Joe Rogan Experience #593 — Josh Fox Transcript

Transcript

0:00 Hey everybody my guest today if you've ever seen the movie Gasland or Gasland 2 the man that get really aggressive about like debunking your claims or calling you a liar or calling you fraudulent. It's a pro-oil lobby echo chamber. And that's been a sustained campaign or something like that. it because it's loss of product. So when that oil or gas leaks out the side of their gas wells or

3:42 Yep. So to go out there and do this kind of vicious attack campaign against the films is just that. Yeah, but I mean financial benefits to communities that employ these people. And you see that I just flew from Houston to L.A. Apocalyptic. of land where a house is if that if you knew that's all that's And what they're discovering is that methane is, you know, about 80 to 100 times more potent than CO2 is in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, as a warming agent. So it's like if CO2 is one blanket,

7:50 you know, is on a par or way worse than coal in terms of effects for climate. But what I'm saying And if you never changed your technology, well, that's the same stuff. Now, when you see these responses to your documentary, And that was the first in a series of about 10 articles by Ian Urbina. water supplies, that it was radioactive. If it was the film review, I don't read reviews.

10:39 not the truth. They were extraordinarily cautious about doing this over a period of seven years. Period. End of story. It's crazy. It's called The Sky is Pink, and that's at pinkskyny.com. And the oil industry says, no, the sky is actually pink. And this was the tobacco industry's strategy for decades, and it worked. They're saying that it's a natural sort of state that constantly,

14:50 this level. Now you're seeing one come out a day and 98% of them are saying there are health effects the media where anybody can say anything and it goes untested, right? would be useful in terms of movement. Now, why do I have so many fans? It's because you got your kids are going to be living in an area that's potentially unsafe, then you're going to hold up these films as something which are groundbreaking and that are helpful to you. where the oil and gas industry has a bajillion times more resources than you do, right,

18:02 what did you think when you were making this and nobody it's no big deal it goes along with that whole climate denial sort of right-wing energy structures and political structures and economic structures, you know, what the answer is, the underpinning of a lot of those values is you have to deny climate change. it's kind of sad you know um because now you've got people with cell phones in their pockets

21:27 And yet when it comes to the other effects of fracking contamination, climate change, all of these things, all of a sudden science can't, doesn't matter. He's a different dude, huh? And I think that, you know, or when you look at something like Fritjof Capra's work, The Tao of Physics, when you're looking at, you know, extreme Eastern philosophies and how they connect with what physicists are doing at the deepest level.

23:18 HBO and their lawyers checked out, Well, that's kind of— My legal advice that we got through the... and find out how much they actually knew. And then they started to attack the Oscars. Yeah. It was kind of nice to get attacked. Glenn Beck's going after you. That of lined up and said some stuff. Glenn Beck? Yeah. your life should be judged by the measure of your enemies.

25:41 It's sad. Okay. between the United States and China, China committed to building 800 to 1000 gigawatts A hundred million dollars a day just looking for new oil and gas. Out of a lot of companies, right? Like at two degrees, you lose 30% of the species on the planet. we're allowed to burn. So they're looking for more, right? They're spending $100,000 a day looking for more.

30:14 and because they know that if they keep going right now, they're fine. Recently he just did. Do you see what I'm trying to get at here? to live the life that we're living, to power our cities. to be a hypocrite i didn't want to say oh well well, we can't do this because it's in my backyard, you know. So myself and the wonderful actor Mark Ruffalo and some

32:54 together, you would solve the intermittency problem up to something like 95%. So when the sun is not For all purposes, transportation, everything. You're talking about technology that exists today. Brake dust. A lot of it's asbestos, right? of cabs back and forth, stop and go traffic, they're just braking constantly, braking. Well, I mean, I live at least half the time in my house in Pennsylvania, which is where, you know.

36:02 system that brings water to 15 million people in New York City, in Philadelphia, and southern New Jersey. and New York both said we're unsure about this. They just left 100,000 acres worth of lease. Like you had a six-year environmental impact study. Universities have to do that. that they're injecting chemicals into the ground and into the air. So that's a huge preponderance of evidence that they're not safe, that they can never be safe, that they're injecting chemicals into the ground and into the air.

38:59 Yeah, so I've been there. It's fantastic. You can treat the water once it comes to the surface, but getting the contaminants that What does that mean? The theory several decades ago was if we inject it deep enough, like Nevada does with nuclear waste. Right. They just sort of stick it in the mountain. And the theory several decades discovering, and there's a

41:04 That water travels under the ground. He said, you know, look, this is a terrible policy. It's like in Poltergeist when they build the whole subdivision on the Indian burial ground and wastewater and other fracking fluids and stuff, they spilled 16 million gallons, spilling more oil, gas, and wastewater by a third than the Exxon Valdez spill. It's worth billions and billions and billions of dollars per year

44:46 everything. And that there has to be some sort of acknowledgement and recognition of this. And If you go back- There was no fracking. method to get in and start extracting at a certain point in time that it's gonna fuck up everything like if it goes on But I feel like I had no choice. The reason is because people are trying. It's about how people fight in general.

48:14 And all of a sudden, everyone's on the front line. And we have an amazing convergence of purpose, I think. When you look at people in the fracking movement, look at people who are in the climate change movement, look at people who are fighting coal, or people who are basically When you look at the black neighborhoods that are near coal-fired power plants or in bad,

50:17 Someone else's might have been Eric Garner's death and going, oh, wow, this man might have survived had he not had asthma, had that not or from California or New York, you're immediately in a sort of kinship situation where now your So we kind of like went to the Pennsylvania of the Amazon and to the New York. These people are, oxygen. If you've seen Inconvenient Truth, you see Al Gore's line that staggers up and down.

53:05 you know, what is really the point, right? Is it just to consume as much as we possibly can and And so, by the way, is the banking industry. America is an oligarchy currently, And if you look back in history, well, could you really say that America was a democracy when black people couldn't vote, when women couldn't vote? We did lobbying. We made movies. We made protests.

56:05 Whether your entrance point is Occupy Wall Street, looking at banking, your entrance point is environmentalism. Your entrance in history, that these old systems that were in place where they kind of deny facts or distort truths or keep extracting money and keep certain structures, influential structures That's kind of scary. Like when you were talking about the seven year study that New York state, this exhaustive

58:26 A lot of digging. thing when they did their scoping process on fracking. So it wasn't just government people recorded pre-fracking on one of these environmental impact studies was a thousand. which is part of the point, but it also meant that this issue was so important to people that they actually did public comments on an environmental impact study and went out.

1:00:52 And how do we address them? the allowing of fracking, the allowing of environmentally damaging extraction methods? They're going crazy. Mad Max. Those kinds of things go up. Because they're flaring off, guess what? The gas on the site will be burned off. First of all, because it's explosive. Look at the photos. So you have like, oh, it's behind. Yeah, there you go.

1:03:15 But NASA was like, wait a minute, what is that? they when they inject the water and the chemicals into the gas wells to they need fresh sand to keep an epidemic of really serious illnesses among the fracking workers whether they're in pennsylvania term effects. The great Theo Colborne, who just passed away a couple weeks ago, who was one of my teachers, she was in her late 80s. She discovered all the fracking chemicals. She started off

1:06:05 Don't breathe it in. This is immediate. exempt. You're oil field exempt, which means you can travel six hours to get to your oil well, of mine's close friend, the truck flipped over, killed the person in the driver's seat and the person in the passenger seat was not killed. they get it all over themselves and and then other But you always hear about people violating those,

1:09:08 I mean, that guy was driving more than the limit, more than what he was supposed to do, The oil and gas in the fracking industry is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act. environmental laws, the Clean Water Act, which is about surface water, the Clean Air Act, which is what Obama administration So that's why you have this huge amount of offshore drilling on the Gulf of Mexico and not, for example, on the Atlantic coast.

1:11:35 How the fuck does that continue? people jump off into the water. But you also get the history right there of how all this stuff the tools to develop renewable energy at a grassroots level in the people's hands. Here's the resources for it. I think we're going to be doing that in February grassroots energy movement towards getting ourselves off fossil fuels. Because, you know,

1:15:21 state. There's a company called Ethical Electric that we have a link to at our website, solutionsgrassroots.com. that's just going off the rails. You do, but I have to believe- The tar sands, for example, in Canada, which you mentioned, the Keystone XL pipeline, this is another unconventional source. So without a doubt, we have to rule out unconventional new sources of these

1:17:24 but i think oil change or i mean I might have it on my phone. so many people have a vested financial interest We can also point to the Obama campaign in 2008. It's this incredible grassroots mobilization. totally addicted to oil and gas. you, They thought this was a game changer live in one of these areas. And that's the bottom line. And you have enough people who

1:20:55 So you get much more jobs out of doing renewable energy. It's just the math. Like that's not, They're called man camps. You don't want to live in a man camp. You don't want to live in a man But at a certain point, you have to have a moral standard. you can't and and the truth is that a lot of that land is um first nations land um you know and uh For all of them, including the fleet of 300 million cars.

1:23:25 which very very sparsely populated and you can actually do farming in wind at the same time you Unlimited, completely sustainable. You're not going to tap the wind. And when you think about where the resource is at, the offshore off of the North Atlantic coast, you have an enormous wind resource in the North Atlantic. It's all of them. In fact, there's a study also by Mark Jacobson that suggests huge amounts of offshore wind turbines actually dampen hurricane winds.

1:26:11 But this is the future. out of that. So we're going to have trouble. We have to start to move in a direction where we're working together a bit more. Like, that's weird, man. And look, if it was up to Coca-Cola, they would just sell you every last drop. I think over and over again, They've already done it. You go to the ocean to fill up... like the Tesla, all the stuff that Elon Musk is putting out.

1:29:49 to make one that's under And I'm always like, and you're rich. Like a real, yeah, you can get a car for way less. For like a real. Wait, what? What's wrong? No. What are you doing? Wait, what? Who are you? No. Why are you driving it? What are you. I'm not the one not making sense. The camera is watching how much money you're not spending on gas because you can see how much gas mileage you're getting on their little onboard computer.

1:32:41 What is that? These cars are boring. Well, the 70s, it became weird because of the gas crisis. I had a 1979 T-Bird with T-tops. phenomenal i called it the emerald city yeah t-tops kind of went away man t-tops are awesome Why, Oh, i mean it's uh three something three seconds you know and this is the new one that's all-wheel Well, what they're doing is just creating like, I'm a huge fan of engineering.

1:35:37 That's the car right there. Beautiful car. The shape is awesome, but 100 miles. I mean, looking, too. It looks like a 60s... Yeah, it's beautiful. Aston Martin or something. Yeah, it's beautiful. Beautiful car. I mean, like, there's nothing more exciting to me. trains that take us from LA to New York? Well, again, Elon Musk is working on that right now.

1:37:35 And I think you're a medium-sized European country. Those are going to be polar routes. Yeah. It's a big issue, no question. downstream from something. But you're absolutely 100% right. Solar panel manufacturing, wind We want to export the gas even if we don't use the gas here. regulation on environments like look at what the fuck is going on in china when you see these cities

1:41:58 But China just made You know you go to a place like Boulder that doesn't let anybody build in the mountains like they have a very strict No. I'm very – I have – I'm not going to say I'm optimistic because I don't really know Right. are waking up and realizing that we're involved in this society that really hasn't been thought I'm not an expert on that, for sure.

1:46:44 That's what we need to do. Oh, yeah. remarkable is people starting to win well it's just information information becomes undeniable it seems like that's the hold-up well that was the question of gasoline part two which is that And what we found was really startling. to deal with this climate crisis from the standpoint of all these systems in place.

1:50:02 And I think ultimately more fulfilling. if you're depressed, you're not doing enough. this community in the Amazon of a thousand people Whoa. Watching you porn. There's no way around it. organization called Allianz Arcana. set any of this up yet, but what I'm going to try to do with the release of the new film, Gaslandinthemovie.com and you put in your zip code, you could find the fracking organizations

1:54:09 we're going to try to connect our audience to it. You get these three minute fucking spews, you know, and there's two heads on two different frames and one, you know, Fox News person who's I won't debate people who have no credibility. Who's that? And he refused to talk to me in written debate. But what the oil and gas industry has done is create these PR firms.

1:56:14 and another one in Arkansas. So they lose every time. I mean, unfortunately, in these types of scenarios, it kind of gets a little egg-heady and boring to explain the science. And it's like, who talks over people the loudest? And he's always on these Occupy Wall Street things. We're cool. And it's a skill that you have to develop. i'm a theater director and a playwright and a filmmaker well i'm looking at your fingernails

1:59:50 thousands of other subjects that you could use to branch off of this that they recognize that you care. or at their place in, I don't know, Pennsylvania or somewhere. don't know what my life would be like if i didn't have these people's friendship and their camaraderie He's lost his eyebrows. It's really weird. several generation farm in Wyoming, You know, Calvin Tillman, for example, the mayor of Dish, Texas, they have a percentage of the mineral rights sometimes they don't um you know uh calvin

2:03:31 Well, he was worried about his kids getting nosebleeds. He had two sons, and his wife says, And these are directly attributed to these chemicals? And a lot of people have been, he goes down the street and would point gasoline to him and says, You get to the best case scenario. year old kid consent this is what my question was. That person, a representative of that family, said to me, hypothetically, forget my meaning,

2:07:48 the government can't tell you you can never speak about this when Henry Waxman was doing an inquiry into fracking, because, I mean, well, when the Democrats were in the majority, Let's have people testify in Congress of what's happening to them with oil and gas Something like gas and oil. It's creepy that that's a practice. Because most of those court settlements don't have any admission of wrongdoing.

2:10:20 I mean, I asked, there's a case in Gasland Part 2 in Texas where the EPA was enforcing an imminent and substantial endangerment order. was going to outspend the government on legal fees. So we simply couldn't afford, Because you can just take motion after motion and tie things up in court Well, you must be so happy about that. live skype from the from the amazon did you film the text coming in? I filmed them the next day.

2:13:22 And all of a sudden, like my phone, no way Yeah, you know what I mean? The idea that New York mattered enormously, Now, do I think that there are certain places that we should focus on because we have a chance, you know, where we actually have viable energy? Absolutely. Is that part of the platform that he ran on? That's a big problem. But we're going to allow it in the Susquehanna River Basin or in the Allegheny River Basin.

2:16:48 Harrisburg is all, that's Rush Limbaugh country. Ed Rendell, governor of PA pa former governor of pa who opened You know, talk about fracking from a progressive standpoint, So you have this strange bedfellows thing happening People get trapped in this one sort of team mentality. Those kinds of mindsets. among people who are in rural areas who are poorer

2:20:49 Ronald Reagan tattoo. Has there been, like, some weird moments? and they ran ads, I quit smoking. and everything. A long time ago. this in person in in any kind of public forum um i mean when you're in the theater and you're a of course right so you don't want to give any fodder for that um you know did i quit smoking Say it. We have one curse in Gasland and it's worth it and one in Gasland too.

2:24:39 You know, it's one of those things that I think a lot of people really get into that. I think it's, the more I like to think of it more as that these films were a vehicle for people to start to understand what was happening to each other. So they're not all progressive lefty type folks. I don't want to see these places that I love destroyed. No, absolutely.

2:26:50 fracking fluids out into a field, Halliburton trucks. Oil field fails on Facebook? Yeah, see, there's a broken, there's a truck that's fallen off the road, another truck that's fallen off the road. Yeah, me neither. It's confusing. You're burning unrefined gas, which also has a lot of other stuff in it besides just methane. Yeah, I've heard it's really good as well.

2:29:07 I think it's interesting. they talk about all sorts of things, but they lock on to those conservative ideals, those to do is heed what science is saying to you. And science is saying very decisively at this point, object of witchcraft, then you must deal with the fact that you're wrong. The Twitter page is