We weren’t planning on making the Green New Deal a weekly item on our podcast. Then a video of Senator Dianne Feinstein dropped over the weekend, where she appears to lecture climate-protesting kids. It set off a chain reaction of outrage.

The social media fervor has since died down, but some really interesting journalism was left in its wake. This whole affair highlighted the crazy upheaval in climate politics. On The Energy Gang this week, we’re going to tackle some of the bigger questions raised. 

Are kids a legitimate constituency? What makes climate politics so different from other issues? Are climate delayers as bad as climate deniers? What’s the endgame for Democrats?

Then, another ethics conflict for Trump’s energy people. We’ll talk about an EPA official who worked with a secretive utility group that lobbies against air pollution regulations, just months before he took a role regulating air pollution. 

Zack Colman of Politico joins us to talk about the ties he uncovered. What do they tell us about the state of lobbying ethics and utility power in the nation’s capital?

Don’t forget about our live show on April 4 at the MIT Energy Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Listeners get 10% off using the code “energygang” when they buy a ticket. 

Read along with us:

  • The New Yorker: The Hard Lessons of Dianne Feinstein’s Encounter With the Young Green New Deal Activists
  • Axios: Dianne Feinstein's Green New Deal Video Basically Explains the Debate on Fighting Climate Change
  • Atlantic: Dianne Feinstein Doesn’t Need a Do-Over
  • Politico: Documents Detail Multimillion-Dollar Ties Involving EPA Official, Secretive Industry Group

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We're also brought to you by Wunder Capital. Listen to our careers episode produced with Wunder Capital. We talked with Wunder CTO Dave Riess about the framework he used to completely change his career path into solar — eventually co-founding a successful company. Listen to that episode in The Interchange feed or find it here.