Challenging Prevailing Climate Change Narratives with HuffPost’s Alexander Kaufman

Path to Zero
Path to Zero
4.05 - Challenging Prevailing Climate Change Narratives with HuffPost’s Alexander Kaufman
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Tucker welcomes the award-winning senior reporter at HuffPost, Alexander Kaufman, to Path to Zero’s special Climate Week episodes in New York City. The two discuss electrification, nuclear energy and many other contentious issues surrounding climate change.

Kaufman’s reporting has explored the energy transition with nuance, challenging prevailing narratives on climate solutions.

In addition to covering energy, climate, and environmental policy for HuffPost, Kaufman is the author of the children’s book, Earth’s Aquarium.

Resources

Transcript

Tucker Perkins:
Our guest in this episode of Path to Zero is an award-winning journalist at Huff Post, Alexander Kaufman. In his reporting, Alexander explores the energy transition and the contentious debates occurring around climate change. So Alexander, thanks so much for stopping by and welcome to Path to Zero.

Alexander Kaufman:
Thank you for having me.

Tucker Perkins:
You wrote a really interesting piece about Ukraine, and the impact of that particular nuclear plant during this war with Russia. Do you think that… I mean, I feel like we’re a point where Chernobyl is behind us, Fukushima’s kind of behind us, you see the Japanese maybe making little steps back towards nuclear. Do you think this Ukraine nuclear plant will impact nuclear growth in the future?

Alexander Kaufman:
So, I think it is… it’s impossible to game out what a radiation disaster would do, because it’s impossible to know exactly how severe a radiation disaster caused by some type of artillery shelling might be. I mean, and in Zaporizhzhia, hope I’m pronouncing that right, there are many protections that certainly were not there for. Chernobyl. Chernobyl is probably a less relevant analogy than Fukushima perhaps. And with Fukushima, I think that there were a lot of lessons learned by the broader community about what that meant.

I always like to ask people how many deaths they think were caused by radiation from Fukushima. And most people kind of scratch their heads and guess a lot, at least several dozen. And the answer is one. One person died, a worker who got lung cancer that they traced back to his radiation exposure years later. I think he died in 2018. Now there were, on the contrary, about 700 or so people that some Japanese newspapers tallied as having died in the stress and the chaos of the evacuation. But from the actual radiation, only one. It was actually in many ways kind of a success story in terms of containing a disaster that was caused, as research later showed, by a failure to meet certain regulations, to skirt new rules on safety. They were ill-prepared. But I think there were a lot of people, while the initial reaction to that was to think that nuclear power was just too safe to even continue using existing reactors, that over time people began to understand that perhaps there was a bit of an overreaction, and perhaps we need to look at this again.

And what I found from talking to some people in reporting that piece is that, while I think the initial thought is that any kind of radiation disaster is going to scare people again, and make people realize the stakes of this, I think public attitudes are beginning to change a lot. One, you have a lot more people who are voting adults, and parents of children now who grew up without the fear of nuclear annihilation of the Cold War. I was born in 1991, an end of history kid, and so that concept of needing to go under my desk because the Soviets might unleash nuclear annihilation on us is not part of my life. Certainly, I think more people are more concerned about climate change now, and it’s really hard to come up with something that is more energy dense, and has no CO2. And I think now, in the wake of the brain war, offers a sense of energy sovereignty that is very hard to come by. And that I think people are very aware of, whether it is because they understand how natural gas supply chains work and who benefits from them, or frankly, if they are thinking about renewables, how dependent the US is on China for not just the completed products, but the dominant share of processed lithium, of processed rare earths, and all of these other commodities that are necessary to making that happen.

And so I guess there are some people who are attracted to the idea that the answer then is we have to dramatically scale down, and the pandemic error lockdowns are somehow a model for how we should reconfigure society. While those, I guess, are some louder voices on the political left, there’s certainly an academic movement behind some of that, I have not seen any evidence that there could be any type of serious democratic support for doing something like that. And so then is the question… we’re going to get rid of democracy? Because many of these same people that seem to be advocating that worldview you are also quite concerned about threats to democracy. So, that doesn’t seem to be something that they are latching onto.

So then what? It seems to me, at least in its present form, to be a big distraction from getting at some of the more complex, and tougher questions that tend to blur ideological lines, partisan lines. And in that, I actually see some hope, in that you don’t have the complete culture warization of these issues, and regardless of which party is in power of Congress after this election, that you might be able to see some serious progress on these things.

Tucker Perkins:
Yeah, you’d like to think these issues transcend politics. So, I mean, you just said three or four lovely things in there that I want to go back, because you use the word, “Energy density.” That’s the point where I always come back is solar, and wind, and maybe offshore wind a little bit better about energy density. You cannot replace a massive nuclear plant with solar panels. Or if you do, it’s certainly at the expense of the landscape and sometimes properties, whatever.

Alexander Kaufman:
Sure. I mean, look, I don’t know the exact estimate of just how much of New York State would need to be covered in solar panels to just compensate, on a capacity level, for the loss of Indian Point is one thing, to say nothing of all the backup and other things that you would need to make up for the fact that that is not a 24 source of generation. Right? To say nothing of the fact that those solar panels are going to have to be replaced in, what, at least 30 years? Right? Not the same type of lifespan that you have from the asset of a fission reactor.

And then beyond that, those solar panel need to be backed up with gas or something else right now, in the meantime, since there was no plan for doing anything like that. When they shut down a Indian Point they replaced it completely with fossil fuels. And while I think that there are important debates to be had over… I don’t think fossil fuels is weighed on one thing that behaves the same way. Obviously there are different parts to that. But the increase in local PM2.5 that we will see from the increased burning of different fuels, at the expense of not having this nuclear plant anymore, will have health effects on people. There’s no question about that. As far as anyone I’ve spoken to, there is no one who can explain to me how, what we understand about PM2.5 works, won’t lead to shortened lives of New Yorkers because we shut this down. So we lost this nuclear generating plant because of some theoretical risk that it posed, and imposed on New Yorkers real health risks. Not just risks, but actual health consequences that are going to come from that. And that contradiction is not something I’ve seen widely addressed, and frustrates me greatly because you don’t have any kind of real accountability for that outcome.

Tucker Perkins:
Have you been able to write about that?

Alexander Kaufman:
I’ve written about it. Yeah, sure. I’ve written quite a bit about New York’s energy issues, and the effects of Indian Point. I’ve written about it primarily in the context of the fight that blossomed after its closure over the Hydro-Québec transmission line project to carry power down from Quebec’s 100% renewable hydro grid into New York City. The completion of that project which, as opposed to many other projects, was permitted, had all of its materials bought already pre inflation, so won’t have the extra expense of any new project needing to go out and buy all of that steel, and other equipment, and that this project was supposed to make up for at least 50% of the lost capacity that we had from closing Indian Point.

So building it only gets us 50% of the way back to the slightly cleaner grid that we had before. And so I’ve explained these things in that context, in the context too, of the same environmental groups that crusaded for the closure of Indian Point, went on and, in at least one prominent case, flipped their support for…

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:10:04]

Alexander Kaufman:
One prominent case flipped their support for this transmission project from yes, when it was useful for advocating the closure of the nuclear plant to a no, afterward when they had determined that actually this was blood energy because of historical grievances from a very small, handful of indigenous groups in Quebec or concern over the Hudson, the pristine body of water that we know that to be. And I was able to communicate some of those things in that story, yeah.

Tucker Perkins:
Because you just again said a three or four things. But I want to go back because I don’t hear very many people talk about. I’d say often people are technologists, “This is what we can do.” Sometimes they’re economists, which again, I like to talk about being able to afford it. But I’m always on record of saying, “I never want to talk about climate without talking about health.” And frankly I want to talk about climate and health and then equity, right? So it’s about, “Is this good in terms of carbon?” But more importantly, which is what you’re saying, “Is it good for our human health to go from nuclear to burning coal and wood?”

Talk about PM 2.5. It’s horrific for our health. And I know you lived in California sometime. 75% of the children in the LA Basin are impacted in some way by asthma bronchitis. And as they grow up to be adults, it becomes COPD. It’s horrific and it’s here now, right? Climate, you can at least argue climate is not here now, it’s coming fast and it soon will be here. But health is here now. And so I read very rarely people talking emphasis on health.

Alexander Kaufman:
Well I think there have been people talking about this for a long time, but I think one piece worth reading on this is by the writer David Wallace Wells now at the New York Times. He wrote a piece for the London Review of Books, I think late last year about local air pollution at PM 2.5 being a much more useful and tangible thing to point to for the climate movement, to ordinary people to get a better understanding of what the risks are to themselves and in their lives. And he was zeroing in particular on many of these states out west who now are just routinely being showered in particles from these wildfires. And I mean I felt that essay very acutely when one of my best friends growing up moved out to Boulder, Colorado, just outside Boulder at the beginning of 2020. He’s a big hiker. He and his wife are big outdoors people and it was just a perfect adventure. He loves the mountains, it’s amazing to them.

But he called me one of these days, I think last winter when that fire was raging into Boulder and it only stopped about a mile from his house. And he had been watching it, deciding what to do and when suddenly, he started smelling this foul, accurate scent of burning plastic and other chemicals in the air, he realized, “Oh shoot, I better get out of here.” And he had to pack up his things and decide which of his belongings of him and his wife, his wife works in a hospital, she was busy at the time, he was going to take with him. And it was just an experience that I haven’t had, but reminds me in some ways of these stories I hear from my grandparents or others, people in my temple about what it was like to flee different persecution in Europe at various times and have to decide as you run for your life, what you’re actually going to take with you.

And that issue, the long term health effects of whatever it is he’s breathing and the risk that his home may incinerate at any given time is something that I struggle to really grapple with. And I think many, many more people are going to struggle to grapple with that in years to come.

Tucker Perkins:
I think that’s why you’re an award winning journalist sometimes, because you’re able to humanize some of those issues, which as a reader, it’s beyond technical, it’s about lives in general. So let’s pick up a few things. You’ve written so many neat articles, you’ve traveled all over the world. Maybe what’s the most interesting story you’ve covered and perhaps why?

Alexander Kaufman:
Most interesting story I’ve covered. I don’t know that I could choose just one, but I will say since we were discussing the nuclear issue earlier, that I really yeah, I was fascinated earlier this year to go to Finland for the first time and to visit the Olkiluoto Plant, which while there were sort of three major projects that exemplified the struggles to build new traditional nuclear reactors. One is the Vogtle Plant in Georgia, the other is the Sizewell Plant in the UK, and then there was this Olkiluoto Plant. And when they completed this in March, it became the first new nuclear reactor to come online in Western Europe in 15 years, 25 years if you don’t count the Czech Republic as part of Western Europe. And so yeah, it was a huge deal and making it even more monumental is that about a mile down the road, they are digging thousands of feet into the earth into bedrock that hasn’t moved in a couple billion years and creating the world’s first permanent repository for spent fuel waste.

And so getting to see that and getting to visit there and getting to understand their perspective on energy was really meaningful to me in part because I have covered these issues for a while in the US primarily, although I have bits of other countries. And in the US, there has been a dominant view against nuclear, I think in a lot of the environmental movement and from many of the NGOs that I’ve frequently spoken to as sources in stories. And going to Finland and seeing how overwhelmingly the public supports this and Greenpeace in Finland supports nuclear. The Green Party in Finland supports nuclear. That really helped me to get a better understanding of these things and helped me to I think understand how some of the dogma around certain energy issues is quite confined to specific countries. And made me feel that there is a certain chauvinism from Americans who think that none of this stuff should exist anywhere. “What are you going to do? Tell all the things that their country that’s dark six months of the year has to run completely solar?” It’s a ludicrous proposition.

Tucker Perkins:
Fast differences in how energy is created around the world, how it’s used, when it’s used, the growth rates, the necessitate, the future. You talk a lot about the electric grid and we talk about climate. One of the things I think shocks me as we study it, and again not studying it to see necessarily how we fit studying it in general, is that the electric grid today in the US, we think it’s dirty, but when we break it into climate intensity, it’s filthy. And we just finished the study where we looked at seven or eight of the balancing authorities, Texas, for example.

And you’d take all of the inputs and turned it into carbon intensity, significantly dirtier than natural gas and propane, which really surprised me because lots of wind, lots of solar in that Texas grid. But all the grids we looked at, the California grid, the New York grid, you talked about [inaudible 00:18:03], is that what you’re saying? All of those grids, now the Pacific Northwest, little bit different. But all of those grids were dirtier today in carbon than natural gas or probate. Does that surprise you as a person who reports on this everyday?

Alexander Kaufman:
Well, no. I think that you have many different sources of generation in these grids. You Still have coal as a major part of those grids. And I think people forget that a lot of the backup power, even in a place that most people I guess would think of as it’s very progressive or forward thinking on climate like New York City can at times be things like fuel oil. But No. 5 fuel oil-

Tucker Perkins:
It is. It is at times.

Alexander Kaufman:
… it is at times what runs the [inaudible 00:18:57] plants that surround my neighborhood in Astoria, Queens.

Tucker Perkins:
So that’s the second piece that we have started. Again, just trying to understand is not looking at the base inputs, but begin to looking at the incremental inputs of the next. So as the grid grows or we drop off power sources, either one, you have to replace it with the next available technology. And as you say, quite often the next available technology is something that’s not as clean as the available technology. And so we begin to see how not only the grid is dirty today and hopefully getting cleaner, but the incremental growth in the grid is pretty filthy. So I don’t see anybody writing about a migration to electric powered things may not be as clean as the fuel they’re replacing.

Alexander Kaufman:
Well sure, I mean electrification I think definitely has been dogged by the issues that the grid itself is not necessarily clean. I guess the counter to that, that I have heard from people who studied this is that electric-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:20:04]

Alexander Kaufman:
… that I have heard from people who study this is that electric appliances. This is not true of all electric appliances. Electric boilers, for instance, are highly inefficient, but that certain heat pumps, and other electric devices are more efficient overall in energy use so you’re seeing a reduction in energy use. I don’t know how the one to one emissions compare when you’re looking at what the emissions intensity of the grid that’s powering that device is, versus the fuels that may have powered the older version of it. But I think that the bigger question for me is actually the grid’s ability to take on all of that additional demand.

Tucker Perkins:
Just the supply.

Alexander Kaufman:
We’ve lived in an era where efficiency gains have more or less kept demand at a flat level for a long time, and I think there was a wrong assumption that that would just continue. And now, between… we have the increased demand for electricity from electrification, we have the increased demand for electricity potentially for things like green hydrogen production. We have increased demand of electricity for things, perhaps, like desalination plants out west, if that is the solution that we’re going to go for. To say nothing of the energy intensity of direct air capture, which I realize is something that some environmentalists oppose for moral hazard reasons. But I haven’t seen many other better solutions because planting trees is not going to get us where we need to be on the carbon, man.

And then that’s not even thinking about the things that are unrelated to climate change like crypto mining, which I’m not going to say whether that’s good or bad, but it’s real, and I don’t know that we can live in a world where the idea is that if some type of economic activity that people want to participate in requires too much energy, that we just shut down everything like that. That’s not the kind of country that we live in. So, that to me suggests that we need to come up with a lot of ways to create vast energy abundance, and that that needs to be a major focus of policy right now to both avoid blackouts, and all the horrors that come of that. I mean, there are millions of people in Puerto Rico right now without electricity. Those are Americans that we can’t provide the basic necessities of modern life to. So that needs to be addressed. And I think that, over time, obviously the emissions intensity of existing grids and everything needs to be addressed in… probably in the short term in order to make sure that we can hit our climate goals.

Tucker Perkins:
You went through a laundry list of great things. I’m just going to add one thing to that, and that is the replacement of direct fired appliances, natural gas, propane water heaters, furnaces, and substituting electric, which some are efficient, some are not, but it’s not a one to one. Right? And direct use versus now I have to create electricity and transport it. We see, a lot of times, it takes twice as much energy. And even to the heat pumps, as you talk about, heat pumps are very efficient at 50, 60, 70 degrees. They’re not very efficient at zero to… Temperatures you see here regularly. Zero, plus 10, minus 10 in Boston. So it’s so much. And I don’t see the writing about it, and my perception is when you do write about it, people don’t want to read that. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but…

Alexander Kaufman:
I’m not sure. I mean, this I think is one of the more complex issues around climate. Deals with people’s personal lives and in a much more tangible way. And I think, again, that there is a lot of variation across the board. Right? I mean, I think electrification of vehicles is a pretty straightforward climate benefit. I think that there are strong cases to be made about the health benefits of the electrification of certain appliances. I’ve also understood certain types of fuels to operate very differently from other types of fuels, that propane and natural gas aren’t necessarily just a purple and a green grape in a bunch.

Tucker Perkins:
Right. Back to your PM2.5, comparing it to diesel fuel or coal… nowhere. And I know for us, when we look at the emissions… We don’t fool with consumer vehicles, passenger. We may be in limousines, but we really tend to be in medium duty stuff. Particulate matter is literally not able to be [inaudible 00:25:01], where diesel fuel is filthy.

Alexander Kaufman:
Can I ask this though about natural gas? Which is just the carbon intensity I think is one measure, but what about the methane? And I understand the methane fee, and other industry steps and regulations are going to hopefully help to address those issues. Certainly it seems like the infrared sensors are helping to identify leaks more easily. But I am moved by arguments from environmentalists that say that the increase in methane emissions can be, perhaps, a thing that pushes us to a climate tipping point. And that is something that is hard to ignore, even if the carbon intensity is lower.

Tucker Perkins:
A hundred percent right. In fact, let me back up. One of the nice things about propane, propane doesn’t have methane.

Alexander Kaufman:
Right.

Tucker Perkins:
You knew that.

Alexander Kaufman:
I know. Right.

Tucker Perkins:
Which is [inaudible 00:25:55].

Alexander Kaufman:
I’m saying this in reference to natural gas.

Tucker Perkins:
So it’s funny, I’ve been on this for five years saying that the natural gas industry has to eliminate the methane leaks. Just back from a natural gas conference last week where, for the first time I heard a group of speakers, not environmentalists, these were engineers involved in the production of natural gas talking about what they were doing to eliminate leaks. And I feel like, for the first time, they really understand that that has to be maybe their top goal. Driven partly by economics now, right? They were quick to say, “I don’t want to leak something that I sell for $8.” But a hundred percent right. But it really has never been about technology. It’s been about the industry’s willingness to find, fix, maintain those leaks.

Alexander Kaufman:
Sure, and the economics that are set up by the regulations around them. But look, I mean, to I think your point around these things, if Western Europe could stop using natural gas like that, it would’ve happened this year. So I think there has been a really clarifying phenomenon from this war, and from the effects of the war around the speed that is just possible to do certain things. And I think it has strengthened arguments. I’m not saying this is my viewpoint necessarily, but it has strengthened arguments from those that want to see more domestic production. Because the alternative is what? Whether it’s the alternative for what we’re using here, or the alternative for our allies that are otherwise relying on fuel that’s helping to finance the largest land war in Europe since World War II.

Tucker Perkins:
Right. Energy independence, and energy security certainly take on a new lesson. And something I think we’ve all known for a long time, that apparently is never widely reported, is the Russian method of securing natural gas, or even producing energy, it’s not the same environmentally friendly way we do it here.

Alexander Kaufman:
Sure. Yeah.

Tucker Perkins:
It’s horrible that, as you see, some of the shortcut cuts they make.

Alexander Kaufman:
I whole heartedly agree with that. I mean, I think that inversion of this debate is also happening around mining for the minerals and metals needed to produce solar panels, and batteries and things like that. But I also have yearned to see, but haven’t seen this as part of the broader discussions, what a US foreign policy response needs to be in order to perhaps remain a large producer, while having the credibility in international negotiations, to persuade certain countries to avoid their emissions.

Tucker Perkins:
We’re going to take a hard turn here for a second. I want to call out a book that you wrote recently. Just out, right? Earth’s Aquarium. Tell us about how that book came to be, and kind of what you’re doing with it.

Alexander Kaufman:
So I have always appreciated nature, and particularly aquatic nature. I grew up on Long Island by the water. Being at the beach was a big part of my life always. And seeing the destruction of some really beautiful ecosystems there too was part of my life. Beautiful salt marshes that were being developed into housing and other things. Not that I oppose developing housing, but this was not dense housing to alleviate the housing crisis, this was luxury housing. And in 2018, I was lucky enough to do a National Press Foundation fellowship in Tampa that was focused on sustainable fisheries. Got to do some just nice fun stuff, go out fishing on the Gulf for the first time, which was a lot of fun. Quite a lot of group things, which was nice. And eat some really delicious seafood down there. And just learn…

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:04]

Alexander Kaufman:
… some really delicious seafood down there and just learned about how the industry there was adapting to different issues in their fisheries, not just from the BP spill, but just from overfishing or from the warming of the water down there, just changing which types of species were living there. So it was an issue I was really interested in, and I never gave much thought to writing a children’s book of any kind.

But a publisher in London reached out to me, having seen that I had done this fellowship and that I had done some various stories on the fishing industry and how fisheries are being affected by climate change, and asked me if I would consider doing something like this. And at first, I wasn’t really interested. I don’t have kids yet, so it’s not as near and dear to my heart. And I guess I felt a little bit shy, as a lot of my friends or colleagues were writing very serious, non-fiction books. And that, I don’t know, maybe there was something trivial about this.

And then I talked to my little niece. My niece Vivian is only a few years old, and she just loves nature and is really excited by different things that she watches on it. And I saw the illustrations from Ms. Rodriguez, and I was just blown away by her artwork, that this wasn’t some kind of dinky two dimensional cartoon drawing, but stuff that was really just beautiful art. And so I said, why not?

And it turned out that a couple months after I agreed to do it, that the whole world went into lockdown and I suddenly had a lot more free time in my apartment. So it was a nice reprieve from the day-to-day chaos and fear of the early days of the pandemic to sort of lose myself in research about different aquatic ecosystems, and certainly about the threats that they face, but moreover, about the beautiful and amazing networks of life that live there.

Tucker Perkins:
Amazing. So again, the book, Earth’s Aquarium, and I encourage you to at least go find that book. I encourage you to buy that book, but also, it’s a great place to look for some of Alexander Kaufman’s other work and just a good example of the writing style.

All right, let’s have a little bit of fun. Couple questions we love to ask. We can use a little bit of magic. You live in a place where magic is always around. I’m going to give you the wand, and I want you to choose one thing that in the next year would have a major impact regarding climate change and sustainability. How would you use that wand?

Alexander Kaufman:
Nuclear fusion is not only viable, but cheap and commercially deployable next year.

Tucker Perkins:
You’ll be proud to know you’re the second voter for fusion in the last couple months.

Alexander Kaufman:
I’m not surprised the team at Princeton had that exact same wish. That’s awesome.

Tucker Perkins:
All right, one other tradition we have, and a way to thank you for your time and for your energy and for spending time with us, is to plant a tree in a national forest in your name. Now, you’re a classic native New Yorker so maybe you have a place here in New York you would love to have a tree planted. Is there a place you know of?

Alexander Kaufman:
A national forest? Can I get back to you on this? I’m actually, this weekend I’m going to be up in the Adirondacks with a very close friend of mine, doing a little bit of backpacking and camping around some of the peaks up there. So I feel like I might have a good connection to one of those.

Tucker Perkins:
We’ll look forward to that. How about anything else you want to tell our listeners? Something you’re working on, something you’re thinking about?

Alexander Kaufman:
Sure. I mean, I guess the thing I would say rather than tease out a story is just, yeah, I know I’ve talked a lot about some of my recent pet issues, climate change, sorry, nuclear energy and things like that. And certainly I have expressed some of my frustrations, I think, with the overall discourse around those issues, or some of the dogma from different advocacy groups.

Now, I’m not opposed to any of those groups, and I value a lot of the ways that they participate. I am a great believer in democracy and the messy project that it is when taking on this very difficult task of decarbonization. I know a lot of people become attracted to places like China for the way that an authoritarian country can implement something as difficult as decarbonization. I believe in democracy. I want to live in a place that allows people with conflicting viewpoints to express them. And I’ve tried always as a reporter to be open to talking to anyone and understanding those divergent viewpoints.

But I do think that with all of the interest and obsession at times with issues around misinformation, whether it’s about elections or Russian misinformation, or frankly, the climate denial movement being fundamentally a misinformation campaign, I try to urge everyone that I talk to across the political spectrum to examine the ways that misinformation or convenient narratives may really be easy to latch onto for them and that it may confirm some of their prior viewpoints, but to just try to interrogate those biases.

I don’t think that there’s anything particularly special about being a journalist, but having done this as long as I have, the one thing that was always drilled into me by editors early on when I was at little local papers was to interrogate any bias. There’s a joke in journalism that if your mother tells you that she loves you, check. See if you can confirm. Get a second source on that.

And so I think that, I don’t think everybody needs to think like a newspaperman, but I think a lot of issues in this country would be helped by people just taking a look at whatever it is that they feel very sure about, and just try to examine the other viewpoints on the other side. I think that would help in a lot of ways. And so I urge everyone, listeners and anyone that I talk to, just try to make that part of their habits.

Tucker Perkins:
I really want to thank you for spending time with us, but more importantly, thank you for the clarity in your writing and the breadth that we really have come to appreciate when you see an article with your name on it. So thanks for being with us today in New York for Climate Week and spending time with Path to Zero.

Alexander Kaufman:
Thanks for having me.