Sign Iowa Banking Living Will Later

Industry sign banking iowa living will later

[Music] right so that's uh that's kind of a mouthful but the basic idea behind this claim is that at all scales from the hyper local to the global the control of speech is a control of ideas which means it's a control of the capacity of a people to challenge those with power the power can be political the power can be economic and oftentimes the two collude so power and money go together especially in capitalist countries such as ours but what I wanted to do there was especially in the reference to my book so book is stories of Wyoming right and why only might be thought of as a rural backwater so whatever those stories are about why I mean surely they don't apply to places like New York and California in Florida in Illinois and whatnot but in fact I really do believe that what was happening in in my state in my communities really was just a highly focused microcosm of the ways in which power and money shape political speech and so when I made reference to the presidential election so we're moving from little Wyoming town all the way up to national election right this is in this last presidential election there were no questions about climate change right and sometimes we learn more from what isn't said and can't be said than from what is said and the complete absence of one of the gravest threats to our nation as well as to our world not being on the table for a presidential election suggests that the capacity of those with power privilege and money to shape political discourse is not something that happens in foreign regimes and rural backwaters it's happening at the highest levels in this country as well you well one way of answering that I suppose is just by a quick review of numbers and couple two simple numbers will tell that story in some way so the state of Wyoming about 70% of the state's revenue into the public coffers comes through oil gas and coal in the form of either what we call mineral royalty taxes or severance taxes called severance taxes because the resource is severed right from the public ownership and though so the idea is that that were compensated for the taking of the oil gas and coal so those taxes oil gas and coal taxes account for 70% of the state's income okay now that's a big chunk so that's the makings as I suggest in the book that's the makings of a company town all right when you're that dependent on one industry now the question though pertains to the university or to other state institutions well University is a fine example seventy percent of this of the university's funds comes from the legislature right so seventy percent of seventy is fifty percent forty nine percent and fifty percent so fifty cents on every dollar that flows into the university flows through oil gas and coal with that kind of economic dependency and the consequent sort of fear and I and I don't mean to make it sound like our legislators are a bunch of cowards they have every right to be fearful of course they've also failed to do the work necessary to diversify the economy but here we are here we are and when the fossil fuel industry is is pumping that kind of money through the system there's a sense of panic what if they leave what if they go somewhere else now it's not quite as if you know we could build cars in any city and Boeing could build a plane in in any city apparently Amazon can put its headquarters in almost any city and so we do actually have some dependency of the industries on the fact that we've got the oil gas and coal but whether they are investing heavily in extract in Wyoming or somewhere else and the degree to which they're gonna fight our regulations is all a function of this is kind of good ol boy collusion between between the politicians at the state level and the local level and these industries and so that kind of I mean it's a kind of very worrisome mutualism Co parasitism they both need the other in a very very desperate way you know and think about this nationally though right so let's scale it up again this isn't just about Wyoming according to some recent reports the typical congressperson in DC is now spending six to eight hours a day a day raising money for their next election alright so at least at least 50% of their time and I'm giving them credit for working like a lot of us do more than eight hours right so at least fifty perhaps 70% of their time goes into raising money for the next election not doing the work of the people right when they're that dependent on giving and you know that giving is not coming in one and two dollar amounts from from people like like like us those dollars are coming in in in one in ten million dollar chunks and they're coming in in larger and larger chunks and the future doesn't look any better in that regard at a national level with citizens united all right corporations are people and money is speech and so that kind of of incredibly worrisome collusion of corporation and government at the national level is is is just this local mirror at the level of of Rawlins Wyoming in Carbon County it's it's happening at all levels the picture in some ways is clear in Wyoming there's there's fewer complexities but I don't think there's anything sort of darker more insidious I think it's I think it's everywhere you again this goes back to perhaps describing Wyoming in these sort of simple terms right which and we are you know if if a political scientist or a cultural anthropologist or sociologist wanted to set up sort of a laboratory experiment right to see what happens when you've got single industries controlling enormous amounts of basically the public good all right you couldn't do a better job than one helming right it's it's sort of this this clear case and you know so the other nice thing nice thing I think it's a nice thing about Wyoming is we have fewer than six hundred thousand people well what that means is there's a kind of transparency so try to get information try to get interviews try to get stories in California in New York right so you're just one little Schmo all right among millions and so there's a level of accessibility a level of transparency our legislature actually is it's not very transparent in some ways but they're almost worried simply transparent and others and I mean I say that because they sort of wear with pride their collusion with the oil gas and coal industry right so it's almost a show of loyalty and so what in some states might be seen as grounds for impeachment in Wyoming is seen as evidence of political efficacy and it's that sort of kind of audacious if you will transparency that makes some of these interactions some of these deals some of these agreements so much clearer in Wyoming but again you know I don't think this story would be really that much different you know of Boeing threatened to leave Seattle if the newest Navy thread to pull out of San Diego right if you know there's lots of these these cases that sort of at state or at least at local levels and so what about what I was sort of getting at in that passage is that the story I tell in Wyoming is a story that has a kind of clarity but I don't think it's it's a it's a the clarity might be kind of unique in a socio-political why but the underlying corruption is not unique it's just some ways easier to see and in and so I think that we are Harbinger right we we are a test case of what happens when corporations in particular single industries become that intertwined with government and what it means for things like elections what it means for regulations what it means for state agencies in terms of of their agendas and what questions they can ask what research they can do well I guess it uses its its might in in a variety of ways certainly well I can think of sort of three major right paths that they take one is the direct influence of political campaigns right the energy industry in the United States each year pumps about eighteen billion dollars into into political campaigns Washington lobbyists for the energy industry are spending about a hundred and twenty eight hundred and fifty million dollars a year the energy industry's lobbying budget is close to that of Wall Street and the defense industry put together right so given how much it takes to get elected right and and those figures are out there you're looking at somewhere around three million dollars to get a House seat ten million dollars for a Senate seat right you're gonna go where the money is and so the direct influence of campaign via campaign contributions is obviously gonna be the huge and then once you've done that you're not alright your expense a quid pro quo check something in return and what you're gonna expect in return largely if you're a company is beneficial regulations and it's kind of weird because we we usually think that companies are gonna pursue and in general the energy industry does but not entirely we usually think they're gonna pursue deregulation right in to a certain extent that wouldn't be nearly as bad as what they often pursue which is favorable regulation right so they want to regulate their competitors out of the market alright so now I've worked with some big corporations when I was when I was working in the College of Agriculture and I understand big corporations are about winning and they're not about winning in a free market place they're about altering the marketplace to their advantage and you do that often times just by regulation not abandoning regulation but getting regulations that are favorable for you and is favorable for your competitors so those two things are certainly certainly huge the third thing is this the capacity when a corporation or or a an industry as of money to shape public discourse and so if we look back at the tobacco industry right in the games that were played with the merchants what wonderful book merchants of doubt' in the ways in which the corporations that at that time the tobacco companies could alter the public discourse could undermine the science could could confuse the conversation could in could create these echo chambers of sort of self-fulfilling kinds of scientific or pseudo scientific discourse all of those techniques that allowed the tobacco industry to draw out for a phenomenal number of years the number of people who were dying right as a consequence of their industry but they were able to draw out that discussion to create uncertainty where none in fact existed although those techniques although those methods were picked up lock stock and barrel by by the energy industry Exxon Mobil being one of the leaders in terms of sort of sowing false uncertain to give up in effect about climate change so when you've got that kind of money you can alter the the political choices we have you can alter the regulations that those politicians pass and then you can alter the public discourse about the hazards that your industry brings to the public hey that's us beauty of the whole system right is is if it was some sort of of competition where candidate a was supported by company a and candidate B was supported by Company B right but what in reality what happens is is candidate a takes money from company a and B and company and and candidate B takes money from both right and so the companies are hedging their bets alright they may not be giving equally but they're not going to fight they're gonna hedge their bets it I mean what they're doing so you go to the racetrack right if you really know what you're doing is you bet you bet win all right I've not bet horse racing very often and hence I always bet to show all right I win if he finishes for a second or third all right given the uncertainties in politics right a lot of companies bet on their horse to show as a matter of fact they bet on two horses to show one wins one place a right so so it's that kind of hedging that's that's going on and as a candidate right you know I'll take anybody's money and we'll work out the favors later well actually it's nothing it's not Versa T's in Wyoming because we only have one we have one public four-year university and no private universities we do have a system of community colleges so it's really about this one University which is also some of this clarity right so so we we get a more transparent picture and and maybe I'll just just sort of answer that influencer question with with an example so the University of Wyoming some years ago that's probably about ten years ago right decided that it was well actually it's a little longer than that but they decided that they were gonna have this very large private effort to raise private money right and so what's happened in the country in the last since the Great Recession and even before that we saw the amount of public funding coming to universities was in decline all right it was declining every year since the Great Recession across the board twenty-five percent decline so universities have have a few choices right they can reduce faculty and staff which has been done they can increase tuition but there's apparently gonna be a limit to that eventually or they can go after private money in most universities do all three and we went after all three and as a consequence there were some very large givers from oh we might call them investors from the state of Wyoming which Matt you know given our economic situation meant oil gas and coal both individual families and companies well they wanted something in return and what they got was what we now call the school of energy resources an entire school with its own faculty gorgeous facilities all dedicated to energy now there is a token investment in the wind but the lion's share goes to oil gas and coal enhanced oil recovery so that was the payoff so what we ended up with right was a school of energy research all right well in most industries one of the most expensive parts of an industry is research and development right it's uncertain its costly you got to pay people lots you don't know exactly what you're gonna get so what they essentially bought wasn't our d Center alright and they got it either tax-free donations and here's the best part once they had it built the university agreed that they would use public money to match dollar-for-dollar any private money that came in to that school right so basically companies say well wait a minute so we get an R&D center and we get a 50% discount right on all of our R&D because it's publicly subsidized so we're publicly subsidizing the wealthiest corporations in human history because I guess it couldn't afford to do their own research and development and so what a boon that was right for these companies you know what I say is it's you know it's equivalent of taxing heroin and developing a program in your medical school to refine sharper needles all right and so the weird part is a lot of the money that was coming into the state was coming through oil gas and coal was being passed right back the other side to subsidize the R&D for those industries I mean it's almost a money laundering operation but probably not quite in a legal sense so what did they get they got a hell of a deal and so if we so what I've been talking about is this the energy industry but if we sort of back up from that there were a couple incidents at the University that laid the foundation for what grew into this tremendous corporate subsidy enterprise that we have um the two incidents one involved actually they both involve faculty from our College of Law one of the faculty members was Mark Squillace he was a friend of mine and he was supporting conservation groups efforts to reduce clear-cutting in in southeastern Wyoming and he was doing it I believe pro bono on his own time but he was associated with the college of law and the forest products industry went berserk threatened the law school threatened to shut down the law school big kerfuffle in the university didn't go to bat they didn't fire him but they also didn't right they didn't go to bat then comes along deb donahue another faculty member who calls into question the public publicly subsidized grazing lands in wyoming all right federal lands that are better leased at very low rates for livestock grazing and she raises economic and ecological questions there publishes a book called rangelands revisited and then there was actu lly calling the legislature for defunding the law school i think it was mostly political posturing but still the university sort of played it softly let the fear of pass but really didn't go toe to toe didn't say didn't call on him right and so there was this sort of tradition of of not getting into the ring and so we'd already laid the foundation with the forest products industry and with the ruin with the range land grazing industry so when the big doll came into the ring right the energy industry was pretty clear that the university was not going to stand up and in that case as i as i talked about in my presentation the university buckled in a couple instances one with the firing of a scientist who offended the energy industry and the other one with the destruction of artwork that offended the energy industry and both of those were sanctioned by the highest levels of the administration political censorship in some ways takes a certain amount of courage right for a politician to say right you're fired let's go after him right we're gonna disallow that and so these incidents that we get into at the University and other places in the state with state agencies our biggest Art Museum in Casper and whatnot the potency and sometimes you look at these incidents and you say wow they're totally disproportionate why is the industry going after a freakin piece of artwork all right what the heck is that about that's because it's not really about just that artwork right why did they demand that dr. Jeff fine right lose his job because he gave an estimate of the amount of water needed for fracking which they thought was was mistaken but they wouldn't share their data right so you think well you know why go after them wow isn't that disproportionate well what they're doing I think is is tactically smart right you make an example all right you post one head on the spear outside the castle door right and it's pretty clear that you've sent the message and so you sacrifice you know you spend a little bit of political capital to go after a piece of artwork and artist and educator or scientist but what you're doing is sending a message right and the message is it could be you next time and so what you're doing is sort of buying self-censorship and let's face it an artist has I know lots of artists right they've got a thousand different projects going on in their head and scientists have hundreds of different research opportunities there and so they're trying to decide among these and so the trend to say well which one will be funded well that could be a function of politics all right and which one is going to bring nothing but hassle headache and and misery if I follow this line all right well I could you know I could I could go over here and do this it's exciting it's fun it's interesting it might even be in the public good sure sure so why bring that down on me right I saw what happened with with fine I saw what happened with Chris Tory the artist and so these disproportionate sort of punishments or responses by industry are really not just about that moment they're about creating an atmosphere in which everybody understands that certain lines of creative work and scientific investigation probably aren't worth pursuing given all the other options you have I take very seriously this concept of tenure all right tenure is a very strong protection of my job which I take to be part of a profoundly important and intimate social contract that I have with the people of the state of Wyoming and the deal is all right that they will allow this system to protect me in exchange for me telling them the truth all right if I'm not gonna tell them the truth if I'm not gonna do the dangerous stuff then what if I really what have I earned right like I don't need protection what why do you protect a job that's not in danger right so I take it to be a part of the social contract that I will save the things that they can't say ask the questions they can't ask write the book for which they would be fired so that that was a big part of my motivation now insofar as that's the case I'm also not stupid all right and so the book manuscript went through two legal reviews with the University of New Mexico press they wanted to make sure there was nothing whatsoever that could be construed as a slander in the book in fact the book has over 400 and notes so it is as thoroughly documented once I say somebody said something then you can go to an EndNote and find out what the original source was so one way of covering yourself you know there's this sort of little little sort of standard legal legalism right that the greatest thing the strongest defense against slander is the truth and so I worked very hard to make the book true I also did two other things I I did consult with with attorneys prior to the publication of the book my own attorneys to make sure there was nothing in there and of course what they invited loved attorneys I do I really do right they said well there's really nothing in this book that there could be reasonably construed as slander but then on the other hand this is America anybody can sue anybody for anything at any time there's actually something called a slap suit and it's an acronym basically what it means is it's a suit to punish you economically the per since suing you has no intention of winning what they want to do is rack up your legal bills and what it means is that they're monumentally richer than you are and they're gonna punish you via a suit of this sort and they're slap suits are are not banned in Wyoming the other thing I did is I it was a little bit worried I thought well you know it did I did write this book on University time right I did it University resources and so I also in the book have said and I have done follow through on this promise that all of my royalties are sent to Penn America an organization dedicated to free speech and to freedom of the press around the world and to protecting writers and journalists from oppressive regimes so I don't make a penny off of the book and I thought well we'll take that away from those who might criticize this venture so I played defense I mean the other thing is you know sometimes the best defense is a good offense right and so when the book came out I have gone to seven communities in Wyoming presented the book presented my talk presented my findings I went to coal country I went to gas and oil country I stood in front of those groups and said here's here's the stories and I must say that I was not always warmly received but it was never personal it was never nasty it was never threatening it was a good hard authentic discussion and I knew people in these communities I and I know you know that they're living close to the margins and that they're depending on these industries and in in these places and that's why you know we do have a citizens climate change lobbying group in Wyoming and one of the things they're really pushing on is we can't talk about reducing fossil fuels as if there are no social costs all right there's people there's real people with real lives in real houses and real kids living in real towns that depend on these real mines and oil fields and we've got to take seriously their misery as well they count all right and if we're not going to take care of misery we generate then you know then then we're not really serious about dealing with this problem and holistic compassion and just sense so it's complicated but you know my other strategy was just to be really out there upfront now in terms of response it's kind of funny so my my opening lecture about the book was on the campus of the University of Wyoming and the sponsor was no university department it was sponsored by the Sierra Club that was allowed to use University space to host a University researcher which is sort of bizarre it was a it was a nice packed house is really pleased but not a single person in the audience was above the level of a department head no higher administrators no deans no associate Dean's no Provost's no vice presidents none of them came to that talk and so if there's one thing in university is good at its passive aggression at passive aggression so basically it's been I see silence which is is is way better than then lawsuits I'll take it has everything we've been told been accurate well most much some of what we've been told is accurate right these as I got to go back to one of my sources and there's a chapter in this fellow Jeff thank the guy who worked at the enhanced oil recovery Institute who lost his job based on his estimates of the amount of water needed for a large fracking operation and he actually had a job before the University of Wyoming he was employed at Colorado School of Mines and he got in trouble there and he got in trouble there for this very simple but incisive observation the the oil and gas industry the the people who were engaged in fracking said there's never been a documented case of contamination and Jeff noted that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence he said the reason why there's no documented cases is because we're not looking all right so if you close your eyes right you can't claim that nothing happened in the room that's the approach that that's been taken right and so to a certain extent they were right no documented cases but that's really not the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth right it's that I closed my eyes during the robbery all right that's why I didn't see the guy with a gun it wasn't that there wasn't a guy with a gun right so so he made that point and that didn't make him many many friends now his area of expertise is ground water ground water contamination any second this is crazy and I have every reason to believe this guy I think he's credible he says you know I don't know what the numbers are 98 99 % of all fracking wells have integrity they're fine there's not going to be a problem he said one or two percent right but he said we have the techniques we have the methods we could monitor we could find out the bad ones right he said this is insane right so all we have to do is pick out the few bad apples assure the public that we're doing the responsible monitoring and the vast majority of them are fine the casings aren't cracked they aren't going to leak but he said the industry won't allow it they won't allow it because it's sort of the camels nose under the tent right because what it is it's an admission that there are serious dangers they have to be monitored and that really bad stuff can happen to groundwater when it does and they don't want that to happen so the other thing we don't know and again one of the reasons reasons why we can say well they've been honest with us because they don't look and that is there are laws in many states including Wyoming that the public is not cannot ask and will not be told what the the province that the the the non water based chemicals that are injected to create the fractures underground the and and to hold those fractures in place we aren't told what those chemicals are we can't they're called trade secrets they're protected as trade secrets in Pennsylvania a doctor as I understand it can determine whether a patient has been in contact with toxic chemicals but he can't where she cannot then share that information with other physicians in the region it's a secret and it has to be kept secret and so you know I tell my students right there you know there was a time before we had an EPA and before we had of what we call the federal insecticide fungicide and rodenticide act a FIFRA right we're basically pesticides were were were freely used without anyone knowing what they are where they were being placed or what was happening all right that's like wow we sprayed crops and I said yeah pretty much I mean it was all very very very few regulations environmental regulations monitoring it was it was you know kind of the wild wild west of chemistry wow that's remarkable and I said yeah yeah you sort of take for granted that you know you can get that information you can ask what was sprayed when was a sprayed what's it's toxicological profile get all that right you can't get that about what we're pumping under the earth potentially potentially leaking into groundwater you can't get that somebody I imagine that in you know 20 or 30 years faculty members Damien for those students say you know there was a time where we could we could pump right this list of toxins right in water underground with the potential for groundwater contamination should should the system not maintain its integrity and you know what there was no law that said that those companies had to reveal the content of their fracking fluid no students you know you gotta be kidding me all right and so are we being told everything about fracking well we're being told some things about fracking and I mean look here we are in New York I mean you guy Tony and graffia right at Cornell University boy talk about a guy who was who was talking about some uncomfortable truths about natural gas and methane in its greenhouse effects and and the way the industry went after that guy and so the story that we've been fracking for years and it's always been safe that's that's an oversimplified partial truth about limited data with a very clear effort on the part of industry to not collect data so that they can claim that you know we don't know what's under there and we don't know what its problems are so you know again there's a lot of effort being put into the absence of evidence and we ought not to infer that that the absence of evidence is in fact evidence that there's nothing going wrong with the EPA you know at least now and I worked I mean so when I first worked in the University of Iowa I have a PhD in entomology I was hired and to do grass and rangeland grasshopper ecology man I worked with that I worked with big chemical companies right in the amount of testing that's required and the environmental testing is a quantum leap above where we were you know and Gashi talked about you know talk about fracking right so let's not forget let's not forget the Halliburton loophole Halliburton loophole said that fracking right is is not under the purview of the Clean Air Act the Clean Water Act or the drinking water act right all of those are off the table with fracking of fracking fluids it doesn't have to meet the standards of clean water clean air and drinking water that's called the Halliburton loophole thanks to why all means Dick Cheney fracking was excluded from that and so I mean there so I have occasional moments of perverse sense of humor coal industry of course is is is in big trouble economically and they're not big trouble economically nobody who knows anything thinks they're in control big trouble because of regulation it's just nonsense their economic economic troubles are all about natural gas all right natural gas is killing the coal industry because they're producing it in massive amounts cheaply because of fracking and of course the irony here is that coal has to meet clean air clean water and drinking water act right the Halliburton loophole only was applicable to fracking and fracking is not relevant with coal and so the fossil fuel industry you know coal should have screamed bloody murder during the early days of fracking and they might still huh they might still have a horse in the race but they didn't it you know this goes back to my earlier comment right that we are not necessarily anti-regulation what we're about is regulating our competitor out of existence I can't think of any major extractive industries or for that matter any major industries that are unregulated I mean pharmaceutical industry agriculture mining okay they're all regulated the worry isn't so much that they're unregulated it's that the regulations are are not necessarily in the public interest they may be in sort of the interest of a non-competitive market so that's I mean that's that's a real concern and and again I mean there's this word it's sort of a mouthful but I kind of like it it's that the word is the corporate okra see all right and so you know we refer to Russia as a kleptocracy all right klepto means as in kleptomaniac right it's a theft right so it's a it's a go ernment of Thieves which is probably not a bad description of Putin and the boys but our own government is looking more more like a corporate ocker see right it's a blending of the corporate and in the government and so here's how I think of of corporations right corporations are complete inventions right they're not natural we created this thing called a corporation and we created it with one duty all right and we gave it a fiduciary duty it's only duty was to return return profits to its shareholders right so it does one thing it does it incredibly well right as a matter of fact if a corporation one can make an argument that if a corporation sacrifices its fiduciary duty for say an environmental ethic or or racial justice right it's violating its duty right those aren't its jobs that's not what it does that's not why it was created it wasn't there to do good it was there to make money and it's damn good at it we made it to do it and it's really good at it right and so that's its interest right and so I think of corporations as sort of like being two-year-olds all right there a moral all right there right there just there I love my children they're growing up now but when they were two they're dis greedy little bastards right and that's what it is to be - it's all about me all right and you have to teach them all right and the job of a parent is to regulate the behavior right of this little creature right that really doesn't have a moral compass right and you begin to build it in with empathy and whatnot and that's a job of a parent and and so what we have in the country is sort of like these gigantic two-year-olds all right that also get to write the family rulebook and we can't figure out why the household is a freaking disaster all right it's because we put the two-year-old in charge the role of government is sort of like the role of the parent it's to regulate for the interests of the public right the behavior of something that exists for the interests of its shareholders right its job is to regulate and it's kind of a beautiful system all right you get a corporation really good at its thing government at least in principle says hey you know I gotta put some break you know I know that you know setting the Mahana Gila River on fire was good for your company but it's not so good for the people you know living along the river right so we're gonna have you know we're gonna have some environmental regulations here so that system seemed to be kind of functional but what's happened is as corporations again begin to influence political offices and in political elections and hence political regulations right this separation of kind of moral power and economic power is evaporating right and and hence we get this Corp autocracy we get banks that are too big to fail and we get fracking companies that are too big to be regulated there are some corporations that have included in their charters and there are some mutual funds right that and again.if and again it's up to the shareholders right so the shareholders can decide that the you know the mutual funds right they're their advisors you know if I've got a mutual fund I you know I can do anything I want I can say no tobacco right there no pesticides or no big farm or whatever I want and that's even that's even freer in a sense right um so I can pick and choose these money-making ventures but I can pick the ones that align with some sort of moral principles so that you know mutual fund is a way of doing that and of course we have you know various nonprofits which which also can function although I mean just because you're non-profit doesn't mean that you do good so let's not confuse those things either it's another example right so all of my cases in Wyoming this is what I tell people around the state I said look all these are about the most Republican legislature in the country right colluding with one of the largest corporations or corporate enterprises in human history on the fossil fuel industry and so you could say Wow well he's just you know and a crazy environmental Democrat and and actually I'm not crazy I'm not Democrat and I guess I am kind of environmental but the point that I make is that look that's how that's how power and money lined up in Wyoming all right shift that power right to the wind energy sector right and shift the politics to the Democrats and I will assure you that they will do everything in their capacity it's a sensor to shut down public speech in to quash criticism right so the censorship is is a tool of power and it doesn't mean that it comes only from the right or the left it doesn't mean that only comes from the black companies you know of the fossil fuel or from only the green companies you got power and you got money you have an interest in shutting down public discourse so public universities have seen a continuing recently there's a little bit of an uptick but but since the Great Recession I think we're looking at something like a 25% reduction in legislative or public dollar support for state universities and for instance in Louisiana which is a combination of the Great Recession and oil right public universities support so the number of dollars that came to the Louisiana State University system through the legislature accounted for about 60 percent of their budget before and now about 25 percent so that's one of the worst-case scenarios so again everybody all universities for the most part are seeing this erosion and a lot of that you know is because of this very intentional belief largely coming out of conservative quarters that everything performs better when privatized one way of privatizing higher education is to start pulling the rug out from state and federal funding right and so we see this there I think it's a very intentional move toward privatization and again it's the notion that the market will do a better job which i think is a disastrous assumption but the point is that funding is going down so there's there's these three options you can cut faculty and staff well you start looking around and you think well god all of a sudden you know tenure is not a guarantee if they close my department which is true of most universities what department are they gonna go after I own the one that caused trouble the one that upset the industry's throne that interfered with the big donors either the one that's pleasing the donors that's pleasing the industries all right and so that's a lovely lovely formula for self-censorship right is start looking at jobs disappearing right well you know you're gonna go down your little hidey hole and not stick your head up very often all right so there so you can do that you can raise tuition my worry there of course is as public institutions raise tuition high education becomes a privilege of the wealthy all right and again who are the wealthy but the sons and daughters largely of those in corporate positions and etc so that becomes a sort of self-fulfilling system and then the third option is or these large private they call them gifts I think of them sort of as investments there's usually some sort of string or some sort of assumed quid pro quo involved and so now we end up with school of energy we end up with a ConocoPhillips school of geology and geophysics at the University of Oklahoma all right so we have these named institutes and schools named after major corporations well you know they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts right and it would be weird if they did right so they would so wouldn't it be strange that the one altruistic thing on the planet turns out to be corporations the rest of us are greedy bastards but they know there are the good guys right so I mean that would be pretty naive so of course they have an interest of course they have an interest in in in the sorts of work that's going on there and so the autonomy the reliability the independence of scholarship and even what's taught in classrooms and what's said on campuses is becoming more and more privatized now the weird thing is that's coming from the right and from the left we have trigger warnings hate speech policies and efforts to kick conservative commentators off campus before they can give public speech so universities are in this weird position of being of having demands of censorship coming from both the Liberals and the Conservatives and it makes you wonder who's actually going to fight the good fight for free speech the best defense against a is education right is not trying to flatten alright the content of courses it's to assure that there is rigorous continuous and intensive education with regard to critical thinking so rather than I would rather this we develop and our students their capacity to defend themselves against all right then for us to become the filters of what it is they can hear in the classroom well right and and so when so there's this one story that I tell that drew me into this whole thing so there was this artwork on campus it was called carbon sink right it was formed by these beetle-killed trees formed into logs that spiraled down into a pool of coal right and so drew the connection between climate change the death of Wyoming force and the coal industry and this is what the energy industry demand to be removed it was removed sort of almost in the dark of night generated this huge kerfuffle as it ought to have an in reaction to that our our Student Senate so the student government all campuses have one of these they had brought before them a piece of legislation that would have reiterated stated confirmed the need for academic freedom right and in essence pretty explicitly condemned the university administration for countenancing the destruction of art all right and when that came to them there was it I was there there was a there was quite a debate and the phrase that that still haunts me and it's the phrase that won the debate was the students who said well I talked to the legislators right and what they said is you know they don't want to bite the hand that feeds you all right and so the students you know who pay very low tuition because of at that time because of very high revenues in the fossil fuel industry saw themselves as bought and paid for all right they they were domesticated animals their food bowl was filled every day all right and it didn't cost him very much and it was because of the oil gas and coal industry and so the warning was well you know do you want to bite the hand that feeds you now when I talked to the president of the Student Senate I said what did that mean to you and he sort of resisted at first and I said well God when I was a student right the goal was to shred the hand that fed us right it was it was to question it was to demand it was you know it was to to doubt it was to be skeptical I said doesn't what does that imply you know and he he did pause and he said yeah I didn't he said it is more worrisome than I had taken it to be the vote lost the motion lost by a single vote and so they did not take to task the university administration for censorship because to do so would have been to sent a message of ingratitude as if the oil gas and coal industry paying their taxes somehow warranted generosity as a matter of fact just a little bit off side but it's really important so so in why only the oil gas and coal industry have done a very good job via radio ads and whatnot of painting themselves as being generous supporters of the state right of pain this severance tax and as a colleague of mine who is actually an attorney in the Department of History points out they no more pay the severance tax than the loaf and jug which is our version of 7-eleven or whatever you want to call her right they don't pay sales tax right so the owner of mini-mart all right doesn't say how a lot of great guy am because I pay all the sales tax he collects a sales tax from the people who buy the product all right and that's good I mean he was supposed to do that he passes it up to the state you all guess in : mister you don't pay the severance tax they collected from the end user the consumer alright so there's no I mean they are no more generous to the state of Wyoming right then the convenience store owner is generous for paying sales tax but again if you control the discourse if you control the language if you control speech right you can shape the impression of people as to what you're doing and what you're not doing so this is like one of my great head-scratching wonders alright and that is free speech the First Amendment right should be the common ground of left and right conservatives and liberals right conservatives you know claim to be constitutionalist they love the Constitution they fight for the Constitution all right and then the countenance censorship right and the Liberals well we're all about freedom we're all about liberty right except we don't want you to use hate speech and we want you to put trigger warnings in your classes oh and you can only say potentially offensive things in this corner of campus oh and by the way if Ann Coulter comes on campus we will protest and shout her down all right and it's like oh my god do you not hear yourselves right so it's is this a battle for who gets to censor what are you not listening to the other side I mean to me it's sort of like this in my world of ideology it's my grand unifying theme I mean we even consider it the United Nations considers it a human right this isn't just something encoded in our constitution I mean these fields and philosophy were well of course we don't want to equate what is moral with what is legal so so we as philosophers would stretch this notion of free speech as John Stuart Mill did even further than the Constitution would and so it sounds like you know from the foundations of Western civilization through the left and the right the Constitution may in the United Nations we ought to all be able to rally around free speech and what we're rallying around is who gets to control it not who gets to free it I did that with a graduate student I was telling her about this and that you know they they call these you know bubbles right inner Internet bubbles right and so what the Internet has done is sort of reinforce your biases right and so saying yeah and so I mean this is this guy is he's young right probably politically more or less like me right socioeconomically I got a lot more money than he does because he graduate student so we just did that right and and what did we I think we typed in what did we type in I think we typed in Israel ready set go into Google all right and then we just read off right at the top ten and I think six were in common but none of them were in the same order obviously they know my income because I got travel he got none and so I mean it yeah so the idea I'm the Internet the promise of the Internet right was that we would be able to work against our biases right because we would have information and what it's done is simply entrenched polarize and and affirm our pre-existing biases and it's I mean that's one of the grand disappointments of the internet whoa God right and so if it wasn't bad enough right if it wasn't bad enough we now are going to abandon net neutrality so it's so it wasn't bad enough that we had put ourselves into these bubbles now people can buy our bubbles well they just took a page out of the book right and so what you do is you you know you create echo chambers right so you put out false information you let it bounce around you you you let one medias pick it up and they pass it to another and that just sort of bounces around right and then you you sow the seeds of uncertainty you become a merchant of doubt right and actually the tobacco industry was very good at it but it was actually picked up by the acid rain folks so all of the legislation having to do with acid rain was also slowed down but so what you want to do is so false information so doubt so uncertainty confusion ambiguity and slow things down make things go slowly you can you can grind the process to a virtual halt by saying one more study one more study one more stay we want good science we're really in favor of science let's fund another study and so there's a whole package of tricks and I don't think any one of them id the fossil fuel industry failed to pick up on there has been this move it was a very interesting move so there was this move associated with climate dating and earthquake data and whatnot in Oklahoma and even applied to our state climatologist and the notion was from coming down from government was we don't want to quash science right we're on good science but the role of science is just the data right you just collect the data data interpretation dated me that's not science science is data tables alright you go beyond the data table you're not into science now you're into advocacy now you're into explanation now you're into policy which is just complete nonsense but it's a very nice way of government pretending or corporate ah cracy pretending yeah yeah we you know we really want that data but all we want is the data it's not your role to interpret the data data without interpretation is you know like music that's not being played I mean that is the function of the scientist so that's you know that's that's an interesting ploy that's been used with with various scientists in size especially agencies you just generate the data well they've done it in a number of ways and probably the most effective way is is through funding right so science is expensive and one of the ways of shaping science there's is is to set up funding programs that direct science in various along various paths and in essence if I'm not going to fund this kind of science then you're not going to be able to do it a good example of that was was an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wyoming who was doing some really interesting work in this this area called a little above a little town called Pinedale it was the Pinedale anticline which is a geological formation that was one of the first places one of the first places to show that fracking was economically viable a huge gas boom there and so then Pinedale started having these very serious problems with ozone which is very peculiar especially it was a winter time I was own most ozone that we think of his summer time I was on Los Angeles and whatnot but Pinedale was having these winter ozone pulses as a matter of fact the air quality was as bad as a pack of cigarettes a day question was where the hell's the ozone coming from well so this guy went out and found out that through a really interesting and complicated chemical process the gas is leaking from this gas field actually from the pipeline's were were interacting with a photochemical process and that in fact it was happening largely in the winter because snow reflection light reflection off the snow was sort of catalyzing to making the problem even worse so we were getting winter ozone and so he figured well it's coming from the gas fields and so he was it was in the early stages of inventing this basically little drive around device where he could identify sources of leakage and he thought that the gas companies would just love this all right because it's a little bit like the guy who wanted to monitor fracking he said look 98% of wells are fine let's find the 2% that are a problem and shut him down or fix them and this guy said yeah you know I would bet that you know 98 whatever is 98 99 percent of the pipelines they're just flying let's find the problem ones and fix them in that case you don't have to shut him down just fix them but again what that meant was an admission that the problem was in fact all right leaks and so the gas companies the extraction industry had no interest in that and so they went around to the State Department of Environmental Quality and it turned out for two years in a row that was the one proposal that there was just not enough money for and so strategic defunding or funding things in in particular wise very very potent and given the importance of well and so where are you gonna get funding for as a scientist you're gonna get either from the federal government from a state agency or from private industry alright and so that's probably in some ways the most potent way that government can shape via corporate influence and and I don't worry about scientists I don't worry about 99.9% of scientists falsifying data right making stuff up that's not how it happens right scientists work very hard in there for the most part wickedly honest the the censorship isn't in altering their date of the censorship is in shaping the questions they they do and don't ask can and can't afford to ask that's where it's happening so I was invited to participate in the real truth about health conference sort of out of the blue right this message came from Steve and I thought okay I'm always suitably suspicious all right so what's the agenda what's the deal and so I thought well I better dig into this I mean I you know I've got credibility issues right I mean I don't want to so it's just a bunch of wacky's talking about crazy right so that's my first suspicion right so I even went back and forth with him well how is this thing being funded right what is your motivation what's the agenda what's this about right and I couldn't find the hidden agenda and I couldn't find all right they was a subversive aboutness and and then so then I then what you do you know again it's like how do you how do you discover if something is legit well you look at who else is involved all right so I started looking at other participants and I researched them on the web right so who are these people and I know if new a few of the names and I knew some of the titles of the books and and and said well god you know it's uh this is this is a credible group right and and I didn't I don't know that much about health I do know about the environment so that's where I focused my energies in terms of credibility and you know are there so someone asked me was pretty funny I said what is this conference and I said well you know there there's sort of like three places in the world right there's the wacky fringe all right and I don't really want to be associated with the wacky fringe all right and then there's the the dangerous status quo all right and then there's this dynamic thing in the middle some are a little closer to the Waikiki 400 saw more a little closer to convention but they're asking some hard questions you know there's a there's a publication in the Rocky Mountain region called high country news right and they they pitched themselves as news from the radical Center and so I mean it's so it struck me that you know these are people asking some really interesting questions or coming up with some really interesting answers and would I buy it all no but do I am I intrigued deeply all right are they raising interesting questions yes and then you know this semester I'm actually teaching a seminar on free speech and censorship right and so you know go back to some introductory remarks that I had in you know the opening I talked about real truth right and I said so does anyone have the real truth I said come on for the health way too complicated the environment way too complicated none of us have their real truth if by that we mean the whole truth right none of us has got the whole truth this stuff's way too complicated all right the people at this conference of the the real truth now do they have some really important partial truths that we've not been hearing oh you bet you bet and you know John Stuart Mill talked about free speech he said well well you know why do we want free speech and he's the you know he's credit with this notion the marketplace of ideas but but he also had this idea that suppose everybody at this conference is mistaken suppose they're wrong right turns out that the status quo the conventional norms of health environment turns out they're right Mill would say great that's fine first of all we can't know it all right because we don't know what the truth is and secondly even if we did know it and this is important even if we did know it he said the truth becomes a dead dog no when it's not challenged because it it isn't a truth that I have invested in it's simply a truth that I believe passively he said so the truth right has to always be challenged right and so I don't think that most of the things I've heard are wrong as a matter of fact I think most of them are pretty right headed but even if they were it wouldn't matter this conference would be absolutely vital because it keeps the notion of us being responsible for understanding the truth alive right we become participants not passive consumers of other people's truths you know that's why I said you know I really think the work of this conference it's not on the stage it's in the audience that's what it's about it's about giving people right the information the ideas the challenges so that they can reflect on their beliefs they can critically think about what they're being told and if they come away from this conference not believing anything that was said all right but four but thinking deeply about the things they believe before they came here then that's a success because the truth right is of their making not of their passive acceptance so so when you think of it in that frame and you think as I understand that I've not been told there's anything I can or that I must say or can't say then this is what the marketplace of ideas is about this is the opportunity for us to to to be in conversation with one another about about all the partial truths that we bring together and somehow approximate a little bit better all right what the real truth might be [Music] you [Music]