 Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Probably more depressing subject, I want to say, is climate change. But this is really interesting to me, so I'm not sure if anyone read this. So Greenpeace, they did a little bit of a sting operation on an Exxon executive, and they made him think that they were doing a job interview with him, and he ended up spilling the beans. And we're not going to read all of this, but I do want to share some of the article, and then we'll get to some clips here, because it's not like any of this is surprising. The revelations here are totally predictable, but still, even having said that, you know, they're so brazen. So inside Exxon's playbook, how America's biggest oil company continues to oppose action on climate change, Exxon Mobile aims to drastically weaken Biden's climate plans and used shadow groups to aggressively fight climate science. Insider tells undercover reporter Exxon Mobile continues to fight efforts to tackle climate change in the United States, despite publicly claiming to support the Paris climate agreement. An undercover investigation by Unearthed has found a senior lobbyist for Exxon told an undercover reporter that the company had been working to weaken key aspects of President Joe Biden's flagship initiative on climate change, the American Jobs Plan. Now, let me just pause for a moment. This is not like the end all be all to climate change to say the least. This is not a Green New Deal. This is woefully inadequate. But the fact that they're trying to weaken something that's already pretty milk toast to be frank is frustrating because they don't want anything to be done to mitigate climate change. He described Biden's new plan to slash US greenhouse gas emissions as quote, insane. Really, Biden's moderate plan is insane and admitted that the company had aggressively fought early climate science through shadow groups to protect its investments. Not surprising to any of us on the panel, but it's really nice to have them admit this, right? Keith McCoy, a senior director in Exxon's Washington DC government affairs team told the undercover reporter that he is speaking to the office of influential Democratic Senator Joe Manchin every week with the aim of drastically reducing the scope of Biden's climate plan so that quote, negative stuff such as rules, limiting greenhouse gas emissions and taxes on oil companies are removed. So if you're wondering why Joe Manchin is so apprehensive about doing anything climate related, if you're wondering why Joe Manchin has watered down effectively the American Jobs Plan and removed all of the climate elements to the infrastructure bill, here's why. It's because he's in the years of fossil fuel funders. Now I want to skip a lot of this and get to the clips here because keep in mind this is what he believes is a Zoom interview. He thinks this is confidential. So he talks about all of this and I want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth because I think this is really, really, this is bad. Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders and you're not going to be able to just switch to battery operated vehicles or wind for your electricity and just having that conversation around why that's not possible in the next 10 years is critically important to the work that we do. And that's at every phase. That's in the Senate, that's in the House, that's with the administration. Something like climate change, there's some forest fires, there's an increase of 0.001 Celsius. That doesn't affect people's everyday lives. Let me just say, the ocean was on fire. Last week. And this guy is saying, you know, we can't just switch to alternative energy within the next 10 years. Well, we can't do any of that. Why not? We already have the technology. The only thing that we're lacking right now is the political will. And oh yeah, by the way, not only is the ocean on fire, but you had a small that remember that small town. I think it was lighten in Canada. Normally beautiful, no, normal moderate temperatures burnt to the ground. Thanks to massive heat. You had the heat dome over in the Northwest, the Pacific Northwest, cooking people in their homes. I don't recall just how many people died, but enough. More than enough. Okay. Climate change is not just an issue. It is the issue. It is the survival of our species. You know, we always get made fun of by right wingers. Oh, you're trying to save those planet Libby Libs, right? No, we're trying to save our own asses. We're trying to save all of us. Okay, including eutroglydites that don't believe in the science whatsoever. We're trying to save everybody so it can, you know, actually have a livable climate. And yet he's talking about how, oh, you know, we just, we just can't do that. No, the only reason that we can't do that is because of people like, what is it? Keep McCoy gets paid in order to lobby Congress in order to give these politicians like Joe Manchin fat bribes. It's sickening. It's disgusting. Yeah. And I wanted to ask Isaiah a question because I'm assuming you'll be elected to Congress. You don't take any money from these ghouls. But that doesn't mean that they're not going to try to influence you. And, you know, in the event they come to you and they try to get you to back down on some bill or water down something that you're proposing. Then inevitably there's going to be the entire industry out against you, you know, these attack ads. How do you, how do you respond as a lawmaker to all of the corruption and the influence of the fossil fuel industry? Because I feel like unless there is substantial legislation to limit the amount of money in politics, you know, limit the influence of lobbyists, nothing is going to change. So how do you respond to this, Isaiah? So Justice Breyer, who was a Supreme Court justice said that sunshine is the best disinfected. For those who know me know that I served in the military. I just did an interview yesterday with PBS News Hour about us pulling out of Afghanistan. I've been shot. I've been blown up. I've been hit by RPGs and IEDs and grenades. What is, do you think me as a six foot eight black man from Brooklyn cares about somebody saying something about me? I don't care about any of that stuff. None of that stuff scares me. None of that stuff bothers me. Others of me, listen, right is right and wrong is wrong. I was taught that from a little bitty boy growing up. So if I am lucky enough to be elected to Congress, man, we got to keep fighting. You don't think people told Nelson Mandela he was wrong? You don't think people told Malcolm and Martin and sojourner and Marcus Garvey and all these people, they were wrong. And history showed them to be right. Martin Luther King got death threats up until the day he died. Yet he knew he was fighting for something bigger. I'm not saying I want to die, but I'm not scared of death. I can tell you that. So if you take death off the table, what the hell else can you threaten me with? A bad review in the newspaper for people who don't like me anyway? Okay, kick rock. That doesn't bother me. What we need to do is have somebody in Congress who's speaking out against these things, not equivocating, not voting present, not, you know, missing votes, stands up and vociferously speak against these things. There's a difference between a leftist and a progressive. There's a difference between a leftist and a Democrat or moderate Democrat or something. So there's a huge difference. I am not, I am none of those. I'm a leftist. I believe in doing things to help the masses. I route to represent the fortune list 500 million, not the fortune 500. And what we just heard this man say in the video, that's like saying water is wet. That's like saying Trump is racist. Yeah, we get that. It's baked into the pie. So how do we fix that? I don't need to see this guy with no goddamn neck telling me that he's a lobbyist and he's trying to kill a climate bill. I already know that's what they're supposed to do. That's what his job is. We get that. So let's take, let's, let's step past that. They want you to be so ingrained and so enthralled with this and so upset at this that you missed the entire forest that is burning for this dumbass tree that's standing in front of you. Let's step past that and get to the work of setting about these things in motion, these things that we need to do. Joe Biden's climate bill is a laughable joke. He wants to pull us off of fossil fuels in 50 years. And this guy said we can't go electric in the next 10 years. Who the hell are you to say we can't go electric in the next 10 years? We haven't even tried to go electric for the past 40 years. We can get things done. Let me tell you viewers out there something. In 1967, we took a human being from the planet Earth, shot him 300,000 miles into the vacuum of space on a giant moving metal rocket with over a million parts, landed him on a celestial body, brought him back to this point in space and recovered him safely. There is more computing power in my iPhone than it took to put a man on the moon. So you cannot tell me in 2021 we cannot get these things done. We can get them done, but we need the political willpower to do so. Why do you think people like me are running for office? Because my opponent takes money from the fossil fuel industry, from the natural gas industry. Listen, if this was 1900, I would understand what he was saying. This is 2021. All things are possible if we have the political will to do so. Yeah. Yeah. Great point. Tiffany, did you want to jump in before we get to the next video? Yeah, I do. I don't know. The reason that fossil fuel companies and corrupt politicians are against like stemming climate changes because when the world goes to hell, they won't be around to see it. A lot of these people would have died off by then and until their demise, they want to reap as much wealth as possible. It's like object permanence. If they can't see it, it doesn't exist. And by the time they admit that climate change is a threat, the US coastal cities will be cause playing Atlantis because they'll be underwater. There have been articles and data that show that it's actually too late to stop climate change. All we can do now is try to mitigate its effects and learn to live with our own man made disaster. We may have been able to get with the program faster if we didn't have money in politics, but we live in a country where legalized bribery exists. And as such, corporations have a louder voice than the scientists and the masses. And it's especially frightening to me and a lot of people my age, a little older and younger, very younger, because we'll be around when things start to get worse. So it's, it's very depressing. Yeah. Yeah. And I thought that you brought up a really good point, Tiffany, in talking about adaptation as well as mitigation, because when we have conversations about climate change, it's always about, you know, what do we do to stop it? It's always in that context when we have to acknowledge that it's here right now. And we also have to equip ourselves with the ability to adapt. So I, actually the video hasn't been published yet, but I share a photograph from my mom's backyard. So I live in the Pacific Northwest. We just experienced the heat wave and her plants facing the sun. It looks like they were hit with a torch completely burned. And when you start to really see things like that, and last year in Portland, we had the wildfires where the air was literally considered hazardous. It really puts things into perspective. And you think, wow, this, it's no, there's no longer like this idea that climate change is coming. You really realize in a concrete way that it's right here. And there's something really. There's something about that. That's like a wake up call. It's like that, you know, coming to Jesus moment. And I've had many with regard to climate change, the IPCC is 12 year deadline seeing it, you know, in the Pacific Northwest. Jeff, I think you wanted to say something. Yeah, I just want to add it up to add on to something that Tiffany and said, you know, a lot of these people that are also that don't believe in climate change or don't believe that we should do anything. They're the same kind of people, the doomsday cultists that think that, oh, no, we don't have to actually do anything because Jesus is going to suck us into heaven anytime now, any day. So you were talking about the come to Jesus moment. They literally want, think that they're going to come to Jesus and they're not going to have to deal with the mess that they've made on the earth, which sucks for the rest of us. Yeah, yeah. And that's actually an issue that I've discussed with individuals in my family who are evangelical where, you know, when climate change comes up, it's like, it doesn't matter. We're going to be like raptured in like three weeks. So LOL, Mike. It's that's a different story though. We won't go down that rabbit hole. Having said that though, I do want to watch one last video from this, from this sting here, if we want to call it that, it doesn't even feel like it's a, it's a sting, but it technically is, but it's just, it's really, really insightful. You know, nobody is going to, to propose a tax on all Americans. And the cynical side of me says, yeah, we kind of know that. But it gives us a talking point that we can say, well, what does X on mobile for? Well, we're for a carbon tax. What you said was just really interesting. So it's basically never going to happen, right? Is the calculation. Yeah. No, it's not, it's not going to, carbon tax isn't going to happen. So this helps me understand a little bit why suddenly a lot of a lot of US oil majors are talking about a carbon tax, because it sounds pretty. Well, I, I, I, I think the cynical side of me, they've got nothing else. So it's a, it's, it's, it's an easy talking point to say, look, I'm for a carbon tax. So, so that's the talking point that that is a, in my mind, an effective advocacy tool. So the reason why I wanted to play that clip is because I think that this is kind of like a microcosm of a bigger issue in the United States. And you can apply this to any other issue. You know, this is what probably a healthcare executive would say about single payer healthcare or even a public option. And so it speaks to this issue here. And this is a bit of a broader question that I wanted to ask the panel here. So, you know, there's a lot of things that. Theoretically would make climate change, mitigation and adaptation legislation easier. The question is what is quicker? And this is a very loaded question. And I don't think there's a perfect answer to it, but it's like, if we have to get money out of politics first, if we have to defeat capitalism before tackling climate change, like what do we do? Do we go straight for climate change with imperfect political institutions? I don't, I don't know where to begin. And I think that that for me is what makes this a little bit overwhelming. Climate change is one of those issues where it affects everything, right? So if there was this issue where there was pollution in the ocean, all right, well, you create a bill to tackle the, you know, pollution in the ocean, clean up the ocean, yada, yada. But this is such a huge thing where virtually everything on the planet is touched. So I wouldn't even know where to begin. And I guess what I'm saying is like, if it comes to climate change, in your opinion, Tiffany, what would be like the first thing that you would hope movements would focus on? And there's no perfect answer to this, but like if you could narrow it down, where do you even begin? Sorry for the loaded question. Even if it's too late to stop climate change, we still should not give up on getting money out of politics and stuff like that. We should still strive for that. And even if it's not perfect, we have to do what we can with the system we're under. So any kind of climate change action is better than none, even if it's not perfect. But still we should focus on getting corporations off our backs so we can actually focus on fixing the planet, you know, where we all live. Yeah. Yeah, Jeff. I mean, really time is of the essence here. So I'm not exactly sure. I'm kind of in the same boat that you are. Where do we start? What's going to be the quickest course of action? And, you know, it would be nice to have enough members of, you know, for example, the squad and is, you know, for whatever problems they have to push a green new deal. Okay. We don't have enough of those people in Congress and we have people like Joe Manchin and we've got people like Kirsten Sinema and we've got, you know, oil lobbyists and we have the money in politics. So, but then you try to remove the money in politics and how big of a process is that going to be? And again, you run into all these political headwinds and you also have, you know, the Republican Party, not just divisions within the Democratic Party. And I think, unfortunately for me, not to get super-doomer, but I'm totally going to get doomer here. I don't see anything except for a major catastrophe and it already feels like we've had major catastrophes. As I mentioned earlier, the ocean was on fire. Apparently that doesn't seem to be enough for certain politicians to move their ass on this. And so, you know, what is it, the question is what is it going to take? What is it going to take for them to actually get involved and to start doing something about this? And I just, I shudder at the thought, really. Yeah. And there's no way that you're going to be able to have like a 100% effectiveness rate in terms of like curtailing CO2 emissions. One thing that I always kind of go back to in terms of like where do I begin is there is an article from, I believe, 2019 from The Guardian that it cites a study that concludes that 100 corporations are responsible for 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Now, if we stop all of those polluters right away, that's still, you know, a lot of greenhouse gases that are pumping into the air, but it's a start. So I wanted to pass the question up to Isaiah, who's more of the policy wonk on the panel and future lawmaker. What would you do, let's say theoretically speaking, you're designing a new piece of legislation aimed directly at those 100 fossil fuel emitters. Not all of them are American companies. Like, do you push for nationalization? Do you push for some sort of a cap? How do you actually get them to stop killing the planet? And again, like these questions are so broad and it's hard to answer them because they're there. It's a lot, but what is your general take on that, Isaiah? So there are 1.7 million corporations on this planet. 1.7 million. There are over 3,500 stocks traded on the United States stock market, on the New York Stock Exchange, right? But there are only 535 people who sit in our governing body that make the bills and the laws and the rules of this country. So you want to start somewhere? You start right there at the heart. See, what we're talking about here is we're all talking in our own echo chamber of pain. We're asking the slave master to understand the plight of the slave, but they don't get it because they're on the other side of the whip and we are receiving the lashes. To them, in their mind, this all makes perfect sense because we're corporations, we're business people. This is what we're supposed to do. So we don't need to talk to those people because they'll never understand the plight of the every man and every woman around this country and around this world. You see what I'm saying? So we're speaking to the wrong people. You want to find a place to start? Guess what? The house is up for election every two goddamn years. Not every six years like the Senate. They're not appointed for life like the Supreme Court. Every two years the house is up and there are enough young people and people who care about the climate and healthcare and criminal justice reform and every other goddamn thing we talk about on the left to swing every election in this country. In Brooklyn, there are 2 million people that live in Brooklyn right now. There are over 750,000 registered Democrats. If 10% of them came out and voted, we would move the needle. And that's true in every single municipality, locality, state, and every federal election. So this is not that hard, Mike. This is actually pretty goddamn simple. Will you start it? Why are you going to go to ExxonMobil to try to get them to understand your reasoning? You're speaking as a working person or a poor person. They're a millionaire, billionaire, executive. You speak in Mandarin Chinese and they speak in American Sign Language. They're just going past each other. We're not even asking these people to hear your plight is ridiculous. It's never going to work. So what do we need to do? We need to extricate ourselves from talking to these folks and we need to mobilize behind people like you and Jeff and Tiffany and myself and anybody else out there in TV land who wants to make this world a better place and we need to push those people forward. I'm running for Congress. That's what I'm doing in my part. Jeff and Tiffany talk about politics and spread the word to the masses. That's what they're doing to their part. For all these people who are in the comments right now, they need to put their backs to the wheel, stiffen their spines, and understand that these people aren't going to concede power without a demand. Power never concedes without a demand. They don't give a damn. You already heard it. They're not going to be around when this world goes to hell. Mitch McConnell is holding up bills and he'll never have to live under it. And this is not just the Republicans. If we're going to bash their side, which they so vehemently deserve, we have to bash our side too. Nancy Pelosi, they're all in the same damn boat. They're all rowing the same boat in the same direction. They just do it with a smile on their face. The biggest polluter in the United States of America is the United States military. Democrats vote for that goddamn funding bill every single year. How do you stand up and say no? Joe Biden is increasing that bill right now. So listen, it's like they're bombing you with a prize flag on their plane. It doesn't make any difference. The bombs are still killing people. So we need to understand, they just give it to you with a smile and a frame of soul. I live in a democratic city. Our police budget is the biggest in the goddamn world. The NYPD is bigger than some armies. And this is supposed to be Bill de Blasio. He's supposed to be a Democrat. He ran for president. Don't let him fool you. So listen, we need to create our own political will on the left. Hear me what I'm saying. This is not Democrat and Republican. The left of all of these corporate cronies is where people like us need to reside. Because if you call yourself a progressive, Kamala Harris is a progressive. Joe Biden said he was the most progressive person to ever run. Barack Obama was a progressive. Bill Clinton was a progressive. We've had years and years of progressives. And we keep getting the same goddamn outcome. So how about we try something different? How about we try to mobilize and organize and fight for the change that we know is needed? And let's just, I'm not talking to you. I'll leave you with this, this Voltaire quote. To administer, to try to use reason on somebody who has renounced it is like administering medicine to the day. It's no point.