Can you just start by telling us more about Heated, why you decided to focus your attention on climate change with the substack?

Yeah, absolutely.

So Heated is a publication that is for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis.

That's the tagline for it.

Perfect.

And I branded it that way because I made it when I was pissed off about the climate crisis.

I started it about six years into my climate reporting career.

you know,

What do you say?

Well, it's interesting.

You know, I've, I've, I've so many different ways to answer this question.

I've actually written a whole article about-- It's called "What Can I Do?" Anything, um, and by anything I really mean anything that contributes to any systemic solution.

So I, I've already talked about, like, there's one massive systemic solution which is, um, you know, which is about the arrangement of fossil fuels and profits.

But there are so many large sources of climate pollution, um, in the world.

And so, you know, fossil fuels is not just, is the, not the only one.

Is there any basis for this? Uh, you know, what's her background? Does she have an ex- any expertise in it? It, you, like you really looked into it extremely thoroughly.

[laughs]

You know, before Biden was in office, we were in a really dismal state with climate policies.

We had really passed nothing huge on a federal level to spur renewable energy development, and the one good thing you can say about Biden on a climate level is that he did spearhead and sign the Inflation Reduction Act, which put hundreds of billions of dollars, if not billions, I'm not sure off the top of my head, but into spurring the clean energy development in the United States.

Only one candidate has pledged to roll all those policies back, and it's Trump.

While in conversation with oil and gas industry donors, telling him that he would roll all those policies back in exchange for a billion-dollar donation from them, and then after that meeting started seeing a bunch of influx of donations from the oil and gas industry.

I covered the first Trump administration.

I don't think that Trump would need a billion dollars from the oil and gas industry to roll back all those policies, because I covered that administration, and that is all he did the entire four years he was in office.

So Will in Wisconsin asked: What can small cities do to improve their climate impact, even if residents don't highly value climate solutions?

brain was

the fact that none of the horrors that we're witnessing today would be possible without big oil, without big oil dollars in government.

The fossil fuel industry was one of, if not the largest corporate backer of Trump's return to power.

We don't know exactly how much money they gave them because of the horrific dark money laws that we have, but we know that they gave at least $75 million to his campaign and PACs and at least $20 million to his inaugural fund.

The fossil fuel industry was also one of the biggest donors to Republicans in 2022 and 2024.

They're one of the main reasons that we have a Republican majority in both houses of Congress.

They are the reason we have a political movement that is openly hostile to Democratic norms.

was exactly the same playbook.

(laughs)

But this is, this is a subject that sort of demands tireless reporting, so yeah, happy to start with there.

You know what I think that I think most people get wrong about the data center conversation is that most people, I think, think that the biggest water problem is from cooling the data centers 'cause, you know, they need...

These, like, huge buildings that are full of, like, very hot computer processors need water to cool them down, and it is a huge problem, right? But one of the more surprising things that I've learned recently in my reporting is that the vast majority of the water use, the reason why, you know, there are those studies that say, like, "It...

You know, a long conversation uses a bottle of water," that's mostly because of power generation.

That's because of all of the water needed to cool, like, a natural gas power plant that is powering the data center.

So yeah, the data centers need, like, a ton of water to cool the servers, but they also need a ton of water because they're all being powered by gas, which is so interesting because that's a problem that is solvable if you were using not fossil fuels to power the data centers.

And what does he think?