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Michael Grunwald
Go to Wix.com hey everybody.
- [01:01]
Jonathan Cohn
Welcome to the Bulwark. This is Jonathan Cohn. Here, very special guest today, New York Times bestselling award winning author, Michael Grunewald. 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.
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Michael Grunwald
This is such a pleasure. It's great to see you, John.
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Jonathan Cohn
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 will 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 nationals. 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 dug one up. This is it right here.
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Michael Grunwald
My God.
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Jonathan Cohn
Yeah. Dining out. And I'm pretty sure it's the one that I was with you for, because when you reviews, these were, to be clear, these were not like high, you know, five star, Michelin kind of restaurants. These are like mom and dad.
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Michael Grunwald
No, it's in the suburbs.
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Jonathan Cohn
Right, right, right. And this one was from Randolph, right. Which is South Boston, am I right?
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Michael Grunwald
That's right, south of Boston.
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Jonathan Cohn
Yeah. It was an Italian restaurant in South Boston. And you would refer to your dining. So you refer to this one, to your dining companion named John. Now, you know, a couple Johns in your life. But I kind of think this one was me. Because among the things you describe, the guest is really struggling with deciding what to order, which would be very on brand for me.
- [03:29]
Michael Grunwald
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?
- [03:49]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that was a good. A good call. A good call. Anyway, I was thinking about that. I do remember, I have very fond 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.
- [04:04]
Michael Grunwald
Three or four different.
- [04:05]
Jonathan Cohn
And I remember ordering all this extra food because that's how you had to find out and be able to judge the restaurant. And I was thinking about that when I was reading your book, because your book is all about the way we eat and how that is affecting the world and what we don't always think about when we eat and what an impact it's having. And actually, a big part of your book or part of your book is the food we waste. But before we get into the waste, before we get into all that, for people who are kind of coming to this new. They're like, food. Why do I care about food? I'm a politics person. I'm a bulwark listener. Why does this all matter to me? You know, give us a little bit. There's a little Micronwald on this.
- [04:42]
Michael Grunwald
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, yes. The book is we are Eating the Earth and the. 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's. 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, 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. That's sort of why I wrote the book. I figured if I was this spectacularly ignorant about really our diets being the biggest source of our environmental problems, that probably a lot of other people were, too.
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Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, well, I certainly was. I mean, I'm not a climate expert like you are, but I spent some time following it, and I had no idea. I really had no idea. Use analogies somewhere, I think about the. 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? I mean, of what we're, you know.
- [06:52]
Michael Grunwald
No, I mean, you know, if you want to talk about what uses water, it's cows and agriculture. I mean, it's. Yeah, it's. 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. We want to basically transform the global economy to an electric economy, and then we want to run it on clean electricity. 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 power plant anywhere in the world, you're probably building a wind or solar plan. There'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 truly incredible. While with food and climate, like, you know, we don't even know what we need to know. And, and we are not making progress. The problem's getting worse. So. So, you know, that really struck me as this kind of vacuum where, you know, there are a thousand, thousand books about how our fossil fuels are destroying the planet. But I feel like, you know, this kind of carbohydra problem is actually more interesting than our hydrocarbon problem, and we do sort of need to start grappling with it.
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Jonathan Cohn
So you said earlier that we have a, an ag. It's not a food product, it's an agriculture problem. And then. But how much of it is, and you mentioned this too. How much of it is a, is a cow problem? I mean, how much of this is about beef?
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Michael Grunwald
Well, you know, the world needs 350 million tons of meat every year. And it's, and it's increasing every year. We're on track to eat another 70% more by 2050. 50. And yeah, 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. I've cut beef and lamb out of my diet because they really are the worst. 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, but cows are like 10 times worse in terms of land use and in terms of emissions.
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Jonathan Cohn
Is that just because they're bigger or. I mean, why is that, by the way? I knew. What's the problem?
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Michael Grunwald
It's mostly because they just, they just use their spectacularly inefficient converters of their food into our food. 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, 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 that we're comfortable with, but just cutting out beef is, for most people, it's about as good as going vegetarian because most vegetarians end up eating 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. Which makes beef so much less efficient. But again, you're absolutely right. And certainly this is why 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, it would be great if 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 being good people who care about the planet, which is, I think, unlikely, or 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. If it was only 4 times as bad as chicken instead of 10 times, that would be a huge emissions reduction. So it's a little bit like Willie Sultan, 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.
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Jonathan Cohn
Let's stick with that. So how do you make beef better?
- [11:39]
Michael Grunwald
Well, and this is where people start to get pissed at me, right?
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Jonathan Cohn
Because it doesn't take this long in a conversation with you to get people pissed at me.
- [11:47]
Michael Grunwald
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, but the how matters. But not in the way that a lot of the sort of people who have read a lot of Michael Pollan, who's a great writer but is, you know, I think his sort of given people some wrong ideas about people who.
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Jonathan Cohn
Don'T know Michael Pollan is. Tell people who Michael Pollan is.
- [12:15]
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, he wrote the Omnivores Dilemma. He's a beautiful writer who essentially is sort of calling for kind of old fashioned farms like Old MacDonald's where 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 in 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 I'll say what you will about modern industrial farming, which treats animals badly and treats people badly and their politics often suck. Their basically promoting, you know, terrible politicians who want to roll back environmental regulations and, and you know, 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 to deforest another dozen California's worth of land by 2050 and 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 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 it's, they just need a lot more land. You know, 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 gentler 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, you're tearing down the Amazon and right now it's most beef that's tearing down the Amazon.
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Jonathan Cohn
Where 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, you know, alternative beef? I mean I, 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, what's the deal? There are. How good is it? How good can it get? What are the, what are the holdups?
- [15:08]
Michael Grunwald
Well, I think there are all kinds of technologies that are really exciting, you know, on the farming side. You know, I've, you know, I, there are these bio pesticides that use the MRNA technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate potato beetles to death and these alternative fertilizers where they gene edit microbes to essentially snatch nitrogen out of the air and feed it to crops. I saw these scientists at the University of Illinois who are literally trying to reinvent photosynthesis, which has been supporting life on earth for a few billion years.
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Jonathan Cohn
I was going to say, yeah, that's been around for a while.
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Michael Grunwald
Long term 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. Food on the alternative proteins again. I think this is a really exciting example of how technology can help because remember, our species were not awesome at 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 fake meat is not. So I think, you know, I, I started my reporting in 2019 right after the Beyond Meat went public and, and it was the biggest popping IPO of the 21st century. People were going nuts. It was worth one third as much as Tyson. You know, it was just. 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 serious conversations about whether it was going to take 10 or 20 years to get rid of meat. My joke was that I thought I was going to accidentally raise a series a round on the drinks line. It was just absolute hysteria. And then now, four years 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 cells hasn't really even made it to market. And people are saying this was a fad. What are. 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 almost as cheap and is actually even a little healthier. But the fact is, 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 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 2 million years ago. We sort of evolved to love it, and I think it's 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, Tesla didn't sell a lot of cars because they said, 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, 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 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. 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 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 going to be a big part of the future.
- [20:07]
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- [20:36]
Jonathan Cohn
So let's talk about the politics for a second and maybe now we can get you to piss off the right a little bit. You know, imagine, you know, I'm trying to imagine Kamala 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 amongst them, but I mean, yeah, terrific. But I mean, you know, you got a lot of entrenched interests. You, 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, 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 Grunwald? And do you have any thoughts on, like, how to make. Because, I mean, 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, you know. Any advice?
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Michael Grunwald
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 holster 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. He, 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. And 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, it's like, it's Biden burgers, right? I mean, it's, you know, we're seeing this, this play out again and that makes it really tough because I mean, ultimately the, ideally you'd like to see, particularly in the rich world, we're going to have to reduce our meat, our 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, it's difficult. The, the politics of ag always suck all around the world. I mean, the, the ag industry is.
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Jonathan Cohn
Not just an American thing.
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Michael Grunwald
Yeah. I mean, globally there are about $600 billion worth of annual subsidies for agriculture and 300 billion of that is just sort of direct handouts. And then, and then on the left and actually now, and you're starting to see it on the right too with, you know, with Robert Kennedy Jr. And Joe Rogan, there's this push instead for like, you know, the kind of kinder and gentler Michael Pollan farming. We should be subsidizing that instead, which of course will eat even more of the 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 method 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 we're going to promote plant based eating. We're going to tax agricultural emissions, including from their dairy industry, the burps and farts. 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, 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 and that, and that that can be an example for the rest of the world of how we, 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, decarbonized, 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, our pigs and cows are actually really efficient. 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 turning it back to forests and wetlands. You keep farming, but just try to do it with less of a mess.
- [26:48]
Jonathan Cohn
I was thinking as you were talking about how this had all gotten politicized in the analogy to the electric cars and everything I, I talk a lot about. You may remember when Biden was president, there was that visit he made here in Michigan to the Ford Dearborn proving grounds. And he drove the F150 electric and the thing. But the, the.
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Michael Grunwald
So much fun.
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Jonathan Cohn
Oh my God. Yeah. Are you an EV driver? I can't remember.
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Michael Grunwald
Are you An EV driver. I am.
- [27:10]
Jonathan Cohn
You are. Right, right.
- [27:12]
Michael Grunwald
And, and my wife, we have two electric cars and we have solar panels. We still fly too much. So, you know, we don't, we're not, not trying, not trying to scold anybody or shame anyone, but. Yeah, yes.
- [27:21]
Jonathan Cohn
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 thing, you know, lower maintenance costs over the cost of your lifetime. And I've always thought, not that I wanted Trump to win in 2020, but, you know, if he had been president, he was the one who had visited the Ford, you know, like, you can see a world where like, whoa, cool American truck. This is American know how, you know, and it kind of became sort of more branded. At the very least, it didn't become unbranded because he would sort of 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 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.
- [28:16]
Michael Grunwald
Well, you'd think so, 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 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 give a lot of money to Florida Republicans. But so, yeah, I do talk about the politics of this stuff in the book and I tell some kind of dismal stories. I write one classic example that I write about. My main character discovered this whole eating the earth problem through biofuels, which are the idea of you grow corn and instead of feeding it to a cow or putting it into A Twinkie or into Coca Col, or a tortilla. You turn it into ethanol and you put it in your car, which is great, except 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 there's that famous West Wing episode where what's his name, the, the Jimmy Smits character, when he's running for president, he's talking about how stupid ethanol is and his, and his a, you know, and, and Josh, season seven, the.
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Jonathan Cohn
Episode named King Corn, I don't believe.
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Michael Grunwald
There you go. Yeah. And Josh tells him, like, you know, if you, if you come out against ethanol, you won't get a single vote in. Single vote in Iowa, in the Iowa caucus. I tell a story about how my main character is trying to lobby, of all people, Jon Corzine's office, 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 the, 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 aide 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, head of Goldman Sachs. Does he honestly think he's going to be President of 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 this all very difficult.
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Jonathan Cohn
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. I should tell you 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 that'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 following 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 flush from the. When it rains right now, it floods in Miami Beach.
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Michael Grunwald
Sometimes when it doesn't rain. Sometimes when it doesn't rain. Just from the tide. Just from the tide. Yeah, yeah.
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Jonathan Cohn
I mean that, 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, and at least I believe that.
- [32:04]
Michael Grunwald
I believe they are now just this. Just sort of like holding grounds for, for prisons, for. I think that's.
- [32:11]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I suppose.
- [32:13]
Michael Grunwald
Well, that's. There may be an ecosystem there as well. I don't, I don't remember.
- [32:17]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, I did hear something about alligators, right?
- [32:19]
Michael Grunwald
Yeah, yeah.
- [32:20]
Jonathan Cohn
Or croc. 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, and yeah, the good old days when, when, when I was growing up in Florida, 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. Big, 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. Very fond. But you know, it was not, 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, you cared about the environment. What the hell happened?
- [33:14]
Michael Grunwald
Well, I mean, you know, first of all, yes. I mean, you know, the, the first scene of the swamp is, is this kind of. I mean, it's just unbelievable, right? It's, it's, 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 Everg. And that was like, not that Jeb Bush and Bill Clinton ever loved hanging out together, 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. So you had, 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. His idiot big brother who was 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 the only Republican who lost that year. And the first thing he did after he lost was join the board of the Audubon Society. And then he won in a landslide in 1998. But by that and his big brother was already the chosen one. And yes, and today the Everglades is just a place to put undocumented immigrants and make jokes about alligator Alcatraz. I think the short answer is that the environment, the climate has all just become part of the culture war. Are you for it or you're against it? And caring about the climate is just a sign that you're a woke Democratic liberal. And if you're a Republican, there's no incentive to care about this stuff. Sometimes Ron DeSantis will do a little bit of lip service, but it's a bummer. And on climate issues, it's funny because you can tell, I mean, and this is not the first time in my career where a lot of my environmental work and climate work is not the stuff that climate activists and the environmental movement, they don't always love what I have to say. I'm challenging them on a lot of what they think is, 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, and, and I think a lot of people who like me, a lot of people whose instinct is 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 the 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, 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 my people, the people who would be interested In a book I write, they already know that it's bad. I'm not really pointing out anything new. And probably a lot of bulwark listeners are in the same kind of, you know, and not only, 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 apocalyptic rhetoric. But that said, like, the Democrats aren't the problem. And, you know, if, you know, people say, like, what are the three things you should do if, 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 you, 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. 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, however dumb that is. It's not the people who are, it's not the fault of the people who are screaming at Joe Manchin when they should have been kissing his feet and saying, thank God we have another Democratic vote for the inflation Reduction Act. And even on my subtle stuff where I say 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 smart. But Trump came along and said, we don't want climate smart agriculture. And that's worse. So, you know, it's, it's, 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.
- [38:55]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, he's very, very bad. Well, I want to wrap up, but, you know, I feel like especially with climate God so much today you get into these discussions and you end up pretty desperate respondent. Things are pretty bad. They suck. But there are, there's hope in the world. Tell me what's, Tell me something hopeful that you, you sort of think about. I mean, what's. 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.
- [39:22]
Michael Grunwald
Well, the main thing like, 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 I wrote that first book is really when I started doing environmental reporting. And at the time, like the Swamp, which I hope you guys like. Guys, yeah, please buy it. But I did a terrible job of dealing with the climate. You know, the Everglades is a, 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, 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, it's an entirely different world. So that's my, 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 see 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 I think as a human, what was like the Winston Paul Churchill line about how Americans always do the right thing after we've exhausted all the other alternatives. And I think on climate, we'll muddle through. 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 grapple with these issues. And that's why I wrote the book. That's why I'm waving my hands in the air is 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, we've, 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, play 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, and that is, that does start to generate hope. Right. When you, you know, when you're reducing your own carbon footprint, you know, you know, you're supporting politicians who want to reduce the country's carbon footprint. And ultimately, you know, that's, 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.
- [42:44]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah. Yeah.
- [42:45]
Michael Grunwald
Well, I think that optimistic was pretty.
- [42:48]
Jonathan Cohn
Optimistic enough for now. By, by today's standards, wildly optimistic.
- [42:53]
Michael Grunwald
Well, 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.
- [43:09]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to say it reminds me of my, 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.
- [43:19]
Michael Grunwald
And don't do stupid shit. Don't do stupid shit 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.
- [43:36]
Jonathan Cohn
Yeah, 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, our individual actions. So everyone maybe eat a little less beef and check out Mike's book, We Are Eating the Earth. Mike. Mike, thanks so much for coming and visiting us today.
- [43:53]
Michael Grunwald
It's such a pleasure, John. Thanks for having me.
- [43:59]
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