Michael Thomas and Distilled

I mentioned Dave Roberts' Volts podcast once before, and since then I've been managing to catch almost every episode. 

The most recent one is called The right-wing groups behind renewable energy misinformation. Independent journalist Michael Thomas recently spent a number of months investigating supposedly separate groups that exist to oppose solar and wind projects and found the common threads among them. It's tied into the kind of efforts Jane Mayer described so thoroughly in her book Dark Money.

Thomas has his own online newsletter, called Distilled, where he writes about his findings, including what he found about the work of John Droz, Jr., who has trained groups around the country in how to stop renewable energy projects. If you ever thought one person couldn't make a difference... well, this should change your mind. (Though being backed by a bunch of billionaire dollars helps.)

Near the end of the Volts podcast, Roberts and Thomas discuss how fear and opposition to change are always easier to motivate (not only from the right but also from left, such as with pipelines), and why it is there isn't similar funding of pro-renewable energy causes and intellectual infrastructure.

Thomas mentions a comedian named Rollie Williams who has a YouTube channel called Climate Town that gets hundreds of thousands of views, like this one about gas stoves.

It's not that there aren't people doing creative work for the left, Roberts says: it's that their work goes under-recognized relative to right-wing work because it doesn't pick up funding. The right has created an entire ecosystem, more vertically integrated every year, as the oil money flows to it. From pre-K to law school to politicians to the Supreme Court. 

There is money out there from lefty billionaires, Roberts insists, but they don't spend it in ways that can counter the right's efforts.

There's a lot more in the podcast episode, including mentions of PragerU (it's a nonprofit!), ALEC, and many other generic-sounding "public policy" organizations with names you will have trouble remembering.