environmental effect, you know, some sort of environmental impetus to it. I haven't seen this. I haven't seen the data yet. But there are those claims. We couldn't handle that. We can't handle what's happening at our border right now, you know, you know, it's not if I if I'm a farmer, if I'm a head of a household and I can't feed my children, I'm going to migrate and nothing to get in my way. I mean, you're a parent. I get it. And it's that's not the world I want to leave my kids. It's not the world any kids should really inherit. And it just it just it's so angering. It's angering for me because because we've known about it for such a long time. We've known about it. I mean, since since in my lifetime, right? And the the we've had half of the world's emissions come in the last 25 years. That's been most of my life. We've had it's we can stop this now. And the thing that gets me Mike is that we actually have the technology. We have like the vast majority of the technology we need right now to deploy it. You know, I I'll go back to Bill Pascal. He actually endorsed the Green New Deal about a week after I announced and got some positive presses like this environmental activists is going after Pascal, which is OK, coincidence. Take it as it is. He endorses it. He pays lip service to it. Activists in New Jersey asked him to come out with a statement for like at least, you know, a statement on a moratorium of new fossil fuel projects, which isn't a hard thing to do. Because I mean, we're building one of the largest wind farms off the off the coast of New Jersey right now. We can replace. We can replace that energy generation. These wind farms don't take long to come up. They take their lesson a year to build these things. I mean, it's not it's not like you're building a nuclear power plant, which will take which takes like 10 years. We have that. But, you know, where where where's the leadership, right? Where's the voice to it? I mean, why does a mother who is perfectly, you know, is perfectly happy, you know, trying to trying to get her company to like start producing, you know, cleaning electricity from hydrogen gas. That was our start. That's our start up. You know, why why am I jumping into this race because because of this negligence. It's criminal negligence. It is it is it is the biggest intergenerational human rights violation, frankly, ever. I mean, it's my children. These guys are going to be long gone out of office by the time my six year old is going to have to deal with food shortages. You know, I mean he's and and and I come from like I come from a privileged background. I am you know, I live in a good neighborhood. I've got a good house. But what happens to the people to folks who who you know, who don't have my advantage advantages such as ours, frankly, advantages that are found in the United States. You go to the rest of the world and it's it's it is we will kill these people will die. These people will die. I can't I can't allow that. I can't allow that who would I who no good person. I'm sorry I'm going on about this, but it gets no you're you're absolutely I love the way that you're talking about this and I actually want to go a little bit deeper because we oftentimes talk about climate change mitigation and adaptation finally in terms of the Green New Deal. But this is a resolution. So there's a lot of neoliberal pro corporate Democrats who can endorse the Green New Deal, but not necessarily explain what they think that means now candidates are filling in what they mean by the Green New Deal. But I want to talk to you because you know more about this than most people I think running for Congress. What does true mitigation and adaptation look like in terms of policy like what would you do that you think would actually suffice because there's people who are proposing things but none of them either meet the deadline, or they're not ambitious enough and I think that the Green New Deal is the first time I'm hearing people talk about, you know, meeting the urgency meeting that IPCC is deadline. But what do you think we need to do just if politics weren't an issue. If politics are an issue. The first thing we need to do is just pass a moratorium on all fossil fuel any new fossil first any new fossil fuel projects need to be stopped. And any and then we start looking at the fossil fuel projects and start looking at their emissions and start start knocking down like the coal any coal fire plants need to be decommissioned those workers need to be trained to to to transition into a green job whether that's building wind turbines or maintenance on those wind turbines putting up you know putting up rooftop solar whatever what we can those are good you know at least in the wind industry here in New Jersey. Some of these companies that have been coming in a very pro worker these are like you know good union jobs that should be done first of all more to keep it in the ground that's that's that's just a non sorry right there. Research the the I'm sorry the financial subsidies right now the depending on the study that I read anywhere between $15 and $20 billion still go of our taxpayer money still goes to this day to possible companies as financial incentives subsidies tax breaks whatever financial incentives. Those need to stop. I mean it's a 200 year old industry they don't need any support I mean I work so I'm paying for these guys to line their pocket and pollute the air that my children are breathing so that just to give you an example I mean that's what it is really bought and paid for right by ExxonMobil. Those need to stop and those need to be completely redirected into either financial incentives to adopt green technologies faster whatever those may be or if they need to be deployed into research and development. That's the second thing. Third thing and this has been used with great effectiveness in other countries and it hasn't been actually that politically controversial is efficiency standards. What we're doing to Cal so California has its own efficiency standards and the Trump administration is trying to go after them for that exemption in other words they can't California has been a driver in a lot of the efficiency standards around the country because if you want to sell into California you know you got to be a good player and that's been driving a lot of technology around the country. And so now the Trump administration wants to say no California you can't do that anymore. You know they're all for states rights until it comes to like energy efficiency. You can't do that anymore. And so they're taking them to court is where I believe it is. Efficiency standards need to put in and then really a lot. We really need to build resiliency in some of these communities. There are depending on the model that you see as far as sea level rise. There are many parts of this country and millions will be affected by sea level rise. Those communities. There's some there it was Florida for an example. Florida is built on limestone. You really can't build a wall around Florida and hope to keep the water out of it because limestone acts as a sponge and comes in through the geology of the state. So those communities either need to be something the building codes need to change. They need to be building higher up. I don't know. Superstorm Sandy hit here in New Jersey. It knocked out power for many of these communities for quite a long time. And that's because the surges that came in you know they hit these substations and these substations are not really designed to handle 15 foot you know tides coming in on a consistent basis. That sort of that sort of resiliency and really it's an infrastructure spend because our infrastructure was developed for a fossil fuel economy. Right. And it was developed for no climate change. And we we spend like a fraction of it. We spend I think it was two or three percent. I want to say don't quote me somewhere around there that we spend just on just an infrastructure maintenance just to maintain our bad infrastructure which you know a lot of civil engineers will tell you needs help. China China China spent somewhere around eight percent of its GDP on infrastructure. They're building a green economy. Europe is building a green economy. And in fact actually you know they're in a lot of their industries and a lot of their economies the Europeans and the Chinese I would say are almost 10 years ahead of where we are where we should be and we should be leading this. I mean right right now within five years my prediction is they will be the number one manufacturer of wind turbines. They are already number one in solar thin solar film. So there's there's a lot of so it's a it's a matter of like it's a matter of stopping the bad stuff shifting some of those resources into the good stuff and then helping communities adapt to what's coming because even if we stopped all emissions right now. The way the physics works is that there's going to be a certain amount of warming in the atmosphere so things are going to get worse before they get better. And I tell people we can't really reverse it in my generation we won't we won't. This next election and you can quote me on this this next election comes down to whether we want to see the worst effects in the next 30 years or if we want to slow it down enough that we see effects like in the next 500 years and allow for our children and grandchildren's generation to come up with solutions to their energy needs and to really just draw back out of the air. You know longer term longer term. There's a lot of things you could do with land management and forestry management that allows for natural processes to start pulling some of these some of the carbon dioxide out of the air. But you know if I if I had one thing to do right now you know carte blanche no politics involved I would and this is going to be a little controversial but I would shut down every methane pipeline in the country. I just and I'll tell you why even a two percent even a two to three percent leak in a methane pipeline because methane as a molecule is so much more powerful at warming the planet. Even a tiny little fractional link from any one of these little joints anywhere on these thousands of miles of pipeline is no better than a fossil fuel plant as far as its warming effects. And you know people are wondering well why is it why you know we're kind of curbing our we are kind of curbing our CO2 emissions. You know in the last three years the the GDP of the United States has completely decoupled from our from our CO2 emissions. So when people tell you oh you know we can't have economic growth and lower our emissions that's bullshit because it's decoupled three years ago. But what we're still seeing is these methane spikes in the air and there are people like where are these coming from. They're coming from these pipelines and there's no way anybody can audit thousands of miles of pipeline. And if you have like the pipeline you know companies the methane companies or the natural gas pipeline companies should say auditing themselves. It's like the chicken and you know the the I'm sorry the fox watching the chicken the chicken coop you know anyway. But yeah so it's like yeah it's those three things. Yeah and I love the way that you simplify that and what you focus on which is important is adaptation and mitigation because you know we can do what we can to stop climate crisis. Regardless people they need to realize that climate change is inevitable a certain degree of it. It's just a matter of what we can control in terms of how bad that disaster will be. So we have to arm ourselves with the capability to adapt. Now you mentioned you know natural ways of removing the CO2 from the atmosphere. One thing that a viewer brought to my attention recently that I'm not too familiar with and I'm not sure if you are too is a way to artificially remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Is that technology that's there yet that's viable. So yeah so yeah I have read a little bit about this technology. So so natural processes assigned aside in other words you know put aside the fact that we need to plant I don't know billion trees. Yeah there is. So CO2 I'm going to get a little technical on you a little bit here. CO2 is a really hard thing to pull out of the atmosphere because the molecule that CO2 molecule doesn't really react with a lot of things. You know I mean it's not like I can throw a chemical out there the CO2 is going to react with it and it draws it down. It's not really reactive. But there is there are some technologies that are being developed which basically which are basically there's there's one company out in the Northwest in the Canadian board. I think it's called Carbon Engineering or something like that. But they they basically have found some sort of a process. It's expensive right now to pull the CO2 out of the air and there's a few companies working on this. They've all kind of got their tweaks on the same sort of basic principle as far as the chemical reaction is concerned. But it's it is I forget the article I was reading but I was reading an article about this about how many of these actual plants at our current technology. We need to deploy around the world to actually start making a dent and it was in the order of tens of thousands and these plants would not be cheap to build. That we need to put money into this R&D. This is not this is not carbon capture and sequestration where like you know you get some natural gas guys saying oh you know I can still keep burning it but I'll just carbon capture and sequester it. I'm like that bad technology where they say clean coal clean coal is a myth. It is it is very expensive and not really viable and it would your electricity rates which would spike if they started doing that en masse but it's this requires research and development from the federal government. I mean it's there is something there. Yeah that's good. Sorry to put you on the spot because I know that this is super complicated but this is something that kind of piqued my interest because any little like thing that I could grab on to that gives me a little bit more. More hope I'm trying to grab and find so that was something that was a little bit interesting to me. But yeah so you you have a really robust platform. I don't want people to think that you're just the climate change candidate but you speak about this in such an amazing and just beautiful and simplistic way that helps us to understand it that I really wanted to pick your brain about this because you know so much that you know whenever we have a resource like you around I want to I want to capitalize on that. But with that being said of course I want you to talk about this campaign the dynamics of your campaign because you are going up against a Democrat who has co-sponsored and endorsed or whatever the Green New Deal but we all know that you know that was due to public pressure because he has a primary challenger. So talk a little bit about the differences between you and Bill Pascal because this is someone who I think is obviously an establishment figure. He takes a lot of corporate money and explain why he is not the person that we need at this time when we're trying to literally save the planet. Well you know so outside of outside of like climate issues a large part of my of my district if you look at sort of the statistics is uninsured as far as I mean as compared to the rest of the state of New Jersey. One of my other sort of very personal issues is Medicare for All because my father who was a small an immigrant and a small business owner never had medical insurance refused to go to the doctor died very young. I'll leave it at that. It is an issue that's personal to me. It is an issue that is personal to a lot of my constituents. I go out canvassing and I hear about I mean I just heard a story from a young woman who said her mother is going blind. Her mother who is a truck driver is going blind because she doesn't have good insurance and so therefore she's going to lose her livelihood. Medicare for All is something that this community needs. Not not only because it's a very sort of polluted community along the Paseik River and even the air pollution here in this part of New Jersey gets an F from the from the American Lung Association. But it is something that is I mean aside from the moral aspect of it. You know so that's where I come from it. If you look at because I've got an MBA right I have to look at it from like the economics aspect of it. It is a three and a half trillion dollar industry that is growing at roughly five to six percent a year. OK. That very quickly grows to about a 50 billion dollar industry in 15 20 years anyway it gets very big very fast. One third roughly one third of that three and a half trillion dollars is spent in overhead overhead. OK. It is it is. If you look at it from a purely business perspective I'm like that's right for disruption. Why is there so much fat in the system. So and we pay. I mean I'm not going to go into the statistics. You know we're getting sick or we're paying more and we're getting sick or it doesn't work. Simply we cannot. It is unaffordable to keep our health and our health care system as it is right now completely are for unaffordable because it's going to grow into a monster and it's going to take an ever increasing share of our GDP which is crazy. That's crazy. I mean it's going to. I mean it's not quite the military budget yet but you know it's going to it's getting out it's getting that big. You know I. And I personally have like a big sort of ethical issue with an industry whose sole motivation is profit and the only way they can do that is to raise prices on you and deny you coverage. I had a friend of mine whose mother died of cancer because she couldn't afford one pill a month was twenty five hundred dollars and her insurance company said no we're not going to approve of that. And like she died. I mean do they care. She died. You know. You know it's like oh then people ask me well what about the ACA. So the ACA was a good starting point. You know got the conversation going. But frankly I mean if you look at medical bankruptcies before the ACA and after the ACA they're the same. It hasn't made a dent in medical bankruptcies. And there's still 28 million people uninsured. It's just that there's obviously immigration reform is a big issue for me. I believe in a pathway to citizen citizenship whether you're here documented or undocumented. Another personal issue for me because my my parents are immigrants and my parents were sponsored by my uncle who came here years ago. Basically was he worked as a merchant Marine and basically jumped one of the ships that he was working on and came here. I don't know what it was 40s or 50s as an undocumented immigrant. Right. And he's he married somebody became a citizen whatever and then he sponsored my parents over. So I have this whole you know. And if you look at sort of the criteria that the Trump administration is sort of this merit based stuff right that they're trying to do. And I'm like I look at my parents and I'm like my father was a high school dropout. I mean I don't think you would have made anything. You know I mean that's not even a criteria. I think we want immigrants. We want it. Can you imagine the courage it takes for somebody to come to a country where they don't know anybody have no money and they don't know the language. That takes a certain type of personality and that's the type of personality that frankly I think we need. You know agree with me or not but those are sort of my my big three issues climate change Medicare for all and an immigration. And I will say one last thing Mike. I've been trying to get this into to get this out a little bit more. Not every Democrat is the same. And I'm happy criticizing my own Democratic Party and even even in my run here in the state here it's it's a plus 16 district but frankly the biggest obstacles have come to me from what from the Democratic Party. They've denied me access to research that I can't paint whatever I've had to I've worked around it because I've built and run businesses for 20 years I can do this whether they throw these obstacles at me or not. But it's not when you walk into a voting booth and you see Democrat you better you better be certain that they're a defending the planet and be working for you and not their corporate benefactors because you know I call I call some of these guys climate delayers their delayers and and people are shocked when I say you know what I'd rather deal with the climate denier because at least I know that they're going to deny it but if I vote for a Democrat and he delays action I'm voting for you so my so I don't have to worry about my kids future in 10 years time. But what have you done. I mean it's just it's very irritating to me so yeah no that rage is felt by millions of people across the country I mean there's a reason why independent has become the largest political party you know in America and it's not a party but just people identify more as being independent than Republicans and Democrats because you know the two party duopoly isn't working because they've both largely been captured by you know private interests and that's a problem that's why we have people dying and going bankrupt because they don't have healthcare that's why we haven't had action on climate change I mean the fossil fuel industries they fund Republicans and Democrats one party simply simply just denies it the other party delays it as you said is perfect I think that's the perfect moniker for them because it really is true I mean if you're not going to get in there then just the mere fact that you acknowledge the reality of anthropogenic climate change that's not enough like we need action yesterday and the fact that people are still not even like willing to you know cosine on the Green New Deal in Congress in the Democratic Party it's mind blowing to me and for them to only do it when they get a we've wasted we've wasted what has it been 10 months 11 months since they since the Green New Deal we've wasted 10 months 10 months at this point of our emissions is a freakin lifetime okay if I don't understand why it's not an all hands on deck thing and quite honestly we're talking about transitioning to an economy that is decarbonized sustainable just for every American regardless of who they are where they came from or who they love this Green New Deal it's not one issue it's everything it is everything I mean we it's it's it's you're dealing with so many social justice issues health issues I mean energy issues infrastructure issues technology issues who does America want to be in the 21st century do we want because I can tell you this this race is going by us and if we don't get on board we're going to lose are we going to continue to be the technological and economic powerhouse that we were in the 20th century that's what I think we should be and I think because we have intelligent people we have a large part of our population descended from these immigrants who have this fight and this ingenuity quite frankly in order to come to a country like this you know and it's it's who do we want to be as a country that's your choice in the next election you know can you handle that can you handle the critical issues of the 21st century or do you want to say as business as usual because I could tell you business as usual is not working yeah yeah and to quote AOC like we will pay for climate change oh regardless of if we take action or not it's just a matter of like actually arming ourselves to deal with it through you know a Green New Deal and mitigation and adaptation is going to be a lot lower price than not doing anything you know about climate change so look anyone who's watching this I know is going to feel inspired I feel so inspired by your campaign and love everything that you're saying tell us what we can do if we want to help you donate volunteer where can we go and how can we help you win well we're they might outspend us but we're going to out organize them as AOC said we are actively recruiting volunteers to do a call banking text banking and also canvassing and we're also obviously we're we're powered by individual donations we don't take any corporate cash and that's at www.zinazinaforcongress.com if folks want to you know maybe give me like I tell them you know give me give me buy me a cup of coffee every month $5 recurring donation would be ideal so that's my blog yeah and the recurring donations are super important for those who don't know because it allows campaigns to really predict you know what revenue they're going to have and how many people to hire and you know it's just it's a lot more financial stability that they really need when they're going up against political behemoths like Bill Pascrell who is raising lots and lots of money from special interests including including fossil fuel this guy took is sponsoring co-sponsoring the Green New Deal and he's taking money from the Petroleum Marketers Association and the National Propane Gas Association so yeah I'm sure he's perfectly serious about it right yeah think about this like just sending money to Zina who would you rather have fight for you Bill Pascrell I don't know why I keep messing up his name or someone like Zina who is going to speak truth to power in a way that is matter of factly that's bold and that really can't be denied like she knows about this like the back of her hand and few people in Congress know that like we have a member of Congress literally bring a snowball to the oh my god so imagine getting some people in there at least a few a small block who know about climate change who know you know what's at stake that would make such a huge difference even if we can't really get a majority even in you know the Democratic Party just getting a larger block would be potentially game changing yeah I'll tell you Mike these progressive candidates because they're not beholden to corporate benefactors I mean these people are amazing they will tell it like it is regardless of whether it is politically expedient or not we are in it we I have no choice I'm like the people are like whoa how can you say that I'm like you know what if I don't say it now I will regret it in 50 years when my grandchildren when my grandchildren and God willing I have some you know ask me grandma what did you do when there was time when there was still time to do something about it what did you do did you sit idly by did you do something and if I don't do this for my kids for everyone's kids frankly I mean I look at some of these children I start crying you know I'm like thinking about their future I get very emotional even though I come across as a very sort of incensed person but yeah it's truth to power and not only to me put to all progressive candidates quite honestly we should be supporting all progressive candidates not just me so absolutely we'll leave that there is in a thank you so much for coming on it's been an absolute pleasure thank you so much for educating us about climate change and more importantly fighting to take action that means so much so we really appreciate it thanks Mike I appreciate it have a good night you too