Science Friday - Right-To-Repair, Exercise Recovery, Gov. Inslee. April 5, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

Whenever your smartphone or video game console breaks down, you usually have to go back to the manufacture or a technician affiliated with the company to have your device fixed. Oftentimes, companies don’t release parts or guides to their devices, making it difficult to repair them own your own. 20 different states have introduced right-to-repair legislation, which calls for companies to open up the ability for individuals to fix their own devices. Recently, senator Elizabeth Warren called for a national right-to-repair law for farming equipment made by John Deere and other agricultural manufacturers. Jason Koebler from Motherboard and agricultural lawyer Todd Janzen discuss the debate between right-to-repair advocates who want more choice in the hands of consumers and companies who cite security issues and intellectual property rights for keep devices closed. If you’re a runner, hitting the road after a long winter indoors feels invigorating… until you get back home, 10 miles later, and your legs feel like jelly. How do you start to recover? Ibuprofen, ice, lots of water, and stretching might sound like good place to start. But it turns out that following these seemingly logical steps for a faster recovery achieves just the opposite. Icing your muscles slows down the process of recovery. Too much water can be harmful. And stretching? You can put that in the same category as compression boots and cupping—they don’t help recovery one bit. Science writer Christie Aschwanden, author of Good To Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery, a new book on the science of recovery, joins Ira to share what she discovered debunking our most commonly-held beliefs about recovery with science. “Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.” So goes the saying. And for Washington state governor Jay Inslee, that idea is climate change. He has staked his run for the White House in 2020 on what he calls “America’s Climate Mission,” and his campaign platform says “defeating climate change is the defining challenge of our time and [it] must be the foremost priority for the next president.” For a little historical perspective, however, consider that climate change was practically a non-issue in the last presidential election. There were no specific questions about climate policy in the debates. And only five minutes and twenty-seven seconds—two percent of total talking time—were spent on climate change across all three presidential debates. In this conversation, Ira discusses Gov. Inslee’s presidential ambitions, and the science issues that have defined his time as governor of Washington. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, science debunks your workout recovery routine. If you have a workout recovery method you swear by, give us a call. Our number, 844-724-8255, or tweet us at SciFry. We'll have our guest devaluated and tell us if you're wasting your time. But first, whenever you accidentally drop your phone or your gaming console breaks, You usually have to take it to the manufacturer to get it fixed, don't you? Or you have to take it to a company-approved repair shop.

But if it's your device, shouldn't you be able to change the screen or tinker with it yourself? Well, since so much hardware, even cars and tractors, so much of it is controlled by software, it has been argued that just like the software you don't own, but you license, well, you really don't own your tractor. So you can't fix stuff. that doesn't belong to you. Twenty states have adopted legislation called Right to Repair that would let consumers do that, fix their stuff, and last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren called for a national law

that would allow farmers to repair their tractors and farm equipment. Companies are still pushing back, citing security, and copyright concerns. My next guest is going to take us through the debate. Jason Kebler is editor-in-chief at Motherboard here in New York. Welcome, Science Friday. Hey, thanks for having me. When you talk about this right to repair, what are we repairing? Is it the software or the hardware here?

It's usually the hardware. So we're talking about iPhone screens, batteries, refrigerator, filters, tractors, anything that is electronic and has chips in it. Now, let's go to the tractors because I know you've spent a lot of time with farmers and their tractors. What's the issue there? So the issue is that for years, hundreds of years, farmers have been repairing their farm equipment, their tractors, what have you. In the last couple decades, though, a lot of the pieces inside of a tractor have become computerized.

So John Deere and other manufacturers have made it much more difficult for farmers to fix it by putting what's known as technical protection measures or DRM on these things. So farmers are unable to replace a transmission without a code from John Deere. They have to have an authorized person come out and use this software called Service Advisor to actually fix it, and farmers are pretty upset about it. How upset are they? They're very upset. So they started actually hacking tractors.

I did a story last year where I learned that farmers were downloading pirated software from Ukraine and putting it on their laptops, using it to get into their tractors, and we're fixing it themselves. And this is what the companies are afraid of, aren't they? That they'll take control of their... Yeah, so John Deere, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, they've all pushed back against this sort of thing. They put these software locks on their devices. They pushed against legislation at the state level through these large groups like Comp TIA and these farm equipment bureaus and these large lobbying groups. And so far, no legislation has passed.

So they have effectively a repair monopoly at this point. Let me bring on a lawyer into the conversation. Todd Jansen is an attorney and president of Jansen Agricultural Law based out of Indianapolis. Welcome to Science Friday. Hey, thanks, Ira. Glad to be here. Now, I know you work with farmers and small agricultural tech firms. How do you react to all of this? Well, it's all very interesting.

And I would say, you know, my farmer clients, for the most part, they're not raising this concern with me. But it's not the type of thing that an individual farmer could necessarily hire a lawyer to try and tackle, right? It's a much bigger issue than that. it's certainly something that I think requires a legislative fix and not something that our courts themselves can address. You have written that one of the fixes may be to change the length of the patent you get on something. Yeah, actually, I was more thinking in the copyright realm.

Copyright. Yes, with respect to software, it is copyrighted, just like you would, a book or a Disney movie or something like that. And so that copyright lasts for decades after the original author is deceased, or if it's created by a company, it can last for 90 to 100 years. And so, in my opinion, I think that that's really too long for software that is going into a very innovative product. And it'd be much better if after a few years after the manufacturer recouped their investment on the software, that this went into the public domain and could be tinkered with, modified, et cetera, by farmers or whoever else wanted to. Right. So at the moment, we have farmers and hackers who are sort of reverse engineering these technical protection measures

and are hacking into tractors and other devices. And that's actually legal under what's known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Librarian of Congress has made various exemptions legal specifically for tractors and other land vehicles. So right now it is legal to hack a tractor in order to repair it. But what right-to-repair activists are asking for is for companies like John Deere to make this sort of information available to everyone, including independent repair companies, including individual farmers, and including consumers at large. And Todd, we have here what looks like to be typical of this all software, all, you know, cell phones, whatever, you have people who say don't hack into them and others who say, no, we want to jailbreak them.

Yeah, absolutely. I think farming is not unique. I mean, it seems to me it's very similar to an iPhone, right? If an iPhone, Apple does not want you to hack into that and use it for other things. They want to control that. And the same is true with the tractor. I think you made a good point to point out how over the course of history, slowly machinery has gotten to be more. more and more complex and technical, and software is a bigger part of that all the time.

And so, you know, as software gets to be more important to these equipment manufacturers, they're going to want to protect that aspect of it even more than they do now. Jason, company site security as a concern, right? So they say security and safety. We even have examples of Apple lobbyists saying, you know, if you try to fix your broken screen, you might cut your finger. Same thing that John Deere's lobbyists say, you know, if you have someone trying to fix their tractor, they might change the settings, they might, you know, hurt themselves while they're doing that.

You know, they have made a lot of different arguments about security as well, saying that if they give access to different diagnostic software or different tools, you might be making, you know, devices less secure. But they haven't, like, their lobbyists at hearings have not issued a coherent narrative about how this would actually make things less secure. You have companies like Apple who have thousands of different authorized repair people throughout the country who they authorize and give their software to. That is them giving up a little bit of control, and the iPhone is not less secure because of that. Todd, how would you answer that? Yeah, you know, I think that security is a concern. I don't know if it's the greatest concern that these equipment manufacturers have, but there were stories. We've all heard stories of people being able to hack into cars while they're driving and take control of them.

I think that another big issue for companies like John Deere and other equipment manufacturers are the environmental aspect, the emissions of the equipment. A modern tractor has tens of thousands of dollars worth of emissions equipment to make sure that it meets the latest diesel engine. regulations, and you could defeat those by hacking into the software, and they'd be less expensive to run, but worse for the environment. And I think there is a legitimate concern that companies like deer have about farmers doing that, and then somehow they would be responsible for that. Aren't we really, though, talking about money here? You'll make less money if you allowed people to do what they'd like, without a license

to do it. Yeah, I mean, from my years of reporting, that's what it keeps coming back to. I mean, these companies do have a business model that's predicated on controlling the afterlife of their devices. You know, Apple has essentially a repair monopoly. John Deere has essentially a repair monopoly. And if they lose that, they stand to, you know, open this up to basically anyone, and they do stand to lose some money. So that, I think, is their most coherent argument against this, that they like the status quo. and they don't want to lose it.

Well, farmers are used to hearing this. They can't even regrow the corn that they grow, right? They just have a license that can't put the seeds back on the ground. Right. So Monsanto actually owns the copyright to the seeds, and every year farmers have to throw these seeds away and buy new ones the next year from Monsanto. There's actually been lawsuits about this that farmers have lost.

It's illegal for them to replant seeds from year to year. Todd, that's like an early day of something you don't own. Well, yeah, I would say, say with respect to seed, that's true if it has a specific trait that the company has developed. It's not necessarily true if it's a type of seed that doesn't have a genetic trait that Monsanto or someone else has developed, then farmers can still replant it. So in some crops where those traits aren't used, they still can do that. But for sure, I think one thing that probably is worth mentioning is that one of the groups that I think

is probably most impacted by this would be the independent repair shops because in a lot of ways, you know, farmers may try and fix something themselves or they may go to a authorized dealer, but if these independent repair shops don't have the tools that they need to fix the equipment, they're probably going to be the ones that lose out the most from these sort of measures. So you're arguing then to allow independent repair shops to fix the stuff that they're not allowed to now? I think that would be the best for the farmers if repair shops had the rights to do the same sort of repairs that the dealers had. Wouldn't the farmers like that? They would definitely like it. What I see in my reporting, I focus a lot on iPhone. So there are a lot of independent iPhone repair

people who are operating in this very gray area. They're not able to get parts from Apple, so they have to get them from the gray market in China. And what we've seen is, you know, is the Department of Homeland Security actually seizing some of these shipments? You know, they're showing up at repair companies' houses, and they're confiscating this stuff, sending them scary letters. And it's just a very difficult situation to work in. And in many cases, these independent repair folks are better than the people the Apple employees because they actually do repairs, the Apple itself won't do.

And so they may be using inferior parts if they can't get the real stuff? Yeah, in some cases, for sure. I mean, any independent repair person worth their salt, you know, sources, very high-quality parts, but there are definitely people who are using knock-off parts, things that will break more easily, and in some cases, parts that don't work at all. To be continued, Todd Jansen, attorney and president of Jansen Agricultural Law based out of Indianapolis and Jason Kebler, editor-in-chief at Motherboard here in New York. Thank you for taking time to be with us today, both of you.

Thanks, Ira. You're welcome. When we come back, we're going to talk about some of our most common beliefs about how to recover from a workout or a long run, whether science backs up icing your muscles or doing the stretches or going for that protein bars? Is there any real science? Any evidence that this stuff works? We're going to have an author come on. Christy Ashwanda, author of Good to Go, has looked into this with this with some really surprising results. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. After a long winter cooped up indoors,

there is no better feeling for runners than lacing up and hitting the road to come spring. You know, it feels invigorating until hours later when they're back home and have legs feeling like jello, and then comes the burning sensation. Is that you? Do you then reach for some ibuprofen, known as vitamin I, to the running community? If you wash it out with a big glass of water to make sure you stay hydrated, you grab some ice from the freezer to beat back the inflammation you're starting to feel in. your knees and your hips. And later, you won't forget to do 30 minutes of stretching on that

foam roller, right? So you won't be sore tomorrow when you hit the road again. It's a recovery regime that's familiar to even a casual runner because it sounds so much like common sense. You fight pain, you hydrate, you stretch, ice your muscles. But according to science journalist Chrissy Ashwanden, following these seemingly logical steps for a faster recovery, achieves just the opposite. Icing your muscles slows down the recovery process. Too much water can be harmful. And stretching, you can put that in the same category as compression boots and cupping. They don't help recover one bit, according to my next guest. And here's our question to my listeners. Do you have a workout recovery method that you swear by? Give us a call. 844-724-8255.

844-sci-talk or tweet us at Sci-Fi. We'll run it by, Christy Ashwant, and who was a science writer and author of Good to Go on the Science of Recovery, and we have an excerpt at Science Friday.com slash recovery. Welcome to Science Friday. I've been so looking forward to talking to you. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's pleasure to be here. Did you have an epiphany moment at some point in your career that you said,

I'm going to take on all this common knowledge about recovery? You know, it's funny. I didn't have a moment where I was doing one of these ridiculous things, but I did have a moment where I realized that I had. haven't really managed to get recovery right. And recovery is something that has gotten more more attention, not just from athletes, but also by marketers in recent years. And I noticed that this stuff was just everywhere. And I was being, you know, bombarded with press releases about new products that were supposed to be helping recovery. And yeah, I'm a former elite athlete

myself. And when I look back on my athletic career, I can see that recovery was sort of the thing that I never managed to master. And so I really set out thinking that some of the stuff was going to helpful and wanting to kind of see what was good and what wasn't. I think probably the biggest myth that you tackle in the book is that icing is good for recovery because we see so many athletes doing that right after intensive athletic achievement. Why is icing the wrong thing? Yeah. So this is something that if you kind of think about the basic science here, and you know, I guess I would throw this back to you, Ira, and say, what are you expecting to get

out of icing? What are you thinking that you're doing when you're you're putting that bag of ice on your muscles. I'm doing what somebody told me to do. Right, right. Okay. But the thing that people are told, and the idea here is that you're stopping inflammation or that you're slowing inflammation. And the basic concept here is that inflammation is part of your body's healing process.

And so it's actually not something that you want to stop or slow. I mean, that's actually where you're going to get better. And if you want to get less sore, you have to let your body actually make those repairs and bring in, you know, this inflammatory response to make repairs that you've created through damaging exercise. I guess people icing, you mentioned this in your book, that the icing may make the pain go away, but it doesn't help the healing. Right. So icing is a very good sort of painkiller. So anyone who's ever done an ice bath or put ice on something, knows that initially it sort of hurts like hell. And then eventually you get numb, and then that feels good, and that could really take the pain away. And there are situations where that might still be appropriate.

I don't want to just throw everything out in one fell swoop. But if you are icing in hopes of becoming less sore or if you're in the middle of, say, a training session, we often see this particularly with professional athletes like NBA players or football players where they're in a training camp preseason and they're all getting into these big dumpsters full of ice water afterwards. And this is exactly the wrong thing. This is not what you want to be doing then because if you've been doing, doing some hard exercise in hopes of getting fitter, faster, stronger, you actually want that inflammation process to come in and do its magic.

That's the process by which you're going to get better, and your muscles will get stronger. So you don't want to slow down inflammation. But the other issue here is that icing really just slows down this process. So when you ice your extremities, your body sort of pulls all of the blood into your core, and so you're reducing the blood flow to those areas, but only temporarily. So once the ice goes away, you heat up again, the blood float continues. So it's really a temporary process to you. So the idea that this is going to have profound effects in a beneficial way is just sort of misguided.

And you said that you don't stretch anymore, that if your running partner wants you, you will do that. But otherwise, you don't bother. I thought stretching was like I thought icing, you know. Right, right. Well, I'll just tell you, in high school, I was the team captain of our track team. And before practice, every day, we had about a 15-minute ritual where we had a very ritualized all of these stretches that we would do. And we really thought that we were doing something good. Our coach told us that this was going to make us less sore.

There's also an idea that stretching might reduce the risk of injury. But it turns out that those ideas aren't supported by the science. And in fact, there have been some pretty good, very large-scale studies looking at stretching. Some of these were with people in the military where you have very large groups of people and they could really control what they were doing. And it turns out that stretching doesn't prevent injury and it doesn't reduce soreness either. Now, the one caveat I would put there is that if you are doing a stretch that, say, your physical therapist prescribed for you for an existing injury, then that may be a different situation. But just stretching in hopes of, you know, reducing soreness is you can forget that. Let me go to a tweet then.

I'll go to the phones because we have lots of calls. June tweets, drinking water is my recovery method. And boy, do you say that's a no-no. you don't need to drink water? Yeah, so I do not say that you don't need to drink water. But the point here, I have an entire chapter in the book about hydration, and the point is that we've really turned hydration into something far more complicated than it needs to be. So there's this advice that's given now that you need to drink early and often,

and that by the time you're thirsty, it's too late. And this is just nonsense. It's not, you know, our bodies are very well adapted to be able to deal with some fluid loss, particularly during exercise. it's okay to sweat. You don't have to replace every drop of sweat right away. It's perfectly fine to listen to your thirst signals. And in fact, that's the ideal way. That's what our bodies were meant to do. And what we've done now with this advice and this focus on hydration and people always worrying about making sure they're hydrated is that we actually have people who are dying now from taking in too much water during exercise and too much fluids. I mean, we have, while I was working on the book, I tried very, hard to find a documented case of someone who had died of dehydration during a marathon or some of their sporting event like that. And I didn't find a single case.

What I did find was at least five people who have died from hyponetremia, which is basically overhydration, that they acquired during a marathon. Wow. Talking with Christy Ashwanda, an author of the new book Good to Go, what the athlete and all of us can learn from the strange science of recovery, which is out now. And let's recover and go to Berkeley. Audrey, welcome to Science Friday. Hello, thanks for taking my question.

So I was wondering if there's a consensus about whether, like, soaking with Epsom salts is helpful for recovering and for, like, relieving soreness. Yeah, that's a great question. I didn't find any good evidence that Epson salts themselves were helpful for reducing soreness. But what I will tell you is that I did some trials of floating. which is a somewhat similar thing where you're floating in this tank of salt water. It's a very relaxing process. But you can also do this with the Upsons at home, a nice salt bath. And this is very relaxing.

And one of the epiphanies that I had while researching this book is that so many of the things that are being marketed for recovery actually do work. But they work because they help you relax and they help you sort of kick back and let all of your other cares go away. and you're taking some time to really take care of yourself. And I think that Eps and Salt Baths are an example of this. There's probably nothing particularly magic about the salts themselves, except that it's just a very pleasant experience. And so much of what we really need when we're trying to enhance recovery is just a way to help ourselves relax.

I mean, we're at a moment now in our culture where this is very difficult to do. And so I would just advise people that if there's something that you're doing that's helping you relax, then it doesn't matter if you have some, fancy scientific explanation for it, you know, just the fact that it's helping you feel better and relax and, you know, let go of some of your stress, that's enough. Right. We have a tweet coming in that says, what about eating 20 grams of protein after a workout to rebuild muscle? Yeah, that's another really good question. So protein is an interesting thing. It used to be that people thought that this was just for meatheads and, you know,

if you're a weightlifter maybe, now there's recognition that protein is important for all athletes. But we used to have this idea that it was really crucial that you get this protein in right away after you exercise. There's the notion that there was an exercise recovery window and that, you know, sometimes it was said to be 20 minutes. It might be as long as 45. But the idea was that you just had to get this right away. And subsequent studies, and, you know, as researchers have continued to look at this issue, what they found is that it's the protein itself, which is important for athletes, that was sort of producing the benefit and the timing wasn't the thing that was the most important.

And so 20 grams is a number that's often thrown around is something that athletes should get. And I think that that's a pretty good guideline. But I think the thing to keep in mind here is that this protein can be taken in throughout the day. It doesn't need to be taken in one big shake right after the workout. And so, yes, protein's important,

but you can stop stressing so much about getting it right away or getting it in one giant serving. You can just continue to eat protein throughout the day. that seems to even be better than just taking it all in at once. Let's go to Orlando and Nikita. Hi, Nikita. Welcome. Hi.

Go ahead. Well, I was just going to call in say, I'm an ex-surge Sully performer. I've been performing since I was 8 years old, and I'm 23 years old now. And I just wanted to respond to what she was saying about stretching and how it's basically saying that it's false claim to stretch. I disagree with that immensely. for us, we spend multiple hours a day stretching and warming up every morning and every night after and before the performances. And that's one of the main reasons why we're not getting any injuries.

So I was just saying that stretching doesn't do anything is just not true. I've seen it firsthand. Okay. Thanks for the call. Any reaction? Yeah. I mean, I would just say that if you're someone who's stretching and you feel like it works for you, it's not something that seems to be very hard. harmful, go ahead and keep doing it. You know, when they've done studies looking at it and comparing people who stretched to people who didn't, they didn't find differences.

But again, this goes back to the idea that if you have a ritual or something that you're doing that feels helpful to you, you know, that may be worth doing for its own sake. Dmitri tweets, what about percussive massage tools? Ah, I think these are those. There's tools now that look like things that you got out of your wood shop or or garage, these power tools that sort of mush and beat at your muscles. And I can tell you that these can feel pretty good. I have a section in the book about massage, and it's interesting. There are a lot of claims that are made about massage, one of them being it's flushing lactic acid out of the

muscles. And I'll just say that, you know, when you start to see claims about lactic acid, you know that you're sort of getting into red flag territory here. Because lactic acid, we used to think it was something that made you sore. Now we know it doesn't make you sore. And in fact, your muscles clear it quite quickly, so you don't need to worry about flushing that. But what I did find with massage is that it's something that helps people feel better. And this qualitative sense of wellness is really important, and it really matters. And I think this is a really good example of this idea that if we can get something that we can measure, and that's very tangible and measurable, some sort of data point,

that that somehow is more important or more real than a feeling of well-being. but when people have looked at recovery, one of the best tools for sort of measuring it or predicting it is actually something like mood. And that's something that sort of you can't measure on a sports watch, right? Right. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We have just a few minutes left, and a lot of people are calling. And let me go to the opposite direction to Jenny in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Hi, welcome. Hi.

Hi there. Go ahead. So I have a question about using heat on your muscles instead of cold for recovering from a run. I've noticed that my lower back hurts a lot after I run, and if I use a heat pad on low setting, it seems to relax my muscles. Is there anything wrong with that? No, I don't think so. And in fact, I think heat is a really nice way of relaxing. Heat actually increases blood flow, and that can be a good thing.

think about sort of the reasons why icing isn't helpful. You can imagine that heating would be helpful because instead of slowing blood flow, it's actually increasing it. So it's sort of opening up the blood vessels and allowing more to flow through. There's an idea that that can help speed the removal of metabolic things that are left after you're exercising. So I say if heat makes you feel good, go ahead and do it. It's probably a pretty good thing to do, and it's certainly very relaxing. And one final question, I think I'm running out of time, but it's an interesting one. And you begin your book about, and it's a tweet from Tannis who says, what about having a

beer? Yeah. A beer after a long day or working out. Does that help? Yeah. So the very first chapter of the book is actually about this very question. It's about beer and running, and it describes the study that I did to try and answer this age-old question.

Is beer the perfect recovery drink? And I think you'll have to read the chapter to get the gist of the full story. But I guess the takeaway is that beer isn't the worst thing that you could do. You shouldn't have more than one, but it's probably not going to wreck your recovery if it's refreshing and it helps you sort of enjoy yourself afterwards. It's probably not too bad. But like I said, you will get much more from the book itself. It goes into a lot of detail about the science of this. And you also talk about how you can over, you can overdo it so much that you can't recover.

There are some people just don't recover. Yeah, that's right. I have a chapter about something called overtraining syndrome, and this is pretty common in elite athletes, although it's not uncommon among sort of, you know, hardcore weekend warriors, too. And this is something where people are exercising so hard and not giving themselves enough time to recover that their bodies just sort of at some point give out and say no more. And what happens is you stop adapting to that exercise and you're just under the stress. And people's performance goes way down.

They stop responding to exercise. They don't feel like exercise. A lot of the symptoms are very similar to depression, in fact, and that's sort of a related thing. So it's really interesting. And this is why it is really important to pay attention to recovery. There's an idea now that it's not so much that you're overtraining. It's that you're under-recovering. And so if you really want to get through those hard sessions of training, you need to sort of give yourself equal recovery time.

Interesting read. You know, if you want to read more about what Christie has written, the name of the book is Good to Go. It talks about the science of recovery. Christy Ashwanda, science writer and author. Welcome. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me. We're going to take a break and come back, Washington governor and presidential candidate.

Jay Inslee is here to talk about staking his bid for the White House. around one big issue, and that is climate change. We'll be right back after this break. He joins us. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. It's been said that nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.

And for my next guest, Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, that idea is climate change, and that idea's time has come. He staked his run for the White House in 2020 on what he calls America's climate mission, And his campaign platform says that, quote, defeating climate change is the defining challenge of our time and that it must be the foremost priority for the next president. That's a bold statement considering that climate change was practically a non-issue in the last presidential election. There were no specific questions about climate policy in the debates. And according to the environmental news site, Grist, only five minutes and 27 seconds were spent talking about climate change across all three. presidential debates. That's 2% of the total talking time. So has the tide turned? Is the American

public ready for a candidate who embraces this issue? That's what we're going to be talking about on our question to you listeners. How important is climate change compared to other national issues when it comes to winning your vote in the next presidential election? On number 844-724-8255-844 Sight Talk, you can tweet us at SIEFRI. Governor Jay Inslee is governor. Washington State. He's jumped into the pool of Democratic presidential candidates for 2020. Welcome to Science Friday, Governor. You bet. It's the best day of the week. Thanks to you. Thank you. Everybody's happy on Friday because of you.

Well, compliments will get you everywhere. You've been called a single-issue candidate. Would you disagree with that name? Yes, because climate change is not a single issue. It's all issues. It's a matter of of saving our economic assets where we've had $1.6 billion in loss because of flooding the Midwest, on the downside, on the upside. It's the number one potential job creator in the United States in the next several decades. Clean energy jobs today are going twice as fast as the rest of the economy. The number one job fastest growing job today is solar installer, and number two is wind turbine technician.

So it is as much an economic promise as it is in a very much. environmental peril. It's a health issue. Look, it's with asthma that our kids are suffering from from fossil fuel pollution, increasing the range of infectious diseases because of insect vectors, loss of life during hurricanes and heat waves. It's a national security issue. We know that Trump is trying to ignore the clear warnings from the Pentagon and our intelligence services, that this is a national security threat because we know that increasing droughts have the potential to drive mass migrations with consequent political instability and violence. So it's not just a single issue. It is all of the issues, and it is the one that we have no more opportunities. This is our last chance.

And what I've learned, when you're a governor, as I've been for six years in the most successful economy in the United States, you need to make priority decisions. It's one of the first functions of leadership. And what I am saying is defeating climate change has to be the first, foremost, and paramount duty of the next administration, because it is our last chance. If you look at the clear science from the IPCC report, it is becoming quite obvious that we've got to move right now. So much of the impacts of climate change that you were ticking off there also seem to be included in the Green New Deal.

that is working its way, debating through Congress. Would you, if you were still serving in Congress, would you have your name among its co-sponsors? Look, I think this has been a welcome development. I wrote a book or co-authored a book in 2007 that basically set out a vision for economic growth around clean energy. And so I really welcome what this has done to light up interest in this. As you indicated, it's really important to get climate change on people's radar scope.

This has been very successful getting into the national conversation. It's also been very successful raising the scope of people's ambition. This cannot be just a check-of-the-box kind of issue. It has to be a dominant organizing principle of the United States. And third, it's engaged more communities in this discussion, marginalized communities, frontline communities. It's communities of color and poverty that are the first victims of climate change. And so it's made clear something I believe,

that as we go through this transition to a decarbonized economy and a clean energy economy, we have to make this not just a transition. It has to be a just transition so everyone can participate. So now we start the heavy work and hard work of developing the policies that hopefully will follow what we've done in Washington. Right now, we're leading the efforts in Washington State, and I hope we keep that ball rolling. So how do you answer people who, say, addressing climate change is too,

expensive or they want to take your hamburgers away from you? Well, I just say baloney. You know, I was having a discussion on Megan McCain on the View a couple weeks ago, and she was saying exactly that, that, you know, Democrats will take away your planes and your railroads and your car. And I said, well, that's interesting, Megan, because as of this moment, I had a shiny blue General Motors All-Electric Bolt. It was made by the American workers in Orion, Michigan.

And that's the type of destiny that we have if we will have a president to ignite the imaginations and the innate, can-do, optimistic spirit of the American people to grow our economy around clean energy. We know we are capable of doing this because we've done it so many times before. Whenever there has been a technological transformation, the United States has been able to lead if we have leadership to get us going. And if I'm giving this high honor, I would intend to provide. that spark of leadership just like John F. Kennedy did when I was, you know, 10 or 11 years of age saying we're on the moon. And I believe with the spark of creativity and ambition, America can do that kind of thing again. But do you think that, you know, I remember the

Kennedy years. I remember the challenge to go to the moon. I remember Lyndon Johnson taking it over. I remember landing on the moon during the Nixon administration. This was a generational and a decade-long effort. Do we have that kind of political muscle now to see something through that we could change a whole society? Yes, not only do we, but we have to have that. You know, I think victory is the only option here. I mean, how can you be so assured of victory?

And you said it's really simple. It's the only option because without victory, there's no survival. And that is a situation that we have to realize today if we follow science. And we are a scientifically literate nation. We deserve a scientifically literate president, and we have a scientifically illiterate person in that office right now, who a couple days ago said that wind turbines cause cancer for goodness sakes,

and that if we have wind turbines, you won't be able to run your television. Here we are growing the U.S. economy, and in my state, we've developed the best economy in the United States, and in part because we've focused on clean energy, we have focused on science. And when you do those two things, good things happen, not only to your health to prevent your force from burning down. And by the way, this is very personal to me because I've met the victims of climate change. I was in Paradise, California a few months ago. And, you know, this is a town of 25,000 people that was burned to the ground and looked like a post-apocalypse movie in Hollywood. I remember meeting a woman named Marcia Moss in Seminole,

Springs, a community of about 100 mobile homes that it burned. She lost everything. She wanted us to do something about climate change to produce these forest fires. And I think we need a president that will do just that. So yes, I do believe the country's ready. And I believe that in part because of the polling in Iowa, it's the number one priority of Iowa Democratic voters. So I'm happy to be just in time at the right moment. Yet a carbon pricing ballot initiative failed in your own state in the last election for the second time. Another pricing initiative failed in 2016. What do these failures mean to you? Are people still not getting it? I think what they show is that we have to be willing to use the most powerful renewable

fuel in the country, and that's perseverance. And we have to use perseverance, and we have to use multiple tools in the toolbox. A carbon pricing system is one of them, but fortunately there are dozens of others. And so we are now addressing, and I'm promoting five bills in my legislature, all of which are moving forward, one of which would guarantee Washingtonians a 100% clean electrical grid, another that would provide us with a clean fuel standard, so we have cleaner transportation fuels, another that would require net zero commercial buildings so we don't waste energy, another that will have an incentive program, so more people, not just wealthier people, but more people have access to electric cars and the like.

So we know there's multiple ways to go forward on this, and we're doing this in my state, and I think we have to have the same attitude in our nation. We can do that if we have a president who's both knowledge about these things, and has had a multi-decadeal commitment, as I have had. I've been at this for over 20 years now and introduced some of the first legislation in 2003. I started the U.S. Climate Alliance with Governor Jerry Brown. We now have 23 states that are moving forward.

I think this is a good sign, by the way. For those who question our ability to move forward, this organization that I helped start now has 23 states that are committed to defeating climate change. And we did this in part because we wanted the world to know there's still intelligent lives in the United States. And we've demonstrated that. It's one of the reasons that the rest of the world is continuing to move forward.

So there is reason for optimism because we know there's many ways to build a clean energy economy, and we're doing that right here in my state. Let's go to the phones, 8447-8255. Let's go to Ames, Iowa. Joe, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you. You know, I think this really points out a real flaw we have in our election system. Every four years, I see all of these politicians come to Iowa, and they speak at these forums put on by our agriculture powerhouses.

And all of them speak in favor of everything that has to do with animal agriculture and ethanol. All of these things that really cause global warming, and all of them are scared to death to speak out against anything to do with animal agriculture, because they know that the Farm Bureau and these other powerful ag interests will sink them. And that even goes, I mean, it's completely true for the Republican Party, but it's even true for the Democratic Party. They're scared to death to speak out against the interests that are huge contributors to global warming, including... So what are you suggesting? Well, I'm suggesting, first of all, we've got to rotate who votes first. We've got to rotate Iowa out of first place.

That's critical, because we're warping the values of the... of the politicians, you know, that the politicians speak to. And second of all, we have to be willing to say openly that animal agriculture is causing a huge amount of the global warming in our country. Let me get an answer. Amira Flater, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Joe calling from Ames, Iowa, which is one of the windiest electric-producing states in the country? Jay, how do you answer that? Well, first off, Iowa is a perfect example.

of what we can do in clean energy. We've got hundreds of wind turbines that are going up like crazy. When I was driving up down the freeway from Ames the other day and going past Story County, there was trucks every half mile with new blades going up. So wind turbines are going fast as fast as cornstalks in Iowa. That's a good sign. Second, as far as the egg community, many of us think that there's a way to bring the egg community into being a positive factor in this by finding a way to sequester carbon. soil. It can be a very good vector, if you will, for getting carbon out of the atmosphere into the top soil. At the same time, we're doing things that reduce erosion with no and low-till technology.

So there's a way to bring ag in a very positive way. And by the way, one of the jewels things he indicated is that he's concerned about, you know, implicitly dollars in politics and, you know, big dollars dominating. Look, I agree with him. we need more individual voices speaking out. One way people can do that today, actually, is, you know, you can go to jensley.com. I need to get 65,000 donors by the time Iowa rolls around this June, and anyone who wants to make sure that climate change is on the debate stage, you can go to jensley.m.com, and if you send in a dollar, that'll help with my 65,000 climate friends.

We need to make sure that climate change is on the national agenda. And my candidacy is very important in making sure that that happens. So I was at Ains at Iowa State about a month ago. I will tell you that it was a center of climate change activity where I met climate reality. Young people who, this is absolutely top on young people's agenda, and so I look forward to getting back there. It is interesting.

Do you think that we have seen a paradigm shift from two years ago when no one would talk about it to now being spoken where you cannot not talk about it? Well, I think it's been a paradigm shift everywhere in America, except on Pennsylvania Avenue with Donald Trump, who continues to, according to Chuck Grassley, this is quoting a Republican Center. In his comments about wind turbines calling cancer, he just said it's just idiotic. But the rest of the country is moving. The polling indicates this in Iowa and across the country. My candidacy shows that people, for the first time in American history, we have a person running on this.

This has never happened before in American history. And so, yes, this is changing. I know something that actually was interesting to me. I testified in front of Congress. I was the only governor willing to do that last week in front of the Commerce Committee. And the Republicans in their criticisms of me have changed dramatically. They no longer were willing to say climate change is not happening and publicly denying climate change.

And the reason is they realize that. that just makes them look totally foolish. In a sense, that's a good thing. Even they have understood that that is no longer acceptable, given the avalanche of scientific information. And more importantly, what people are now seeing with their own eyes, look, when you see a town burn like Paradise Burned Down, when you see the floods in Nebraska,

when you see Seattle where sometimes our kids couldn't go out to swim because of the air quality because of our forest fires, people are now seen with their own eyes. But here's the bad news. the Republican parties may no longer totally be the climate, the party of climate denial, but there's still the party of climate do nothingism, and that's equally fatal. You know, we need to take action here. And right now, unfortunately, there is only one candidate running for president in the United States

who says categorically this has to be the number one priority of the United States. And the reason I firmly believe this is, if it is not job one, it won't get to. done. And I think it's great that other candidates are putting it on their list of things to do on their refrigerator. But this has to be the organizing principle of the next president, and we have a candidate, and that's myself, who believes that. And I think it's good time. Thank you for taking time to be with us and allowing us to pick your brain on this. Governor Jay Insleega is governor of the state of Washington running to be the Democratic nominee for president. Thanks again.

Thank you. Go get them. Have good weekend. Have a good weekend. That's about all the time. We have BJ Leederman compose our theme music. If you missed any part of the program, you can subscribe to our podcast, or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday whenever you want, and you can catch up with us. And also, we're on Facebook and Twitter. All kinds of goodies on our website are educational stuff that we have on our website all there also for you. So there's plenty of stuff to choose from. Have a great weekend. I'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.