← On the Media
On the Media
Great Expectations
00:50:18
The political war over our appliances; a dearth of 'Aha!' moments in modern science.
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- [00:01]
Paris Marks
You're not taking our gas stoves away from us.
- [00:05]
Brooke Gladstone
Coming up on this week's on the Media fights over the future of fossil fuel powered durable goods. Generates a whole lot of hot air all the way to the state House. Get this, Wyoming is proposing a bill.
- [00:19]
Rebecca Lieber
To ban new sales of electric vehicles.
- [00:22]
Brooke Gladstone
EVs may be making the news, but they're far from a new idea.
- [00:26]
Paris Marks
There have been a few other moments through the 20th century where it looked like electric vehicles were going to take off. You know, in the 1970s in particular. And the oil shock then.
- [00:36]
Brooke Gladstone
Plus disruptive leaps in science have given way to small incremental steps.
- [00:42]
Rebecca Lieber
Why the Media Are Complicit We've conditioned the public to see science as an accumulation of facts and discoveries. But real science? It's mostly ideas and concepts.
- [00:54]
Brooke Gladstone
It's all coming up after this.
- [01:00]
Paris Marks
On the Media. Supported by Progressive Insurance, you chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice. Make another smart choice with Auto Quote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. You set the gold standard for your business. Your website should do the same. WIX puts you at the helm so you can enjoy the creative freedom of designing your site just the way you want. Want someone to bounce your ideas off? Talk with AI to create a beautiful site together. Whatever your business, manage it from one place and tie it all together with a personalized domain name. Gear up for success with the brand that says you best. You can do it yourself on wix. I'm Ben Smith. I'm Max Tawny and we host Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media. The future of media feels like a moving target, so every Friday we pull back the curtain on the platforms, ideas and people that are shaping the new media landscape. We'll tell you what really matters and try to figure out what's coming next. Plus, we go behind the scenes with the most important players in media right now. Whether you are yourself a media insider or or just simply curious about who or what will be all over your feed next, Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media is the perfect addition to your media diet. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:30]
Brooke Gladstone
From WNYC in New York, this is ON THE media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Now, when you think of electric cars, you might think of the long touted benefits to the environment and likely Tesla, whose famous CEO continued to make headlines this week for not Twitter.
- [02:48]
Paris Marks
Opening arguments kicked off today in the securities fraud trial of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
- [02:53]
Brooke Gladstone
Well, actually for Twitter, it's over tweets.
- [02:56]
Paris Marks
From 2018 where Musk claimed he secured funding to take Tesla private. The class action lawsuit alleges that Musk's Twitter activity caused stock prices to rollercoaster. Investors claim they lost billions when that deal just never happened.
- [03:10]
Brooke Gladstone
But in the last few weeks, electric vehicles have been making headlines for other reasons. In Wyoming. Wyoming is proposing a bill to ban.
- [03:19]
Rebecca Lieber
New sales of electric vehicles by 2035.
- [03:23]
Brooke Gladstone
That was last Friday. It didn't pass. And in Virginia, Virginia has stopped carmaker.
- [03:28]
Paris Marks
Ford Motor Company's plan to install a battery factory in its state over concerns of Chinese interference.
- [03:35]
Brooke Gladstone
Yep, over the last week, if you live in a Republican led state, it might seem like everywhere you turn there was EV backlash. The latest casualty in a political battle that started months ago. No secret that Joe Biden wants you.
- [03:48]
Rebecca Lieber
To buy an electric car. Sure, it's expensive, but come on, you can afford it now. We're choosing to build a better America, an America that's confronting the climate crisis with America's workers leading the way. Look folks, you know the great American road trip is going to be fully electrified.
- [04:09]
Brooke Gladstone
Meanwhile, Democratic led states have continued to push a move towards hoard electric vehicles, with New York and California promising to sell only zero emission cars by the year 2035, which would effectively ban the sale of new gas powered cars. As it happens, in 2022, sales of EVs spiked something like 68% higher than 2021, an increase that many on the left count as victory. Paris Marques is the host of the the podcast Tech Won't Save Us and the author of Road to what Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. He says the marketers knew what they were doing, at least when it came to the blue states.
- [04:54]
Paris Marks
This is your no guilt purchase, right? You don't need to feel guilty about anything anymore because you're helping the environment and all this stuff.
- [05:01]
Brooke Gladstone
Okay, but some car manufacturers, some politicians say that EVs are actually not that much better for the environment than gas cars. That can't be true, right?
- [05:12]
Paris Marks
The electric vehicle is certainly an improvement over the vehicles that we have now. But the batteries that go into electric vehicles, a lot of metals go into making those batteries. The rare earths, lithium, there's cobalt in there, graphite, a lot of other minerals are necessary to make those batteries. And that requires a lot of mining. And one thing that we know about the mining industry is that it's not always the most environmentally Friendly, it can have impacts on the communities surrounding those mines. And the workers aren't always treated the best.
- [05:41]
Brooke Gladstone
You've observed that the pollution caused by EVs generally happen when they're being produced, while with gas cars it happens as you use them. That doesn't mean obviously that gas cars don't produce emissions when they're being produced as well. But I guess fewer of them, and that's right.
- [06:00]
Paris Marks
You know, this is kind of the nuance in the conversation. The electric vehicle, you know, a significant proportion of its lifetime emissions are going to come from production. Right. And in particular from the battery itself. But the more you drive it, the life cycle emissions decrease. Because if you're going to, say, drive an electric car or a fossil fuel vehicle for the same number of miles, there will be a moment where the life cycle emissions of the electric car drop below the fossil fuel vehicle because you've driven it enough miles. And that depends on where the vehicle was produced, the type of energy powering the vehicle itself, the type of vehicle that you're actually driving. There are many things that go into that. But say if you have a luxury car that you don't drive very often, you're actually contributing more emissions, whereas if you buy an electric car, you're replacing the trips that you would have driven in a fossil fuel vehicle, then yes, you are actually going to have a lower environmental impact if you drive the car until it dies. And that's even if the grid is powered by fossil fuels, isn't just by renewables.
- [07:03]
Brooke Gladstone
Right now we don't have enough charging stations. In the Inflation Reduction act, they're dedicating 7.5 billion to building electric vehicle charging infrastructure on federal highways and millions in tax incentives that will make it cheaper for businesses to buy and install their own charging equipment. That's projected to be enough to build half a million public chargers over the next five years, Right?
- [07:31]
Paris Marks
Yeah. But then we also need to ensure that these are charging stations with high quality chargers that are going to charge your vehicle quick enough. So you're not going to be sat there for, you know, 15 minutes, a half hour, even longer, waiting for your vehicle to charge up. And then on top of that, you need to ensure that any vehicle can use the chargers at that station. Tesla owns a lot of charging stations right now. For a long time it was only Teslas that could charge there. Now they've opened that up. But other vehicles still need particular adapters like Apple cables.
- [08:01]
Brooke Gladstone
You just have to keep buying them and buying them and they keep changing them.
- [08:04]
Paris Marks
Exactly. And so this is a real issue that is going to need to be dealt with if we want to make sure that people feel they can go anywhere, they can trust the chargers. They know that they're going to work for their vehicles. And that's not always the case right now.
- [08:16]
Brooke Gladstone
So Tesla has been an innovator, but you've noted that the story of electric cars long predates that. It practically goes back to electricity itself, right?
- [08:29]
Paris Marks
Oh, yeah. The history of electric cars is very long and we're just in the most recent period of excitement or expectation around it.
- [08:37]
Brooke Gladstone
In the 1830s, a Scottish inventor motorized a carriage. But things didn't really start going until batteries could be recharged. And that happened in 1859.
- [08:50]
Paris Marks
And that was a really key development. And so, you know, by the late 1800s, motor vehicles start to become a bit more common on streets. They're still quite a niche product, but in that moment, there's a debate as to what is actually going to propel these vehicles into the future. Is it going to be the electric batteries, as you're talking about? Is it going to be the internal combustion engine powered by fossil fuels, or is it going to be steam power, which was another way of moving things back in that period. And for a while, it did look like the electric vehicle was going to take off because the electric vehicles moved more smoothly. They were easier to drive. The early internal combustion engines, you had to hang, crank them to get them started. But then in the end, of course, you know, Henry Ford came along, he brought in the factory and the assembly line. Fossil fuel vehicles dropped in cost. And then, of course, when World War I came around, fossil fuel vehicles were very key to that, and that helped to entrench them. There have been a few other moments through the 20th century where it looked like electric vehicles were going to take off, you know, in the 1970s in particular, and the oil shock then. But it's really in the past couple of decades that they really started to take hold and become the solution to the climate crisis that we're facing, in part because of all the emissions created by our cars.
- [10:05]
Brooke Gladstone
In your book, you wrote about another form of transportation infrastructure that has intrigued Elon Musk. He apparently admitted to his biographer that he'd been investing in what he called the hyperloop in order to stop the state of California from developing a high speed rail system.
- [10:23]
Paris Marks
What he proposed with the hyperloop was it was like a train, because California a decade or so ago, was proposing to start building its high speed rail system that is still under Construction right now it's certainly run into problems. But Elon Musk really did not want to see that project built. And so he proposed a hyperloop instead. So instead of a high speed train, it would be like a vacuum tube that went all the way from LA to San Francisco.
- [10:46]
Jinx Falkenberg
It still sounds pretty complicated, Elon.
- [10:49]
Paris Marks
It's like a tube with an air hockey table. It's just a low pressure tube tube with a pod in it that runs on air bearings on air skis with an air compressor on the front that's taking the high pressure air buildup on the nose and pumping it through the air skis. And he said it would be much cheaper to build, it would move people much faster. Of course, there's no sign anywhere in the world of an actual working hyperloop right now. But it did become part of the ammunition used against the high speed rail project in California. And then the other piece of that as well is he's not just pushed the hyperloop right. He has another company called the Boring Company. Traffic, it's like acid on the soul. It's horrible. Finally, finally, finally there's something, something that I think could solve the goddamn traffic problem. Which, you know, was initially proposed to be a tunnel under Los Angeles. Now we see one that has been built under Las Vegas, which does not live up anywhere near to what he initially promised it would be. But the Boring Company has gone around to around the United States who were looking at new transit projects and said, here is our idea for this tunnel based transportation system. And instead of a subway line or anything like that, build this tunnel for cars. And that would fix the traffic problem. And then every time it comes time for them to deliver, with the exception of Las Vegas, they tend to disappear and not actually follow through on the promises. Meanwhile, they've helped disrupt any plans for transit in those cities or the development of those.
- [12:24]
Brooke Gladstone
There's another technical innovation I suspect that probably gets in the way of building these mass transit infrastructures. And that would be the promise of self driving cars.
- [12:36]
Paris Marks
Yeah, we can think back almost a decade ago now when the tech companies started to promise this. Just give us a few years and we'll develop these self driving cars and they'll be all over our cities and they will take you everywhere you want to go. They'll be incredibly cheap. But I think if we look at the ways that we get around, we see that hasn't made much of a difference.
- [12:55]
Brooke Gladstone
Well, they haven't really made reliable ones yet. And they say self driving cars won't work. Until everyone is in a self driving car. Because human drivers mess everything up.
- [13:06]
Paris Marks
Yeah, which is going to be a bit difficult to do, especially if we're thinking about the timeline that we have to address these problems and especially reduce transport emissions. But the thing with self driving cars as well is again, it wasn't just a promise that was put out there by the tech industry. The New York Times reported, I believe it was in 2018 that self driving cars had become part of the pitch for groups like Americans with Prosperity that are funded by the Koch brothers. They were going across the country fighting efforts to increase transit, to build new transit projects.
- [13:38]
Brooke Gladstone
This is because they're big investors in.
- [13:40]
Paris Marks
Oil, the oil industry, auto parts as well. So they profit from the way that things are. And once the tech companies started to promise self driving cars, that became part of their pitch against transit. Self driving cars are going to be here in a couple of years. So why would you invest in this outdated infrastructure?
- [13:57]
Brooke Gladstone
There's a cultural issue though. Just in case you didn't know, Americans really like to drive big cars. You noted in an article that when President Biden made a stop in Detroit in the fall of 2021 to promote the Democrats infrastructure bill and the electric vehicle rollout, he jumped behind the wheel not of a Bolt GM's electric subcompact, but the new Hummer EV. A vehicle that you wrote is the embodiment of everything wrong with the trajectory of vehicle design in the past couple of decades. The International Energy Agency found that between 2010 and 2018, the growing demand globally for SUVs was the second largest contributor to increasing emissions. And, and you reported that they're expected to account for 78% of new vehicle sales by 2025. How is this complicating the ecological benefit of EVs?
- [14:59]
Paris Marks
Yeah, even though the engines are getting more efficient, in many of the cars that we drive, the vehicles are getting heavier. So it takes more power to propel them and then that creates more emissions. And so then when we translate that to electric vehicles, if we're not going to rethink how larger these vehicles have gotten, we just switch that over to electric vehicles. Then we have really large vehicles that require incredibly large batteries. And those batteries make the vehicles even more heavy, it's going to require more energy to power them. But because those vehicles are even heavier and they still have the high front ends that SUVs and trucks have today, that also makes them more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists. These big trucks and big SUVs are two to three times more fatal if they hit a pedestrian, if you make the vehicles even heavier, you make them more dangerous, and that's a serious problem.
- [15:51]
Brooke Gladstone
But we love our big cars. And in fact, aren't most American cities designed around cars as the main form of transportation? I mean, the infrastructure is already there. New York City is a big subway, but it's still clogged with traffic. Is it realistic at this point to see a future where we move away from that idea and the use of any car, electric or otherwise?
- [16:19]
Paris Marks
The more that we can get people to move from fossil fuel vehicles to electric vehicles, it is still a net positive. But I think one thing that we forget is that there used to be different options in a lot of American cities where you didn't just have to drive to get around. And it was policy choices that took those options away and basically forced everyone to have to own a vehicle.
- [16:41]
Brooke Gladstone
Didn't we already start to see at least a little bit of that discussion during the pandemic? Cities that were passing bills that allowed for more development around bike lanes and such?
- [16:53]
Paris Marks
Totally. Especially in that first year of the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion around how our cities could be different. Because a lot of cities close some main streets to cars in order to allow people who live in the city to get out and walk around. They started allowing restaurants to do dining on the sidewalks or on the streets, made that space available. And I think for a lot of people, maybe they'd traveled to Europe and seen that things can work differently. But actually seeing these things in their own cities showed them that our cities can be different, too.
- [17:24]
Brooke Gladstone
Also, when we talk about the social life of cities, cars and their upkeep, they're expensive, they're not accessible to a lot of people. So that's a big chunk of a population left out of this conversation and not really being served.
- [17:41]
Paris Marks
Electric vehicle prices are often even more expensive than a fossil fuel car you might save over the long term when you're fueling it up because you don't need to buy gas all the time. But then a lot of people have been hit as well as gas prices have gone up over the past year. And we should remember that these sorts of conversations have been had before. If we look back to the 1970s, when we had the oil shocks, then there was a discussion as to whether it made sense to have so many big vehicles. There was encouragement for people to cycle more. And there was a bicycle boom in the 1970s because of that. So we're in this moment right now where we have an opportunity to do something different. We're making this large transition from fossil fuel to electric vehicles in order to address the climate crisis. But that also gives us an opportunity to have a deeper discussion around the transport system, around the decisions that we've made over the course of the last century, and also what is going to impact increase quality of life, make our roads and our communities safer into the future. And I think that we should try to seize that conversation instead of just letting the automakers and the mining companies and various politicians just have us focused on electric vehicles over anything else.
- [18:51]
Brooke Gladstone
Thank you very much, Paris.
- [18:53]
Paris Marks
It's been my pleasure. Thank you.
- [18:55]
Brooke Gladstone
Paris Marks is the host of the podcast Tech Won't Save Us and the author of Road to what Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the future of Transportation. Coming up, proxy partisan battles aren't just rolling down America's highways. They're camped out in our kitchens too, he says.
- [19:16]
Paris Marks
God guns, gas stoves.
- [19:19]
Brooke Gladstone
This is on the media.
- [19:29]
Paris Marks
On the Media is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com, progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. You know where your business would be without you. Imagine where it could go with more of you. Well, with wix you can create a website with more of your vision, your voice, your expertise. Wix gives you the freedom to truly own your brand and do it on your own with full customization and advanced AI tools that help turn your ideas into reality. Grow your business into your online brand because without you, your business is just business as usual. Go to Wix.com Trip Planner by Expedia. You were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends find a place on the beach with a pool and a marina and a waterfall and a soaking tube. Expedia Made to Travel I'm Ben Smith. I'm Max Tawney and we host Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media. The future of media feels like a moving target, so every Friday we pull back the curtain on the platforms, ideas and people that are shaping the new media landscape. We'll tell you what really matters and try to figure out what's coming next. Plus, we go behind the scenes with the most important players in media right now. Whether you are yourself a media insider or just simply curious about who or what will be all over your feed. Next, Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media is the perfect addition to your media diet. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, this.
- [21:12]
Brooke Gladstone
Is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week a fiery debate was ignited over a kitchen appliance.
- [21:20]
Paris Marks
Gas stoves have become a hot button issue over the past week.
- [21:23]
Rebecca Lieber
The gas stove ban debate is boiling over.
- [21:26]
Paris Marks
And not sure about you, but this story lit a fire under you know.
- [21:30]
Brooke Gladstone
What, there's nothing that news writers like more than a punworthy story. This particular debate was catalyzed by comments.
- [21:39]
Paris Marks
From a member of the Consumer Product.
- [21:41]
Rebecca Lieber
Safety Commission, or cpsc. It comes as mounting research links gas stoves to health risks when it comes to breathing issues. A recent peer reviewed study from a prominent medical Journal found nearly 13% of childhood asthma cases in the US are attributable to gas stove use.
- [21:58]
Brooke Gladstone
Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. In an interview with Bloomberg called the use of gas stoves a hidden hazard. Any option is on the table. Products that can't be made safe can be banned. Which left many Americans wondering, will the United States of America ban gas stoves? Can they even do that? Are these people in the Biden administration has said it's not moving towards a ban. No one's coming for your gas stoves. But that's not relevant to media outlets like Fox News, horrified by the multitude of stuff the feds want to pry from your cold, dead hands.
- [22:35]
Paris Marks
They came for our light bulbs. They came for the shower head pressure, the toilet water pressure. So they've already taken all these things. So I do believe that they are.
- [22:44]
Brooke Gladstone
Coming eventually for the gas stove as well. Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia tweeted, I can tell you the last thing that would ever leave my house is the gas stove that we cook on. Here's Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
- [22:59]
Paris Marks
You're not taking our gas stoves away from us.
- [23:02]
Rebecca Lieber
That is your choice.
- [23:04]
Paris Marks
And I know many people who cook.
- [23:06]
Brooke Gladstone
A lot do not want to part.
- [23:08]
Paris Marks
With their gas stoves. And so we're going to stand up for that.
- [23:12]
Brooke Gladstone
By the way, both those states, like most of the country, are majority electric. The only states that run mostly on gas are New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California and Nevada. Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal published an op ed with the subhead, progressive Democrats really are coming for your kitchen appliances. And then there was this succinct tweet from Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.
- [23:37]
Paris Marks
He says, God guns, gas stoves, hot takes.
- [23:41]
Brooke Gladstone
But for the people who have been in this fight, this is nothing new.
- [23:44]
Paris Marks
The doctors have been sounding the alarm for years now.
- [23:47]
Rebecca Lieber
I mean, we hear the phrase now.
- [23:49]
Paris Marks
You'Re cooking with gas, right? But what this comes down to is a public health crisis, a public health concern for a lot of people. Asthma, heart problems, cognitive delays.
- [23:58]
Rebecca Lieber
All of this and more has been connected to gas stoves.
- [24:03]
Jinx Falkenberg
This is something that we've seen over and over again in the scientific literature dating back to the 80s that link gas stoves to respiratory problems.
- [24:13]
Brooke Gladstone
Rebecca Lieber is a senior reporter covering climate at Vox.
- [24:18]
Jinx Falkenberg
The question that we're still debating is how much and how much should I be concerned? But the takeaway I would urge people to consider from the study, rather than getting hung up on exactly the percentage risk, is that exposure to elevated and prolonged no two can be linked to an assortment of health problems.
- [24:40]
Brooke Gladstone
When we interviewed you in 2021, it was about an article you'd written for Mother Jones about how the gas industry's lobbying got us to a place where we have gas stoves in the first place. And this dated Back to the 50s and the 60s with celebrity endorsements from people like Bob Hope. You've said that actually newspaper ads throughout the last century have a lot of people notably talking about defending gas stoves. What was going on behind the scenes?
- [25:13]
Jinx Falkenberg
The gas stove was trying to compete with electric stoves even then. And there were also other stoves like coal and wood at the time that we don't really use as much today. And the gas industry was trying to gain market share. The gas industry actually invented this phrase from Bob Hope, cooking with gas. And from there, I tracked this evolving PR campaign over time that actually echoes a lot of the things we say today, as a matter of fact, about the gas stove. So in the 1950s, I found all of these ads from celebrities of the time endorsing the gas stove as the superior way for the housewife to cook. This is the future of the kitchen.
- [25:56]
Paris Marks
The world of tomorrow. Tomorrow is cooking with gas, right?
- [26:00]
Rebecca Lieber
Jinx Falkenberg.
- [26:02]
Brooke Gladstone
Naturally, just as nearly all of America's fine restaurants do, 99% of the restaurants.
- [26:08]
Paris Marks
At the New York World Fair use gas for cooking. Why not have in your own kitchen the same fast, cool, clean, controlled gas cooking that fine chefs insist on? Live modern for less with gas.
- [26:23]
Jinx Falkenberg
But fast forward to present day, we have the successor to the original campaign, and that's social media influencers. The gas industry has paid influencers to promote the gas stove to their audiences. And what I love about this campaign is they'll always say, natural gas stove. These are influencers who are posing with their spatula at their stove, showing you how they make tacos or whatnot this only works on a natural gas stove.
- [26:54]
Paris Marks
And I'll show you why. When we turn on the stove, you'll.
- [26:59]
Jinx Falkenberg
See that blue flame come up and.
- [27:01]
Paris Marks
You can tell that it's heating the entire bottom of the wok, which is.
- [27:04]
Rebecca Lieber
Key for that really great caramelization that you want in most of your stir fries.
- [27:08]
Jinx Falkenberg
And it makes sure that the heat is distributed perfectly. One of my favorites is a woman just posing in monochrome orange, smelling her spatula in this beautiful kitchen. And her caption is, there's nothing better during the holidays than getting snuggled, filling up on our favorite holiday dishes. And then she starts talking about how she loves cooking with gas. It helps cook food faster and gives me more control over the temperature when cooking. These campaigns are repeating a lot of the myths. I hear regularly that gas is superior, that it's just better than electric, that it's the only way chefs cook. What a lot of these campaigns miss is there's a better modern equivalent to that electric stove a lot of people hate.
- [27:58]
Brooke Gladstone
It seems they've gotten a lot better. But what about the pressure on the electrical grid? If we start hooking up everything to the grid, won't we end up using more fossil fuel?
- [28:12]
Jinx Falkenberg
This isn't something we're all going to hook up to the grid in the next year or so. We're talking about 10, 20 year timelines. The grid today may run a bit on coal and definitely on gas and oil, but in that longer horizon, it's going to run a lot more on solar and wind, so the grid's going to get cleaner. But a building that has a gas pipeline today, in decades, it's still going to have that gas pipeline.
- [28:41]
Brooke Gladstone
How come?
- [28:42]
Jinx Falkenberg
Well, that has to do with how hard infrastructure is to tackle when it comes to climate change. Once you build something, it's really hard to change it. We see that with our existing buildings and with the gas stove fight, but the power sector is getting tons of investment right now from the federal government to clean up its act. So we are seeing that transition happen already.
- [29:07]
Brooke Gladstone
You said that these links between the gas industry and these influencing campaigns, they may be hard to find because they don't want reporters like you to find them. But you did, so how did you.
- [29:18]
Jinx Falkenberg
This is a fight that predates the blow up with the Consumer Product Safety Commission this week. This has been going back for years as climate activists fight on a local level throughout the country. So a lot of my sourcing has been with these local activists who are fighting day to day around trying to electrify their Communities. The gas industry has tried all types of tactics, including trying to promote on social media sites like Nextdoor, which is in a certain community group. And it would have been impossible to learn about these endeavors without those community activists working on this. But another element of this reporting has been information requests for emails, because a lot of these gas utilities are actually public entities or the officials have semi public duties that can be subject to foia.
- [30:15]
Brooke Gladstone
You mean they work for public utilities?
- [30:18]
Jinx Falkenberg
They either work for public utilities or they're talking to a regulatory body that is the government. And some of the most interesting details from my prior reporting were from these emails, like a utility executive saying in response to my reporting on gas influencers, of course we should pay them to gush more. They should not stop for even one hour. That is also a result of tireless work from groups like Climate Investigation center that have spent years filing FOIA requests. And what I've tried to do is really show how the research on the health effects, how the politics of the gas industry response and our actions around climate change all are linked in this same battle in this unexpected way.
- [31:08]
Brooke Gladstone
You've written that the next frontier in fighting climate change is the great indoors. I'm all into renewable fuels. I mean, I'm hooked up to solar myself, but I also have a gas stove. And I'm wondering, is there a way to wean us off these appliances without saying, you know, your refrigerator's gonna kill you details at 11?
- [31:31]
Jinx Falkenberg
Yeah, it would be hysteric to say you are going to die because of your gas stove and ditch it this second or you will truly regret it. There's no going back. But there are things people can and should be doing, guided by the science to move towards proper health warnings and reduce the risks of all that air pollution. And over time, when they're doing renovations or thinking about how they can electrify their own homes, there are steps they can take. And I think there's a difference in talking about those options and just talking in absolutes around gas stoves.
- [32:09]
Brooke Gladstone
So no federal ban is in the offing, but there have been statutes passed, right, In a variety of states and localities.
- [32:19]
Jinx Falkenberg
Right. There's no federal ban happening, but at the state and local level they might go a bit further. And we already are seeing lots of cities adopt electrification mandates where they say they're over time going to phase in a ban on pipelines to new construction. Again, we're talking about the new construction not existing. There are some states that are looking at gas stove science overall and also thinking about is this something that we should warn about the risks or specifically ban the gas stove? No one's quite there yet. This is something that California is looking at, this is something Oregon's looking at, and now New York. But to say that there are gas stove bans in the works would be going too far, because a lot of this is just whether new construction should hook up to gas or the electric grid.
- [33:15]
Brooke Gladstone
But if you are a California Republican who's all in for the culture wars, would they be justified in saying that their gas stove is being targeted?
- [33:26]
Jinx Falkenberg
No one is touching existing stoves and existing buildings at this point. And that's not even part of the discussion. So even if you live in a state that is pursuing electrification in new buildings, you can keep your gas stove.
- [33:42]
Brooke Gladstone
Even if you live in California?
- [33:44]
Jinx Falkenberg
Even if you live in California.
- [33:47]
Brooke Gladstone
And that said, at least 21 states have passed laws that would preemptively prevent cities from passing gas bans. Right?
- [33:56]
Jinx Falkenberg
Yeah. This was a whirlwind of laws, as you could probably expect, passed in red states in the last couple years in reaction to those city efforts. The industry which is helped craft a lot of these laws has now pushed more into purplish states to see if it can pass there. But a lot of red states don't run on gas for their buildings. At least they run on electric. If you look at a map, the Southeast is actually hugely electrified while gas cooking is concentrated in a lot of big blue cities like New York City. So the irony here is, even though this is becoming this red blue divide around gas stoves, in a lot of these red states, the cities weren't even considering electrification. So I think that's another example of the rhetoric versus the reality here and.
- [34:48]
Brooke Gladstone
Important to distinguish, given the ferocity of this argument. Are there red flags that you see in some of the coverage of this issue?
- [34:59]
Jinx Falkenberg
How much of this seemed so new to so many people the last couple weeks who never heard about this ongoing debate around stoves? Sorry for the pun. This issue has really been heating up for a while now. And I think for someone who wasn't aware of all that was going on in the background, this probably seemed to come both out of nowhere and like this super extreme step that an agency would even consider. But when you realize that there was this long tail of debate starting in the states and cities, then it seems a little less drastic what the Consumer Product Safety Commission is doing here.
- [35:40]
Brooke Gladstone
Rebecca, thank you very much.
- [35:42]
Jinx Falkenberg
Thank you.
- [35:43]
Brooke Gladstone
Rebecca Lieber is a senior reporter at Vox.
- [35:48]
Paris Marks
You got the Potom and the gas.
- [35:52]
Brooke Gladstone
Up high and popular in Europe, but what may be coming for you? Induction stoves. They're currently a small slice of the electric stove market in the U.S. according to a 2022 survey, only 3% of Americans currently use them, but almost 70% say they'd consider it. Coming up what happened to all those eureka moments in science? This is on the Media.
- [36:30]
Paris Marks
On the Media is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. No offense, but your brain is a terrible place to keep your big idea.
- [36:56]
Brooke Gladstone
It belongs in the world.
- [36:58]
Paris Marks
But you know that already. You have a calling, a voice that says this is what I'm meant to do. Create the website your big idea deserves with wix. Make it your own with top to bottom customization, AI to help realize your vision and built in business tools to turn your daydream into your dream job. WIX supports every stage of the business journey except one. Your decision to begin. Ready? Go to wix.com I'm Ben Smith. I'm Max Tawney and we host Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media. The future of media feels like a moving target, so every Friday we pull back the curtain on the platforms, ideas and people that are shaping the new media landscape. We'll tell you what really matters and try to figure out what's coming next. Plus, we go behind the scenes with the most important players in media right now. Whether you are yourself a media insider or just simply curious about who or what will be all over your feed next, Mixed Signals from Semaphore Media is the perfect addition to your media diet. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [38:02]
Jinx Falkenberg
This.
- [38:02]
Brooke Gladstone
Is on the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Imagine what it was like to be alive before and just after the turn of the last century. You'd be watching a dazzling parade of miraculous inventions.
- [38:16]
Paris Marks
Civilization has been revolutionized.
- [38:19]
Brooke Gladstone
That's Thomas Alva Edison in 1908, reflecting on the impact of his many inventions, including the automatic telegraph, phonograph and transmitter. And so he claimed, the light bulb.
- [38:32]
Paris Marks
It is still too early to stand outside these events and pronounce final judgment.
- [38:39]
Brooke Gladstone
On their lasting value.
- [38:41]
Paris Marks
But we may surely entertain the belief that the last half of the 19th century was as distinct in its electrical.
- [38:51]
Brooke Gladstone
Inventions as the first half was in relation to steam. And into that new century, the eureka moments continued in our laboratories.
- [39:01]
Rebecca Lieber
Today, we live in an atmosphere dim.
- [39:04]
Paris Marks
With the flying fragments of exploding atoms.
- [39:07]
Brooke Gladstone
ERNEST RUTHERFORD In 1935, one of the scientists responsible for the discovery of the.
- [39:14]
Rebecca Lieber
Electron and of the spontaneous radioactivity observed in the heavy elements uranium and thorium.
- [39:21]
Brooke Gladstone
Elementary particles, you know, just the building blocks of the universe. And then the key to the atom's.
- [39:28]
Paris Marks
Secrets was first given to the world in 1980, when the genius Albert Einstein.
- [39:33]
Brooke Gladstone
Defined the relation between all matter and.
- [39:36]
Paris Marks
Energy and evolved his revolutionary theory of special relativity.
- [39:41]
Brooke Gladstone
Einstein looked to science for clarity amid the chaos which happens from time to.
- [39:47]
Paris Marks
Time, as when, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick first discovered the structure.
- [39:53]
Brooke Gladstone
Of DNA, even though the scientist Rosalind Franklin was the one who first photographed the X pattern, which was a telltale.
- [40:01]
Paris Marks
Sign for a helical structure of some kind.
- [40:05]
Brooke Gladstone
A single snapshot containing the double helix secret of life. Now compare that to.
- [40:12]
Paris Marks
This year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry will.
- [40:14]
Brooke Gladstone
Be shared by three scientists.
- [40:16]
Rebecca Lieber
They received a prize for the development.
- [40:18]
Paris Marks
Of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.
- [40:23]
Brooke Gladstone
Less eureka and more huh? Earlier this month, a new paper by Michael Park, Erin Leahy, and Russell J. Funk in the journal Nature argued that the lack of aha moments in science is no accident. The research team concluded that there just aren't as many disruptive scientific breakthroughs as there used to be. But how do you determine what's a disruptive breakthrough and what's just a great scientific achievement?
- [40:52]
Rebecca Lieber
They came up with a beautiful, new, sexy idea in the very boring world of citation analysis.
- [40:59]
Brooke Gladstone
William J. Broad, science journalist and senior writer at the New York Times, says that the old way of gauging a scientific paper's impact involved simply counting the number of how many people cited the paper in later research. A basic applause meter. But that kind of count could be thrown off by anything from the popularity of the researchers to the scientists who. Who are citing themselves in their own work. So Park, Leahy and Funk made an adjustment.
- [41:29]
Rebecca Lieber
They were going deeper. They looked at nearly 50 million papers and patents going back to 1945 and analyzed them with this new technique of theirs.
- [41:39]
Brooke Gladstone
They measured not just how many times a colleague cited the paper at issue, but also how many times they cited the citations in that paper. But how does that indicate actual scientific disruption?
- [41:54]
Rebecca Lieber
We could just use the Watson and Crick paper as an example.
- [41:58]
Brooke Gladstone
They made that breakthrough when they saw it visualized in a leaked photograph stolen from Rosalind Franklin.
- [42:05]
Rebecca Lieber
Darn right. They took it and ran in one of the great outrages of science history. Using her research, they came up with the helical structure of DNA in 1953, which was a big deal. Now that paper, if you look at it through this new lens, they don't look just at the paper, they look at what the paper cited when it was written. Now in the case of Watson and Crick, there are just six citations to their paper that appeared in Nature. One, they're pointing out a mistaken theory on how DNA was structured. And two of them are saying we don't have enough data to really figure this out experimentally. Ho hum. And very few citations. It turns out that in this new kind of analysis, that's the hallmark of a breakthrough. For breakthrough papers, people don't go back to papers that breakthrough artists cited because what they did was so novel and big in dulcetory research. They're more interested in the winding path. Things like MRNA vaccines, which were lifesaver. Right. It seems like a huge breakthrough and it is in terms of public health. However, if you go back and look at where that came from, it was decades and decades of itsy bitsy steps along this winding path. So that by the definition of these researchers is ordinary science. It's consolidating information rather than taking giant leaps forward.
- [43:31]
Brooke Gladstone
If I'm understanding this correctly, the disruption and the breakthrough level of a paper or patent rests on how big of a leap it makes beyond the body of the research behind it. Right.
- [43:44]
Rebecca Lieber
Beautifully said. I'm gonna quote you in my next article.
- [43:47]
Brooke Gladstone
Are there holes in this method?
- [43:50]
Rebecca Lieber
Probably. This is a new baby, right? I just became a grandparent for the first time.
- [43:55]
Brooke Gladstone
Congratulations.
- [43:56]
Rebecca Lieber
Thank you very much. But that new baby is perfect. And it's obviously the world's most beautiful baby. Well, we'll see, right? Time goes by and it turns out the new baby has not ours. Of course this new analytic technique has limitations. That's the beautiful and scary thing about this science is this enormous global enterprise and yet we don't really have very good ways to get a grip on how well it's doing. This paper takes a very interesting step in that direction and it's already creating a large hubbub in the community. But there will be criticism and there.
- [44:34]
Brooke Gladstone
Will be updates since disruptive breakthroughs are rarer and rarer. According to the paper in Nature. What are some of them?
- [44:43]
Rebecca Lieber
The one on the top of their scale, almost off the charts as a breakthrough blew my mind because I had never heard of it. It's this gene splicing technique for inserting DNA into human cells allowing all kinds of great biotechnology stuff. And it made between Columbia and These three investigators, almost a billion dollars in royalties, all kinds of science awards. I had never heard of it, but it's, in terms of their measure, more important than Watson and Crick. You know, it's like, off the charts, which is fascinating. They've got a metric that's finding things that are huge and virtually unknown to the public.
- [45:20]
Brooke Gladstone
Wow. Well, here's a proportion question then. More research is being published than ever. You say a million papers a year are published. Does the number of major breakthroughs look smaller because there's just so much more of it going on?
- [45:37]
Rebecca Lieber
Another way this trend gets framed is that quantity is outdoing quality. Why? That's the big question. Why? Why is this literature exploding at the expense of seeing real breakthroughs? And that's a very, very hard question which they don't really address in this paper.
- [45:56]
Brooke Gladstone
I think that maybe to answer it, we should try to follow the money, because money for science is just exploding.
- [46:04]
Rebecca Lieber
Totally. I quote a guy at the end of the piece, this very nice sociologist at the University of Chicago, James Evans. This nation has invested literally many trillions of dollars in scientific research over the decades. But people on Capitol Hill are very worried about frittering away those trillions. Remember good Senator Proxmire from the great state of Wisconsin?
- [46:29]
Paris Marks
Yeah.
- [46:29]
Rebecca Lieber
He had these Golden Fleece awards, which he gave out, like, every month. And a lot of those were science.
- [46:36]
Paris Marks
Ever since 1975, every month I've given an award, a Golden Fleece, to the most disgusting, revolting, repulsive waste of the taxpayer's money by the federal government. The first Golden Fleece, we gave to an agency that spent $83,000 to try to find out why people fall in love.
- [46:51]
Brooke Gladstone
Now, the difficulty was, that is, even.
- [46:53]
Paris Marks
If they could give you the answer.
- [46:54]
Brooke Gladstone
I wouldn't want to know.
- [46:54]
Rebecca Lieber
Because the great thing about love is it's mystery.
- [46:56]
Paris Marks
And once the scientists can weigh it.
- [46:57]
Rebecca Lieber
And measure it, you can kiss it goodbye.
- [46:59]
Paris Marks
Then I gave it to an agency that spent $103,000 to try to find out whether sunfish that drink tequila are more aggressive than sunfish that drink gin. Sunfish?
- [47:07]
Brooke Gladstone
No.
- [47:07]
Rebecca Lieber
They could have come to Milwaukee, gotten.
- [47:08]
Paris Marks
All kinds of volunteers for that program.
- [47:10]
Rebecca Lieber
Scientists frittering away your money on blue sky crafts. And they scared the crap out of a lot of scientists. And the whole apparatus has become extremely conservative in trying to encourage accountability and concrete results. We don't want to do blue sky research.
- [47:29]
Brooke Gladstone
I was reading the Vox article on this study, and Kelsey Piper wrote that quote, it seems entirely possible that the slowdown in Science is not an inevitable natural law, but a result of policy choices. Despite the record level of funding, we know that visionaries with transformative ideas, like Catalyn Carico, who did the crucial early work to invent the MRNA vaccines, struggled for years to get grant money.
- [47:59]
Rebecca Lieber
That's exactly right. Not only that, there's the academic complex. Like, you want tenure. How many papers have you published? So people engage in what they call salami science. You cut your work into tiny little incomprehensible bits, so each one gets a little paper. And then you can proudly announce to the tenure committee that you've got 300 publications out in respectable journals and give me tenure. It's put a big crimp in the quality of the research.
- [48:26]
Brooke Gladstone
I want to float another theory to you that Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen articulated in the Atlantic a couple years ago. They said, suppose we think of science, the exploration of nature, as similar to the exploration of a new continent. In the early days, little is known. Explorers set out and discover major new features with ease. But gradually they fill in knowledge of the new continent. To make significant discoveries, explorers must go to ever more remote areas under ever more difficult conditions.
- [48:57]
Rebecca Lieber
What these people at the Atlantic are talking about is sort of science being a victim of nature. James Evans at the University of Chicago calls it, and they call it going for the low hanging fruit.
- [49:09]
Brooke Gladstone
Newtonian physics is now the first page of the textbook, no longer eliciting the kind of wonder it once did. You've suggested that to make a Newton level jump in today's research would be like inventing a personal time machine. I mean, is it that hard?
- [49:29]
Rebecca Lieber
Yeah. Since we're on the media here, let's just put our cards on the table. The media are complicit in the dumbing down of science and our goals. We've conditioned the public to see science as an accumulation of facts and discoveries. Those little tidbits are easy to digest and they're the symbols of science. But I was a graduate student in the history of science and our teachers used to bash this into our heads. Real science isn't just those little factoids and those little discoveries. It's mostly ideas and concepts.
- [50:00]
Brooke Gladstone
I have to be honest, I was very skeptical of this story and still am to a degree, because I'm not sure I agree on what a disruption might be. A lot of the disruptions of the past were the cogitation of one or two people, you know, small teams. Finding the first electron didn't take a lot of people. Thousands of scientists worked on Finding the.
- [50:30]
Rebecca Lieber
Higgs boson and gravity waves.
- [50:33]
Brooke Gladstone
Right, right, right.
- [50:34]
Rebecca Lieber
Very, very hard. Right. Huge endeavors.
- [50:37]
Brooke Gladstone
So is it just the romance? Is it that it has to be just the result of one or two scientists? Are we defining breakthrough correctly?
- [50:48]
Rebecca Lieber
I think when you start looking at the guts of their analysis, you start to see the wisdom of it. Like gravity waves, a new lens on the universe. This is changing astronomy as we speak. You know, new teams are focusing in on new parts of the universe for a new time. Like the first one was a collision of two black holes. You know, it's telling you fundamental things about how the universe works. It's huge in terms of application. But where did that come from? It starts with Einstein and general relativity and then a century of hard work of hundreds of people and hundreds of papers making little incremental steps forward to try to do what? To confirm his brilliant theory. I mean, the effects of that proof are enormous. They're creating a new field, a new lens on the universe. But getting there was a century old idea. That's what they're identifying as being rarer, those big breakthrough ideas.
- [51:54]
Brooke Gladstone
Disruption means changing how we see the world. Because in terms of technologies, one could argue that the Internet or something were disruptive in how they changed our lives. Socially disruptive, materially disruptive.
- [52:11]
Rebecca Lieber
One of the papers that these authors cite is the Google patent. This was a simple algorithmic change sponsored by Federal Research. Larry Page and company came up with it and presto changeo, everything has changed about search algorithms. But that's not science. And as we can see with AI, in many respects it's getting easier, not harder. People think of electronics and the heart of your computer as really complex. Well, it's these little, you know, logic circuits that are basically really simple. It's just there's an awful lot of them. It's simple mathematics compared to chaos in the atmosphere and getting a grip on those swirls and how they affect your ability to predict the weather 10 years in advance, 100 years in advance.
- [53:00]
Brooke Gladstone
What is this research into the diminishing number of disruptions over time for what's it do for us?
- [53:10]
Rebecca Lieber
It's feedback from our millions of people and trillions of dollars that are plowing away doing science. If we did for this research what they have done for all the other research, I think we'd find a lot of citations to it. It's a new way of thinking and we'd see that a lot of those citations are from people who are trying to figure out ways to make science work better.
- [53:34]
Brooke Gladstone
What do you hope comes out of this research.
- [53:37]
Rebecca Lieber
We all are dazzled by science cause it does all these dazzling things. But in truth, it's a very fragile thing institutionally. And if I had a lamp and one wish that the genie would grant it would be that people could and Congress could and the administrators could communicate better what a beautiful, fragile thing it is. And that you gotta look at it and take care of it if you want the miracles to continue.
- [54:05]
Brooke Gladstone
Thank you very much.
- [54:07]
Rebecca Lieber
No, thank you.
- [54:08]
Brooke Gladstone
William J. Broad is a science journalist and senior writer at the New York Times. That's it for this week's show on the Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondio, Molly Schwartz, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong and Suzanne Gaver, with help from Tammy George, our technical directors, Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Shyam Sundra. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. NYC now delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City. By sponsoring programming like NYC now, you'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to get in touch and find out more.