Bulwark Takes - When ‘Woke Meat’ Gets Banned (w/ Michael Grunwald)

Episode Date: August 10, 2025

Jonathan Cohn talks with "We Are Eating the Earth" author Michael Grunwald about how food and farming are wrecking the planet. From beef and biofuels to fake meat and Florida politics, it’s a climate crisis hiding in plain sight. Hungry for more? Read more from Michael Grunwald in We Are Eating the Earth: https://a.co/d/dPBVm9b

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19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Bullwork. This is Jonathan Cohn here. Very special guest today, New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Michael Grunwald. We are here to talk about his new book. We are eating the Earth. Yes, we are going to talk about food, what you are eating, what I am eating, what we are all eating, and what we're doing to the planet. Mike is an expert in these things. He's also an expert in climate, which is something we'll get to. And hopefully we'll get to talk a little bit about politics in Florida. which is where he's based and has also written incredibly incisively over the years. Before we start, if you like what we're doing here at the bulwark, you like hearing from smart

people like Michael Grunwald. Please like this video. Subscribe to our YouTube feed. Subscribe to our newsletters. Mike, it's great to have you here visiting the bulwark. Oh, this is such a pleasure. It's great to see you, John. Yeah, now I should tell all our viewers and listeners.

that you and I, we've known each other a really long time. I'm hesitant to say, way back. Yeah, I'm a little hesitant to say how long we'll age us. But that includes a period very early in our respective careers when we were both living in Boston. You were working at the Boston Globe, excellent American newspaper. I was at the American Prospect, which was based in Boston at the time. And you had this great gig. You were doing first local and state news, then you moved on to nationalists,

but you had this great side hustle at the time where you would. do restaurant reviews. And I remember these very well because the best part of the restaurant review was you got to take a wingman with you. And I got to be that wingman sometimes. So I would get free food on the Boston Globe. Thank you. Boston Globe management from 30 years ago. And you'd write these reviews. And I actually went, I actually dug one up. This is it right here. Oh my God. Yeah. Dining out. And I'm pretty sure it's the one that I was with you for. because when you were reviews, these were, to be clear, these were not like high, you know, five-star Michelin kind of restaurants.

These are like mom and pop kind of. No, it's in the suburbs. Right, right, right. And this one was from Randolph, right, which is South Boston, am I right? That's right, south of Boston. Yeah, it was an Italian restaurant in South Boston. And you would refer to your dining companion. So you refer to this one to your dining companion named John.

Now, you know a couple of Johns in your life, but I kind of think this one was me because one of the things you describe the guest is really struggling with deciding what to order. which would be very on brand for me. That does sound, that sounds familiar. I would just like to say I got that gig because the guy who was doing it wrote a review where he said he complained about the, the Caesar salad that it had anchovies in it,

which is, you know, kind of not an unusual thing in Caesar salads. And after that, the editor was like, all right, Grunwald, you do you do them. Yeah, yeah, no, I think that was a good call, a good call. Anyway, I was thinking about that. I do remember, I have very, fun memories of going out with you to do that restaurant review. And of course, one of the things that would happen when you did these reviews, you had to order a lot, right? I mean, you had to order

like three or four different. And I remember ordering all this extra food because that's what you had to find out, you know, and be able to judge the restaurant. And, you know, I was thinking about that when I was reading your book. Because your book is all about the way we eat and, you know, how that is affecting the world. And what we don't always think about when we eat and what an impact is happening. And actually, a big part of your book or part of your book is the food we waste. Before we get into the waste, before we get into all that,

just for people who are kind of coming to this and they're like, food, why do I care about food? I'm a politics person. I'm a bullwork listener. Why does this all matter to me? So, you know, give us a little bit. There's a little micro-unwald on this. I mean, now all I can think about

is why I didn't take women on those dates where I had the, you know, the free food, but why I was taking you. But anyway, yeah, so the book is, We are eating the earth, and essentially it's agriculture that's eating the earth, right? You know, I think a lot of us know that we talk about urban sprawl the way our cities and suburbs are sort of sprawling into nature. Well, that's one of every hundred acres of the planet.

Agriculture is two of every five. We are really converting this natural planet into an agricultural planet, right? We are losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest to agriculture every six seconds. And agriculture also has all these other problems, right? It uses 70% of our fresh water. It's the leading driver of water pollution and deforestation and wetlands drainage. It's really a huge deal. And even though I was, you know, I wrote about the climate, it's a third of our climate problem.

And I knew nothing about it. The main problem really is that, you know, Agriculture is replacing nature, and nature stores a lot of carbon. So when you tear down a forest, all that carbon goes into the atmosphere. And also forests, they soak up carbon from the atmosphere, you know, from our fossil fuels. So I always say that, you know, trying to decarbonize the planet while you're continuing to replace forest with farms, it's like trying to clean up your house while you're smashing your vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. you're making a huge mess and you're also crippling your ability to clean up the mess. So that's sort of why I wrote the book.

I figured if I was this spectacularly ignorant about, you know, really our diets being the biggest source of our environmental problems that probably a lot of other people were too. Yeah, well, I certainly was. I mean, I'm not a climate expert like you are, but I spend some time following it. And I had no idea. I really had no idea. They use analogies somewhere, I think, but they, you know, we're all talking about AI now and when, you know, these data centers and how much water they use. I mean, and that's just like a fraction, right, of what we're, you know. No, I mean, you know, if you want to talk about what uses water, it's cows and agriculture.

I mean, it's, yeah, and again, sort of, I think with energy and most of the climate focus is on energy, and I understand that. That was mine for many, many years. I wrote an energy column for Time magazine. But at least with energy, at this point, we kind of know what we need to do, right? We want to basically transform the global economy to an electric economy, and then we want to run it on clean electricity. And we're actually starting to do that, despite what's happening in Washington right now. We're in the middle of this extraordinary clean energy revolution, where if you're building a new plower plant anywhere in the world, you're probably building a wind or solar plant. It's just been, when I started writing about energy and climate, there were no alternatives to fossil fuels like 20 years ago.

So it's really incredible. While with food and climate, like, you know, we don't even know what we need to know. And we are not making progress. The problem's getting worse. So, you know, that really struck me as this kind of vacuum where, you know, there are 1,000,000 books about how our fossil fuels are destroying the planet. it. But I feel like, you know, this kind of carbohydrate problem is actually more interesting than our hydrocarbon problem. And we do sort of need to start grappling with it. So you said earlier that we have an aggregate. It's not a food problem. It's an agriculture problem. But how much of it is

and you mentioned this too? How much of it is a cow problem? I mean, how much of this is about beef? Well, you know, the world eats 350 million tons of meat every year. year. And it's increasing every year. We're on track to eat another, 70% more by 2050. And yeah, it's, in many ways, the earth is becoming an animal farm. About three quarters of our agricultural land is either pastures or it's crops that we feed to animals. And as you suggested, I mean, cattle are the baddies. You know, I've cut beef and lamb out of my diet because they really are the worst. You know, chicken, you have to feed a chicken nine calories worth of plants to get one calorie worth of chicken, you know, worth of meat. But cows are like 10 times worse in terms

of land use and in terms of emissions. Is that just because they're bigger or, I mean, why is that, by the way? It's mostly because they just, they just use their spectacularly inefficient converters of their food into our food. I see. I see. And so. it's, so really, like in the United States, cattle use about half our agricultural land, and they provide about 3% of our calories. So it's, yeah, it's really, and so, and so that's why I look, I mean, if you want to, if you, you want to, your diet, you want to have the best diet for the planet, you should go vegan, but I'm too weak to go vegan. I'm too much of a hypocrite, and we kind of all find the level of hypocrisy they were comfortable with. But just cutting out

beef is for most people to about as good as going vegetarian because most vegetarians end up eating a lot of dairy. And again, dairy mostly comes from cows and cows are the baddie. Now again, like cows, they make milk several times a day while they only make beef like once in their lifetime, which is what makes beef, you know, so much less efficient. But again, you're absolutely right. And certainly, this is why I, you know, my book I try to, the first half is kind of about the problem. And then the second half is a lot about solutions. And yes, like, it would be great if, you know, the United States, we eat four times the global average of meat. The average American eats three burgers a week. If we cut that to two burgers, we

would save a Massachusetts worth of land every year. So, yeah, reducing beef, whether it's just through, you know, being good people, who care about the planet, which is, I think, unlikely, through alternative proteins like the fake meats, whether that's from plants or from cells or from fungi. I think that's important. But at the same time, we're also going to have to make the beef that we make better. You know, if it was only four times as bad as chicken instead of 10 times, that would be a huge emissions reduction. So it's a little bit like, you know, Willie Sulton, Sutton, Rob Banks, because that's where the money is. If you care about emissions, you're going to have to care about making beef better

because that's where the emissions are. Let's stick with that. So how do you make beef better? Well, and this is where, you know, people start to get pissed at me, right? You just doesn't take this long on a conversation with you to get people pissed at you. Yeah, because you do hear a lot, like, you know, particularly from the sort of regenerative ranchers. You hear like, oh, it's not the cow. It's the how.

And first of all, it's mostly the cow. Like, but, you know, the how matters. not in the way that a lot of the sort of people who have read a lot of Michael Pollan, who is a great writer, but is, you know, I think has sort of given people some wrong ideas about agriculture. Just for people who Michael Pollan is. Tell people who Michael Pollan is. Yeah, he wrote the Omnivore's Dilemma. He's a beautiful writer who essentially is sort of calling for kind of old-fashioned farms like Old McDonald's where, you know, without all these chemicals, without these terrible feedlots. without the modern monoculture, a more bucolic, natural, kinder and gentler kind of farming, that unfortunately doesn't make as much food.

And part of what I bang my spoon on my high chair about is that if you make less food per acre, you need more acres to make the same amount of food. You eat more of the earth. And so, well, say what you will about, you know, modern industrial farming, which treats animals badly and treats people badly and their politics often suck. They're basically promoting terrible politicians who want to roll back environmental regulations

and basically climate deniers. They use too many antibiotics, so many bad things about them. But factories are really good at manufacturing a lot of food. And that is going to be agriculture's number one job over the next 30 years. We're going to have to make more food over the next 30 years. than we've made over the last 12,000. And that's if we want to feed the world and we want to do it without tearing down all these forests.

Right now we're on track to deforest another dozen California's worth of land by 2050. And, you know, we don't have another dozen California's worth of forest to spare. And so it turns out that actually grass-fed beef, like organic grass-fed beef, that everybody thinks is, like, better for the planet, it's actually worse. It takes longer to get the cattle to slaughter weight, so they're burping and farting more methane, which I know it sounds goofy, but that really is a problem. But mainly, they just need a lot more land because feeding them grain in the last couple months is a lot more efficient. And so, you know, these are sometimes uncomfortable truths. They're inconvenient truths, and they're not what people want to hear.

And, of course, I'm getting a lot of pushback from people who would like, you know, kinder and gently. farming. But again, to the extent that you can do regenerative, organic, and still have the high yields, that's great. But if you're using more land to make the same amount of food, you know, you're tearing down the Amazon. And right now it's mostly beef that's tearing down the Amazon. You talk about this in your book, and I've heard you talk about this, but how much can technology help us, you know, crafting alternative beef? I mean, I'll say I've had Beyond burgers. I like them. They don't quite taste like real burgers. I like them, though. I'll eat them. What's the deal there? How good is it? How good can it get? What are the hold-ups?

Well, I think there are all kinds of technologies that are really exciting. You know, on the farming side, you know, I've seen, you know, these biopesticides that use the MRI technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate potato beetles to death. and these, you know, alternative fertilizers where they gene edit microbes to essentially snatch nitrogen out of the air and feed it to crops. I mean, I saw these scientists at the University of Illinois who are literally trying to reinvent photosynthesis, which has been, you know, kind of supporting life on Earth for a few billion years. I was going to say, yeah, that's been around for a while. Yeah, but turns out to do it to do it in some very inefficient ways.

And they are using gene editing and artificial intelligence and big data to sort of edit out some of those inefficiencies. And they think they can increase crop yields 50%. And that means you need 50% fewer land, 50% less land to make the same amount of food. On the alternative proteins, again, I think this is a really exciting example of how technology can help. Because remember, I mean, like our species were like not awesome. at like being nice to each other or making sacrifices for the good of the planet. But we're really good at inventing stuff. And the cow is a pretty mature technology.

And, you know, fake meat is not. So I think, you know, I started my reporting in 2019 right after the Beyond Meat went public. And it was the biggest popping IPO of the 21st century. People were going nuts. It was worth one third as much as Tyson. Um, you know, it was just, uh, its stock went up to $250 a share. I went to a conference for, for basically all of the different meat alternatives. And, you know, the exuberance was just off the chart. There were serious conversations about whether it was going to take 10 or 20 years to get rid of meat. Um, my joke was that I thought I was going to accidentally raise a series A round on the drinks line. Um, it was just absolute hysteria. And then, you know, now four years later, later, I went back to that same conference and it was all doom and gloom because Beyond has gone from $250 a share to $2 a share. The meat made from sales hasn't really even made it to market. And people

are saying this was a fad. What are we thinking? But I think the sort of easy explanation is that the dogs didn't like the food, right? It's not an indictment of technology. It's an incredible achievement to make a burger out of plants that's 90% as good as a carcass burger and, you know, and it's almost as cheap and is actually even a little healthier. But the fact is, like, there's no real reason for somebody to spend more money to buy something that's not as good, unless they happen to care about the climate. And that's not what most people are thinking about when they're choosing their diet. So I think, you know, this stuff is, it was better than the old veggie burger hockey pucks, right?

So people got excited about it. But it wasn't as good as meat. Meat is pretty awesome. And our ancestors started eating it two million years ago. We sort of evolved to love it. And I think it's going to take time to displace it. But I have a lot of faith in some of these technological solutions that they will keep getting better. And as we saw with Tesla, you know, Tesla didn't sell a lot of cars because they said,

said like buy Tesla, save the planet, they made a really good product that people liked better than internal combustion engines. And not everybody did, but a lot of people did. And I think that's really the goal of all these, you know, the green revolution that we had in the 1960s with fertilizers and irrigation and cool new types of seeds and all these stuff that they do in the factory farms to, you know, to make more efficient meat. that tripled crop yields. And so if it wasn't for that revolution, we'd use three times as much land as we use today.

And we don't have that. We'd need like a planet B. So now we're just going to need a greener green revolution, which is going to include, I think, things like alternative proteins on the demand side, on the diet side. But it's also going to have to include things like, I don't know, like feed additives that you can feed to cows so that they don't burp as much methane on the, supply side on the farming side. And, you know, none of that stuff has traction yet. It's going to require the same kind of government investment and entrepreneurial spirit that we had on the, you know, to get solar and wind and electric vehicles to scale. But I think that's, you know, going to be a big part of the future. Being active, playing with your kids, exploring the best

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You know, imagine, you know, I'm trying to imagine Comelect. Harris walking out on the campaign trail in October and saying, you know, okay, less beef. That's my platform. I mean, obviously, that was a lot of simple time. But I mean, yeah, terrific. But, I mean, you know, you got a lot of entrenched interest, you know, and I think for better or worse, or it's pretty inevitable now, like so many other parts of our politics, food has now been politicized, right?

I mean, it's a badge of honor. Like, you know, if you don't, if you're against beef, you're, you're against the American flag, you're against, you know, America, you know, why do you hate America, Michael Grenwald. And do you have any thoughts on like how to make? Because I mean, there are policy steps that can be taken. You were just saying investment. I mean, that's money. Just at the most basic level, getting money out of Congress is really hard. Any advice? Yeah. I mean, well, the first thing is that it's going to be hard. Everything I write about in this book is going to be hard, right? If it was easy, somebody would have fixed it already. And I do, I quote a pollster who talks about how taxes and other

restrictions on meat are the least popular policy he's ever polled. He, his quote was that it's, his quote was that it's up there with veterans benefits for ISIS. So, you know, so, you know, you don't want to lead with that. I think who would be, yeah, and it's very unfortunate. I think that just like, you know, you know, about a decade ago, right, electric vehicles suddenly became Obama mobiles, right? They got caught up in the culture war. It's like, that's, you know, those are woke cars or, you know, they're part of, they're like climate friendly

cars and green cars. That's bad. And now you're seeing that like, you know, you started to see when Cracker Barrel tried to put, tried to put impossible sausages on their menu, it's like it's Bidenburgers, right? I mean, it's, you know, we're seeing this play out again. And that makes it really tough because, I mean, ultimately, the ideal you'd like to see, particularly, in the rich world, we're going to have to reduce our meat, particularly our beef consumption by about 50%. And that's going to be really tough if, you know, if half of the country is like, well, I'm going to eat more beef just to piss you off. So it's, you know, it's difficult. The politics of ag always suck all around the world. I mean, the ag industry. It's not just an

American thing. Yeah. I mean, globally, there are. Globally, there, about $600 billion worth of annual subsidies for agriculture. And $300 billion of that is just sort of direct handouts. And then on the left, and actually, and you're starting to see it on the right, too, with Robert Kennedy Jr. and Joe Rogan, there's this push instead for, like, you know, the kinder and gentler Michael Pollan farming. We should be subsidizing that instead, which, of course, we'll eat even more of earth. So it's going to be very difficult. I mean, I think ultimately you want to try to have

some sort of grand bargain where realistically, you know, we're not going to cut off all of your subsidies. But, you know, there has to just be a little bit more responsibility where, you know, if you talk to farmers, a lot of them will say like, oh, you know, I'm a good steward of the land. But collectively, they're stewarding a mess. And I think the ultimate goal needs to be like, we're going to help you make even more food, but you're going to have to do it with, fewer emissions, less water, and less mess. And again, people say, like, that's utopian. That's very unrealistic.

And it's like, well, yeah, I know. But, you know, all of these problems are going to be very difficult to solve. And I will say that in Denmark, which, granted, it's Denmark. They're like the model nation. I know like, oh, Denmark, the happiest people on Earth. Denmark just passed basically the Mike Grunwald Agricultural Reform Act of 2025. which is, you know, it's, we're going to promote plant-based eating. We're going to tax agricultural emissions from their, you know, including from their dairy industry, you know, the burps and farts.

They're going to, they're going to actually even return some of their marginal farmland to nature, so they're going to eat less of the earth. But they're not going to dismantle their very efficient dairy and pork industry and just basically outsource all their deforestation and pollution to the developing world. No, instead they're going to help it get even more efficient. They're going to, but they're also going to invest in the kind of technologies like those feed additives that can make it make less of a mess. And I think that, again, Denmark's only 6 million people and we have more than 8 billion people on Earth. So it's not going to move the needle on emissions. But the hope is that that shows that it can be done and that that can be an example for the rest of the world of how we get around the politics. Even Denmark has a very powerful agricultural industry.

They use more of their land for ag than any nation except for Bangladesh. But what they were able to do, essentially, and again, we get back to Utopia. In Denmark, they did such a good job decarbonizing energy that suddenly ag was the outlier. And it was sort of like their turn in the barrel. And they had to come to the negotiating table. And when the alternative was like, okay, we're just going to get rid of half, your pigs and half your cows. And they're like, wait, we, you know, our pigs and cows are actually really efficient. You know, we're helping to eat less of the earth with our pigs and

cows. That helped to come to a deal. And American farmers and ranchers also tend to be very efficient. So the hope is that, again, we can someday have a similar kind of deal where we want you to make even more food. You keep doing what you're doing. This middle of the country is actually awesome agricultural land. We're not talking about, you know, turning it back to forests and wetlands. You keep farming, but just try to do it with less of a mess. You know, I was thinking as you were talking about how this has all gotten politicized in the analogy to the electric cars and everything. I talk a lot about, you may remember when Biden was president, there was that visit he made here in Michigan to the four Dearborn Proving Grounds

and he drove the F-150 electric. And the thing, but the touch is so much fun. Oh, my God, yeah. Are you EV driver? I can't remember. Are you an EV person? I am. I am. You are, right? Right, right. And my wife. We have two electric cars and we have solar panels. We still fly too much. So, you know, we're not trying to scold anybody or shame anyone. But yes. And we have a plug-in hybrid, which is not quite the same. But actually, because of how we drive it, usually on electric power only. So it feels like an electric car. And I always tell people, they are so, I mean, the driving experience is better. They're faster. They're quieter. I mean, and that's the same of the lower maintenance. cost over the cost of your lifetime. And I've always thought, not that I wanted Trump to win in 2020, but if he had been president, he was the one who had visited the Ford. You know, you can see a world where like, whoa, cool American truck. This is American know-how. And it kind of became sort of more branded. At the very least, it didn't become unbranded because he would sort of, you know, take some pride in, okay, maybe I'm being utopian now. But, you know, I do feel like, I mean, insofar as what you're talking about is innovation and sort of American know-how. I mean,

maybe there is a way to get buy-in from some of these even al-Maga conservatives and these farmers and say, hey, this is, you know, we're going to do this better. And, you know, you're going to have to probably throw money at it. That's always what it takes for maybe. But I live in the free state of Florida and my governor banned cultivated meat, right? You know, in the free state of Florida, we're not allowed to decide what kind of meat we want to eat because, you know, meat grown from cells that uses 90%, you know, less, less land and it generates 90% fewer emissions. That's woke meat. That's like, you know, that's Davos meat. You know, that's like the people

who want us to like, you know, take away our burgers and force us to eat bugs. And of course, it's also like the meat that's a threat to cattlemen who, you know, give a lot of money to Florida Republicans. But so, yeah, I mean, you know, I do talk about the politics of this stuff in the book and I tell some kind of dismal stories. I mean, I write one classic example that I write about. And, you know, my main character discovered this whole eating the earth problem through biofuels, right? Which are, you know, the idea of like you grow corn and instead of, you know, feeding it to a cow or putting it into a twinkie or, you know, into Coca-Cola or or a tortilla, you turn it into ethanol and you put it in your car, which is great, except,

you know, you replace fossil fuels, except then you're going to have to grow some food somewhere else. You have to replace the food. And that turns out to be usually in a forest or a wetland. And that's why biofuels, especially corn ethanol, are just a disaster for the climate. But when, you know, there's that famous West Wing episode where, what's his name, the Jimmy Smith's character when he's running for president, he's talking about how stupid ethanol is and his and his aid, you know, and Josh. Season 7, the episode is named King Corn. I don't believe I know that.

There you go, yeah. And Josh tells him, like, you know, if you come out against ethanol, you won't get a single vote in Iowa caucus. I tell a story about how my main character is trying to lobby, of all people, John Corzine's office, to come out against ethanol. And the argument is pretty simple, right? It's like, you don't grow a lot of corn in New Jersey. This is going to increase what your constituents pay at the pump. It's going to increase the price of food. just to make some agribusinesses in the Midwest rich.

And the aid is like, look, Tim, I'm sorry. My guy can't afford to piss off the corn farmers in Iowa. And Tim is like, wait a minute, your guy used to be the head of Goldman Sachs. Does he honestly think he's going to be president in the United States? And the aide says, Tim, they all think they're going to be president of the United States, which is just a long-winded way of saying, like, you know, politicians don't want to piss off farmers. and that makes us all very difficult. Yeah, it really does.

It really does. Well, you mentioned Florida, state close to my heart because it's where I grew up and it's where you live now. I can maybe say the politics of climate in Florida fascinating. And I should tell people watching this that when you're done reading Mike's new book, go back and read The Swamp, which is his history of the Everglades, just a fantastic book. It'll tell you the story, not just about the Everglades itself, but about environmentalism, about politics in Florida, about development, just a real classic. And so you've been fond of this for so long.

And I just, I find it baffling. I mean, Florida is like ground zero. I'm mixing my analogies here, but for climate, right? I mean, you have floods from the winter rains right now. It floods in Miami Beach. Sometimes when it doesn't rain. Sometimes when it doesn't rain, just from the tide, just from the tide. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, that is, that is crazy. you have at the same time, you have the Everglades, you have these watersheds that are national treasures, right? I mean, and at least... I believe they are now just this just sort of holding grounds for prisons. That's right. Sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah, I suppose. Well, that's... There may be an ecosystem there as well.

I don't remember. I did hear something about alligators, right? Yeah, yeah. Or crocod, no, alligators. And what's weird about this to me is that when I was growing up in Florida, and this was a long time ago, to be fair, Dan Marino was still quarterback for the dolphins. But when I was growing up in, yeah, the good old days, when I was growing up in Florida, it was never a liberal state, but it was a divided state. I mean, we had, you know, it was a swing state. We'd go both ways.

And we had Democratic governors. They were conservative Democratic governors. But I remember very distinctly Bob Graham, who was a beloved governor in the state of Florida. correct me if I'm wrong, but a big environmentalist. I mean, that was something he cared a lot about. And my, and it was a weird, and it's always been a quirky state, it's very fond. But, you know, it was not this, it was not such an anti-environmental place. If anything, it was a place where even the conservatives sometimes sounded. You know, you had to at least talk like you cared about the environment. What the hell happened? Well, I mean, you know, first of all, yes. I mean, you know, the first scene of the swamp is, is this kind of, I mean, it's just unbelievable. right it's it's uh it's jeb bush and bill clinton together in the oval office celebrating the largest environmental project in the history of the planet to save the everglades um and that was like

not that jeb bush and bill clinton ever loved hanging out together um but it was like this huge bipartisan event and that was the same day that they were arguing bush v gore at the supreme court um so you had uh so you had like this big fight over florida's political swamp but Florida's actual swamp was bringing people together. And in fact, Jeb Bush in 1994, when Republicans everywhere around the country just, you know, it was a huge Republican year, his brother was running in Texas and was considered this huge long shot, you know, his like kind of idiot big brother who was like kind of an alcoholic. But Jeb was the next big thing.

He was going to be the Florida governor and then the president. But Jeb ran such a right-wing anti-environmental. campaign that he was like the only Republican who lost that year. And the first thing he did after he lost was joined the board of the Audubon Society. And then he won in a landslide in 1998. But by then his big brother was already the chosen one. And yes. And today, the Everglades is just a place to put undocumented immigrants and, you know, and make jokes about alligator alcatraz. Grab a coffee and discover nonstop action with Bud MGM Casino. Check out our hottest exclusive. Friends are one with multi-drop. Once even more.

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thrills only available at BetMGM. Download the BetMGM Ontario app today. 19 plus a wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531, 2,600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. I think the short answer is that the environment, the climate, has all just become part of the culture war, right? Are you for it or you're against it? And, uh, and, uh, and, you know, caring about the climate is just a sign that you're like a woke, Democratic liberal. And if you're a Republican, um, there's, there's no incentive to care about this stuff. Sometimes, sometimes Ron DeSantis will,

you know, do a little bit of lip service. Um, but it's a, you know, it's a bummer. And, and on climate issues, it's funny because you can tell, I mean, and this is not the first time in my career, where, you know, a lot of my environmental work and climate work is not the stuff that climate activists and, you know, the environmental movement, they don't always love what I have to say. You know, I'm challenging them on a lot of what they think is like, you know, sustainable farming. A lot of what they think is, you know, what our food should look like, a lot about technological revolutions. You know, they don't like what I have to say necessarily. But honestly, you know, Trump sucks on this stuff, right? And I think a lot of people who, like me, a lot of people whose instinct is to like, you know, we want to write, you know, we want to think, we want to be, you know, subtle, nuanced thinkers about the climate.

So you want to kind of, you know, point out where you disagree with the climate movement and all that. But, like, you know, if you're going to take this seriously, the real problem is that, like, Donald Trump is anti-climate. And he's got an entire party behind him that is, you know, they're pretending that climate change is, you know, is not a dangerous thing. They are, you know, rolling back all the support for clean energy and providing new support for dirty energy. This is all bad. And it's boring. And it's not like, you know, like my people, the people who would be interested in a book I write, like they already know that it's bad, right? And I'm not really pointing out anything new.

And probably a lot of a lot of bulwark listeners are in this same kind of, you know, and not only on climate issues where you're not like a far left liberal. And so you, you know, you want to point out areas where you're different from the Democratic Party or you feel like the Democratic Party has gone too far left. And on a lot of these issues, I do think it's been bad policy. And sometimes bad, it's definitely bad politics, some of the, you know, the sort of climate hysteria and a pop. apocalyptic rhetoric. But that said, like, the Democrats aren't the problem. And, you know,

if people say, like, what are the three things you should do if you care about the climate now that I'm on book tour, right? And I'm always like, eat less beef, waste less food, which you mentioned at the beginning, because when we waste a quarter of our food and when you, when you waste food, you waste the farmland that uses to grow the food and the water and the fertilizer. And then number three, my joke is always like, eat even less beef. But really, number three should be vote for Democrats because, like, Democrats right now are the only game in town when it comes to climate. And it's sort of not cool for, you know, for nonpartisan journalists to say that, especially nonpartisan journalists who are kind of, I guess, call me centrist or moderate or whatever and are often calling out the excesses of the climate movement. But this isn't, you know, the bad stuff happening is not the climate movement's fault.

It's not the fault of the people who are throwing soup on art, you know, however dumb that is. You know, it's not the people who are, you know, it's not the fault of the people who are screaming at Joe Mansion when they should have been kissing his feet, you know, and saying like, thank God we have another Democratic vote for the inflation reduction act. And even on my subtle stuff where I say like, you know, the Biden administration, which put $20 billion into climate smart agriculture, and I think a lot of it was really misguided. It wasn't that climate smart. but Trump came along and said,

we don't want climate-smart agriculture, and that's worse. So, you know, this is sort of boring, right, to just say, like, the orange man is bad. But on this stuff, the orange man is very bad. Yeah, he's very, very bad. Well, I want to wrap up, but, you know, I feel like, especially with climate,

but God, so much today, you get into these discussions, and you end up pretty despondent. Things are pretty bad. They suck. But there are, there's hope, in the world. Tell me something hopeful that you sort of think about. I mean, give me, give me one or two things that you give you reason to think that, you know, we're going to get

on the right track here. Well, the main thing, like I suggested, I started writing, really, I stumbled into the Everglades and the Army Corps of Engineers, you know, like 20 years ago. And that first book is really when I started doing environmental reporting. And at the time, like the swamp, which I hope you guys, yeah, please buy it. But I did a terrible. job of dealing with the climate. You know, the Everglades is a ecosystem that's like a couple feet above sea level. It's like unbelievably at risk of sea level rise. And I wasn't really thinking about the climate in those days. It was before Al Gore's movie came, that movie came out just about when my book came out. And I was like, oh, shit, I should have done a little more

climate stuff. But so then I did. I started writing about it. And at the time, there were really no alternatives to fossil fuels, except for biofuels, which are terrible, which are worse than fossil fuels. And today, you know, it's an entirely different world. So that's my big, you know, that's my big source of optimism is that right now, yes, when I write about, talk about food and climate, there is not a lot of progress happening. And we are on track for, you know, really this kind of, even if we all stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow, which is not going to happen, we're still on track just through deforestation to

blow through our climate targets by 2050, and it's a bummer that none of these very cool technologies and very cool policies that I write about have really gotten a lot of traction, but they could, right? And, you know, I think as a human, what was like the Winston Churchill line about how, you know, Americans, you know, always do the right thing after we've exhausted all the other alternatives. And I think on climate, you know, we'll sort of muddle through, right? You know, perfect probably isn't on the menu, but better is better than worse. And there's a lot we can do that can be politically difficult but not politically impossible.

But first, I think we have to kind of grapple with these issues. And that's why I wrote the book. That's why I'm like waving my hands in the air. This idea that like, you know, people are going to talk a lot of shit about different things I say in this book. But one thing I grappled. And I hope that, you know, I hope other people will too, because we do vote on these issues three times a day, right? And so, you know, I think you and I have talked in the past about this whole, like the environmental community, one of the things I don't like about them these days is that they're really trying to downplay individual action, right? It's like, you know, what's his name, Michael Mann, the big climate scientist, he wrote an op-ed.

The title was like, going vegan, won't save the planet. And it's like, well, no shit, but it will help. And this is, and on food issues is an area where I do think, like, you know, people can, people can make a difference. And, and that is, that does start to generate hope, right? When you, you know, when you're reducing your own carbon footprint, you know, then maybe, you know, you're supporting politicians who want to reduce the country's carbon footprint. And ultimately, you know, that's how change happens. It doesn't happen easily. Never does.

That's what all three of my books have been about. But it happens. Yeah. Yeah. Is that optimistic? It was pretty optimistic enough. For now, by today's standards, wildly optimistic. Well, and there's no point just being like, we're doomed.

We're doomed. If we don't reduce emissions, 43% by 2030, it's game over for the climate. It's like, that's crazy. There is no game over for the climate. There's just like better and there's worse. and we should try to do better. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to say it reminds me of two of my favorite phrases from the Obama era.

I'm sure you know them, but you know, which was hard things are hard, better is good. And I think that's right. And don't do stupid shit. Don't do stupid shit. It would be another big Obama one that is very relevant to this. Like don't, you know, don't spend $4 trillion on a global transition to, you know, bogus forms of carbon farming that aren't going to fix anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I think those are all true for how we act politically and what we want our politicians and true in our individual actions. So everyone, maybe eat a little less beef. And check out Mike's book. We are eating the earth. Mike, thanks so much for coming and visiting us today. Oh, it's such a pleasure, John. Thanks for having me.

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