Transcript exported from the video version of this episode - Note that it has not been copyedited

00:00:00:01 - 00:00:24:06
Grant Ennis
So we do spend a lot of time as advocates demanding change in one way or another. And it's important to recognize that there's there is actually one. One target that we should be focusing on. It is political change. It's political action. And we're we're very easily have our energies diluted when we go after the CEO of a company or corporations themselves.

00:00:24:08 - 00:00:35:23
Grant Ennis
That's because corporations and CEOs respond. And I don't mean to be apologetic to them, but this is the state of the world. They respond to incentives. They respond to government policy.

00:00:35:25 - 00:01:01:23
John Simmerman
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Active Towns Channel. I'm John Simmerman. And that is Grant Ennis author of the new book Dark PR How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment. We're going to be talking about how organizations, industries, institutions use nine different devious framing techniques to keep us focused on other things other than changing political structure.

00:01:02:00 - 00:01:16:26
John Simmerman
It's fascinating. It's a long one, so let's get right to it. With Grant in us. Grant, it's a pleasure seeing you once again. Thank you for joining me on the Active Towns podcast.

00:01:16:29 - 00:01:19:10
Grant Ennis
Pleasure to be here, John. Thanks a lot for having me.

00:01:19:13 - 00:01:25:06
John Simmerman
So Grant, I'd love to have you just sort of share with the audience a little bit about yourself. So who is Grant in us?

00:01:25:11 - 00:01:59:01
Grant Ennis
I'm a lifelong NGO worker. I've worked around the world in Iraq, throughout Asia. They'd work in Latin America and Africa, mainly focused on working with governments. And I've seen quite a lot of work by corporations throughout my career to influence government policy in ways that really harm public health, harm the environment. And that became the focus of a book that I recently published by the Roger Press called Dark PR How Corporations Work How Corporate Disinformation Undermines Our Health and the Environment.

00:01:59:07 - 00:02:02:29
Grant Ennis
We did quite a lot of title changes towards the end there.

00:02:03:01 - 00:02:23:18
John Simmerman
And I love and I love this. If I can just jump in and say, you know, I love the fact that my good friend Peter Norton is right on the front, necessary and important. And I think that's how you and I got connected, was you and Peter. Peter maybe was like amplifying something that you had said out on LinkedIn and we got connected.

00:02:23:18 - 00:02:29:27
John Simmerman
You reached out to me and I'm so glad that you did. So where are you joining us from?

00:02:29:29 - 00:02:40:13
Grant Ennis
I'm in Paris right now. I moved here recently, not not because of the the great urban landscape and the work of Hidalgo, but it's definitely a big plus. It's a beautiful city.

00:02:40:15 - 00:02:47:26
John Simmerman
Fantastic. Okay, so. Oh, yeah, great. Another American living in Paris.

00:02:47:29 - 00:02:50:00
Grant Ennis
Hopefully I can get a TV show.

00:02:50:02 - 00:02:51:14
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

00:02:51:19 - 00:03:13:10
John Simmerman
And I laughed in jest jokingly, because I'm producing a lot of videos right now of me in Paris. So I'm like, reliving the fact that I spent a couple of days there in November. So it's been wonderful, you know, dipping back into that video, all that I shot and getting that out. So I know you've been sort of following along that I've been putting those videos out.

00:03:13:10 - 00:03:15:00
John Simmerman
So that's good stuff.

00:03:15:02 - 00:03:21:13
Grant Ennis
I've been watching your slow rides to see if I can see my house and them. I haven't so far in so far.

00:03:21:16 - 00:03:22:25
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. No.

00:03:22:26 - 00:03:24:18
John Simmerman
What part of Paris are you in?

00:03:24:20 - 00:03:27:16
Grant Ennis
I'm in the 10th. I'm near the 10th London.

00:03:27:18 - 00:03:51:04
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. That's. That's great. Yeah, it's. I try every time I go back to Paris I try to stay in a different era and dismount so I can get, you know, a different kind of feel for the different areas. And it's all good stuff. All right, cool. Well, we are going to dive into to this book because this is a really powerful book and it's a really important book.

00:03:51:04 - 00:04:21:23
John Simmerman
I've been trying to share this with all my friends and colleagues doing work in active mobility and urbanism, because I think that this is probably one of the most important and most impactful texts to come out in in a long time. And part of the reason is because it really gets into our core challenge, gets right to the matter, which means we have to go right to the top.

00:04:21:25 - 00:04:44:11
John Simmerman
And I'm going to put you know, I'm going to just say this upfront for all the listeners and all the viewers of this episode. Hang with us. You might get triggered at some point in time because some of the things that we're going to talk about and some of the framing that comes out of this and I'll let you talk more about framing what that really means.

00:04:44:13 - 00:05:12:06
John Simmerman
It really starts to get to the heart of the matter in terms of how we've been duped. So with that is as sort of a a a caveat and a warning for our our listeners and our viewers. Talk a little bit about just from a, you know, a 30,000 foot level, what you mean by dark PR. I mean, we've got the subtext right here, how corporate disinformation undermines our health and the environment.

00:05:12:08 - 00:05:18:16
John Simmerman
And the next slide we're going to go to is going to get to those frames. So go ahead and just give that 30,000 foot level.

00:05:18:18 - 00:05:48:09
Grant Ennis
So dark PR, the title I chose for this book after a lot of deliberation because a lot of books have covered propaganda and framing and different kinds of spin and PR over the years, but I'm covering the ways that we are already subsidizing the policies whereby we're already subsidizing large scale public health and environmental problems like global warming, the diabetes disaster facing the earth and and road deaths.

00:05:48:11 - 00:06:16:06
Grant Ennis
We are subsidizing these these problems. And then the companies and industries profiting from these problems are throwing dark PR at us. They are using disinformation in order to distract us from meaningful solutions, namely ending the subsidies that they're profiting from. Right. That's the 303,000 foot lens.

00:06:16:13 - 00:06:33:27
John Simmerman
I love it. And part of what you're talking about here, you know, talks about these nine devious frames. And I think I remember a previous interview that you did where, you know, it was tempted to to title the book, The nine Lies.

00:06:34:00 - 00:06:36:24
John Simmerman
So, you know, because it really is this.

00:06:36:24 - 00:06:47:19
John Simmerman
Is this is cool. But before we dive into like these nine different devious frames, talk a little bit about what do you mean by subsidy?

00:06:47:21 - 00:07:22:06
Grant Ennis
So subsidies are a name or a word that can be triggering for some people in some of the ways that it's used or in the ways that people claim subsidies exists. A subsidy is any kind of way that government policy incentivizes corporation and those can be monetized. So the international Monetary Fund, for example, looks at all of the different ways that corporate and state government policies are incentivizing fossil fuel extraction.

00:07:22:08 - 00:07:49:01
Grant Ennis
Right. There is a guy at at the University of California, Davis, named Mark Delucchi, who's done a great job over the years of tallying exactly how much money is spent by the U.S. government to subsidize driving. And it comes to something between 5000 and $14,000 per person per year. Even for the people that don't drive like kids, the numbers are astronomical.

00:07:49:03 - 00:08:13:12
John Simmerman
And as an example, as an example, if you'll let me kind of intervene, I pulled up a slide here, which I think gets right to what we're talking about in like a few bullet points in terms of current subsidies for road builders. And that'll that'll really hit home, I think, with the audience here. So talk a little bit about, you know, with that in the context I mean this is how the this is what we mean by subsidies.

00:08:13:14 - 00:08:47:25
Grant Ennis
Yeah. So you got parking minimums and so you got you have two different kinds of urban planning problems that are created by these subsidies. One is the absence of density and the other one is the absence of mixed use. So for density, where we ban density, density is illegal. So we're disincentivizing it through subsidies. Parking minimums are one where governments make it so that a given city has to build a certain amount of parking per person or per anticipated customer.

00:08:47:27 - 00:08:53:16
Grant Ennis
And Donald Shoup is the man that knows all about this. I don't often on the show already, but.

00:08:53:19 - 00:08:54:06
John Simmerman
Yeah, I'm.

00:08:54:06 - 00:09:24:03
Grant Ennis
Saying, well, he's well known. Minimum road widths subsidize like the concrete industry. When you make roads a certain width by law that's that's to the benefit of the road industry that those rents be wider. So there's a huge incentive there for the road industry to lobby for that kind of thing. Same with parking minimums, minimum lot sizes, the minimum distance between the front door of your house and the street height limits, you name it, there's there's a laundry list of density subsidies.

00:09:24:08 - 00:09:44:17
Grant Ennis
So when people think of single family homes, you often hear that people want them, that that's the choice. But in fact, there's not much of a choice, right? Single family homes are subsidized and mandated by law. And similarly with bans on mixed use, single family zoning means that you can't walk to where you need to get to. It's the opposite of the 15 minute city.

00:09:44:19 - 00:10:31:20
John Simmerman
Yeah, Yeah, exactly. I appreciate you doing that. And we can a little bit went out of order, but I really wanted to make sure that we kind of addressed the fact that, yes, it's more it broader, there's more nuance when we talk about subsidies. It's really the policies at the highest level within our governments that are, you know, preventing things, certain things from happening and banning certain things from happening, incentivize housing, other things from happening, as well as outright giving money, because there are those subsidies that are literal actual cash being provided from the government to industry, you know, to be able to prop up said industry and and maybe try to stave off an

00:10:31:20 - 00:11:01:13
John Simmerman
economic meltdown. And we can think of some big name examples of of, you know, governments doing that whether you know, that's like propping up the agriculture industry or propping up the oil and gas industry or releasing strategic reserves from oil. These are all things that help to artificially keep the price lower so that we can kind of keep that, you know, car addiction, car dependency moving along and chugging along and not going.

00:11:01:13 - 00:11:34:01
John Simmerman
So I just wanted to make sure that we kind of definitely talked a little bit about that. It's the subsidy. The word subsidies is quite broad in that sense. So, okay, so with that set, let's get right back to what we were talking about here. So for those people who don't really understand or they probably do understand that they may not know or be really super familiar with the use of the term frame, talk a little bit about frames and framing and how that is is manifests itself in spin.

00:11:34:03 - 00:12:03:16
Grant Ennis
Okay. So a classic example of this is pro-life versus pro-choice, death tax versus estate tax. You have these are different ways of framing very important issues. And sometimes they might not actually be issues until somebody creates this framing devices and puts this through a focus group. But it's different ways of portraying the same thing through a rhetorical technique.

00:12:03:18 - 00:12:31:03
John Simmerman
Right? Yeah. Fantastic. Okay. So with that being said, so these are these are public relations PR related manifestations. These are part of the tool book in terms of framing. And you have come up with nine devious frames. Are these nine that you've come up with sort of organically or is this sort of been distilled from other published literature that's out there?

00:12:31:05 - 00:12:56:05
Grant Ennis
This is each each of these individually has been covered and publish large literature ad nauseum. But I, I identified that they were all cross industry and put together this playbook, this, this kind of matrix as you have in front of you. I think a lot of the time people tend to think of these technique techniques as being something that are used only in one industry.

00:12:56:08 - 00:12:56:29
John Simmerman
Right?

00:12:57:02 - 00:13:10:04
Grant Ennis
You know, it's not it's not something that's being used by multiple industries at the same time, where in fact these are being used across multiple industries because the PR firms are the same. So you have to see, do they do work?

00:13:10:04 - 00:13:31:27
John Simmerman
Yeah, they do work across multiple industries. Absolutely. And I'm glad that you did. You pointed that out in your book. You really hone in on three different industries, three different areas of emphasis. We really hone in on the sugar industry and you really hone in on the the motor dump side of things and the road deaths and that side.

00:13:31:27 - 00:13:54:11
John Simmerman
We're going to spend most of our time, you know, in that realm. And you've you've done a good job of of sort of helping frame some of the the discussion framing and some of the discussion along that area, because we've been talking a lot about the road deaths and the car addiction and all that. But then we also have global warming and we have that side of things as well.

00:13:54:11 - 00:14:24:27
John Simmerman
So you've really focused in the book in those three different buckets. But as I was going through the book, I'm thinking, Oh yeah, I mean, big agriculture, similar to to like sugar. Huge, right there, pharmaceutical industry, plenty of it in there. So it's really I mean, this all is happening across all different industry types. You just happened to to focus on these three because I think these three were the ones that a you know, meant something to you personally.

00:14:25:00 - 00:14:30:17
John Simmerman
And, and and it was probably relatively easy to get good examples.

00:14:30:20 - 00:14:33:03
John Simmerman
In each of these buckets.

00:14:33:05 - 00:14:53:25
Grant Ennis
Definitely. And it is more than corporations. You have state sponsored disinformation is the same as you remember when when Russia invaded Ukraine. First they denied they were there at all and then then they post denied they were they were doing something good. They were killing Nazis and then they normalized at the United States. Does it to everybody invades other countries, you know, and etc., etc..

00:14:53:25 - 00:14:59:22
Grant Ennis
It's these are these are things that are used consistently throughout PR.

00:14:59:25 - 00:15:30:17
John Simmerman
So again, you got denialism, post denialism, normalization, silver boomerangs, magic treatment, or, you know, the actual treatment of that you're doing to deal with the situation and then victim blaming knotted web and multifactorial folks that are regular listeners and viewers of this podcast, Many of these are going to be quite familiar to you. But well, let's start off with with denialism.

00:15:30:20 - 00:15:49:12
John Simmerman
You know, this is number one right off the bat. This is what we do is is we just, you know, the very first thing that happens, whether it's a government entity, as you mentioned, like with Russia or an industry, is, oh, yeah, no, that's not true. It's unsettled, that's denialism. Talk a little bit more about.

00:15:49:12 - 00:16:12:03
Grant Ennis
Absolutely. Well, I think we've got a lot of ground to cover. The one point I want to make about denialism is that all too often looking into disinformation and industry efforts, it stops at denialism. And I think that we've got to we've really got to get beyond that. Climate denialism denying that road deaths are a problem, that car dependent problem.

00:16:12:05 - 00:16:17:07
Grant Ennis
That's just a very tip of the iceberg. And we're putting ourselves right. Fixating on it.

00:16:17:08 - 00:16:24:06
John Simmerman
Yeah. If you don't if you don't get past that, then yeah, you're kind of, I pardon the pun, dead in the water.

00:16:24:08 - 00:16:48:05
Grant Ennis
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it's important, but it's there's so much more. I mean, this is a this is from this is a very famous book in the road safety space. It's from like the 1940s. And I can't see on my screen to read that little quote there. But this is a this is an example of denialism. That speed is dangerous, that speed is harmful.

00:16:48:11 - 00:17:09:07
Grant Ennis
And the author in the forties is complaining, comparing it to the big lie, calling it the big lie that they would say like, oh, speed, maybe it's dangerous, but not in all cases. Right right. You know, But yeah, well, in what case you get hit by a speeding car. Do not die. Yeah, it's ludicrous. Yeah. You know, and this is something you're still hearing today by road builders.

00:17:09:14 - 00:17:15:24
Grant Ennis
You're hearing it from the road lobbying. And it's not true.

00:17:15:27 - 00:17:21:10
John Simmerman
I'm getting a good chuckle out of this photo itself because I see that we have our headphones.

00:17:21:12 - 00:17:26:00
John Simmerman
In the background. Nice touch there. I thought.

00:17:26:00 - 00:17:26:14
Grant Ennis
You might catch.

00:17:26:14 - 00:17:28:17
John Simmerman
That. I did catch that.

00:17:28:19 - 00:17:44:06
John Simmerman
I'm pretty sharp like that. So we have the next one is post denialism and this is a brilliant video from 1997. Let's hit let's hit play on this and see what they have to say.

00:17:44:08 - 00:18:11:16
Speaker 4
Presenting the possibilities of plastics. Plastics help save you from dents and broken bones. It helps protect my patella. They help save energy. Then my plastics, fewer trucks, less gas. They help save you from being scrambled. They help save the soda, help food, stay fresher, brussel sprouts, plastic can even help save toddlers from trouble. And this fence helped save my dad's life.

00:18:11:20 - 00:18:15:00
Speaker 4
Plastics make it possible.

00:18:15:03 - 00:18:24:19
John Simmerman
There we go. Post denialism. The this is another version of it. And this one is kind of in your face.

00:18:24:21 - 00:18:50:26
Speaker 4
Hi, I'm Albert Lawrence in sunny Southern California, Here to talk to people about environmental costs. I'm going to find out if people are surprised to learn that plastics actually have less of an environmental cost than alternative materials. Let's go see. I want you to tell me which of these bars, the smaller one or the larger one represents the cost in the environment that using plastic has the orange from the bottom one.

00:18:50:28 - 00:19:01:14
Speaker 4
Good plastic is bad enough. I would say that's just common knowledge. Well, my friend, I am pleasantly here to shock you. Oh my gosh. Plastics actually cost the environment.

00:19:01:14 - 00:19:18:20
John Simmerman
And it continues on and on and on. But really what we're talking about here in this particular playbook is when we're input post denialism is to essentially say that no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. This is actually good for us.

00:19:18:22 - 00:19:40:03
Grant Ennis
Yeah, it's good for us. It's going to make us live longer. I mean, these videos, I remember that plastics advertisement from 97 and I went to go look for it and I was shocked to find that other one from like 2018 or whatever it was then the fact that they're still doing that. And then this I mean, this book that you have there, I, I brought it out here as well.

00:19:40:06 - 00:20:02:20
Grant Ennis
Yeah. It's so it's so disturbing for those of the people that are listening to this. The title of this book is called and this is written by a fossil Fuel Lobbyist The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment, with a subtitle being How Humanity and the Rest of the Biosphere will prosper from this amazing trace gas that so many have wrongfully characterized as a dangerous air pollutant.

00:20:02:23 - 00:20:23:22
Grant Ennis
For me, it's nuts and so easy to it's so easy to think of this as something that's like you just laugh it off because it's ridiculous. But then you go to this next image that I know you have over there, and it's this became Trump industry policy. You know, the Trump administration called fossil fuels molecules of freedom.

00:20:23:24 - 00:20:24:12
John Simmerman
Right?

00:20:24:14 - 00:20:37:06
Grant Ennis
You know, so you can't write this stuff off, this really this stuff. It's called priming. It primes us to believe that even if this kind of stuff is nonsense, it's possible. It leaves the the option out there.

00:20:37:08 - 00:21:02:15
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. And for again, the listening audience, this is basically just a snapshot of a statement here, kind of a pull quote from a Forbes article and basically saying the United States Department of Energy has apparently started referring to fossil fuels as molecules of freedom. Who doesn't want freedom? And it's cold and specifically natural gas as freedom Gas.

00:21:02:17 - 00:21:36:27
John Simmerman
Hey, who doesn't want freedom? I mean, gosh, this is this is America. Are you kidding? So crazy. It is crazy, but it's actually, you know, the reason why some so much of this actually resonates is there's actually, you know, grains of truth in it, you know, in the sense that, yes, you know, fossil fuels, the ability to to do this has has really profoundly changed mankind in our world, in the ability to do things.

00:21:36:27 - 00:21:58:21
John Simmerman
And and and the fact that, you know, yeah, even plastics, plastics are essential in being able to do a lot of things, you know, in terms of being able to they're you know, they're they're very, very frequent in the surgical, you know, environment and the realm. And so we're not saying that any of this is, you know, is just completely evil and bad.

00:21:58:21 - 00:22:23:10
John Simmerman
And we have to go back to the Stone Age. But at the same time, it's gone way overboard to the point where it's it's like literally threatening, you know, our livelihoods and transforming our environments. And so one of the key things that we we need to take a look at and again, this this is one of the post denialism, you know, factors here.

00:22:23:13 - 00:22:42:05
John Simmerman
And I'm seeing that this is zoomed in a little bit too much to list, pulled back on this particular thing. So we can see the title here. We've got safety is being used as the big lie. Again, that word, that terminology, the big lie to sell wider freeways. Talk a little bit more about this.

00:22:42:07 - 00:23:14:21
Grant Ennis
So this is an article by Joe Cortright, who's pretty awesome. I think you probably know him. And this talks about something that I didn't put any other images or content in there for you, but this is something that the fossil fuel industry and the road lobby have been using for over 100 years. The narrative that if you take a road and you make it straighter, you make it wider, you make it any number of things, that in fact makes it much more dangerous because it makes people drive much faster on that road, that it's a quote unquote improvement.

00:23:14:23 - 00:23:36:01
John Simmerman
Right. And this is exactly what's highlighted down below here, is they're trying to sell this particular highway project. It's the Rose Highway or I think that's what it's called, the Zeros in in Portland. And they're selling it because if we do a freeway. Right. Widening, it's a safety enhancement. It's a safety improvement.

00:23:36:03 - 00:23:55:19
Grant Ennis
Totally. And I mean, Peter Norton, I think when you had him on the show, he highlighted something he wrote about not drama, that the smart highways, you know, that's another form of post nihilism that in the U.S., I think that happened in like the sixties. But Boris Johnson, I believe, undertook a smart highways project in the U.K., too.

00:23:55:21 - 00:24:04:29
Grant Ennis
They removed the hard shoulder on these freeways throughout the U.K. They removed the hard shoulder so that when you were driving, your car breaks down, you have nowhere to park.

00:24:05:02 - 00:24:05:17
John Simmerman
Right?

00:24:05:20 - 00:24:09:08
Grant Ennis
Yeah. And they installed cameras and they called it smart highways.

00:24:09:10 - 00:24:23:16
John Simmerman
Yeah. And again, this is this We're still in the post denialism phase here. And and one of the things that this is the normal is that normalization the.

00:24:23:18 - 00:24:27:12
John Simmerman
I'm sorry, this caught me off guard. I was I thought I was going to get.

00:24:27:12 - 00:24:54:28
John Simmerman
The the photo of the the the dagger on the wheel, the the steering. But yeah, I mean, one of one of the biggest challenges is, is what we feel is safety. Oftentimes, you know, causes us to actually behave more dangerously. And and that's one of the key things that I think is is happening. And we see that in you know, we may actually see that later in the boomerang effect.

00:24:54:28 - 00:24:57:09
John Simmerman
So yeah, yeah.

00:24:57:12 - 00:24:57:24
Grant Ennis
Definitely.

00:24:58:01 - 00:25:07:20
John Simmerman
Anyways, normalization. We're here at normalization and this is where we start to get kind of interesting. So what do you mean by normalization?

00:25:07:23 - 00:25:47:03
Grant Ennis
So normalizing normalization is a process by which the problem disappears. You go from no problem in denialism to to good problem with post denialism and then normalization is just it's it disappears not because we're denying it, but because it's it's just how it it's not a problem. That's just how it is. So normalization can sometimes come in the form of it's natural, which is the case with the way that framing research from the late nineties by Frank Luntz, he did a bunch of focus group discussions which we'll see a little clip on how that works in a moment.

00:25:47:06 - 00:25:58:09
Grant Ennis
And he then advised the Bush White House to stop using the word global warming and to say climate change because climate change was more natural and less scary. Yeah.

00:25:58:11 - 00:26:03:18
John Simmerman
Why don't you go ahead and say a few words to set up what we're about to see here in this little video clip.

00:26:03:20 - 00:26:33:12
Grant Ennis
So this is a clip from the film Vice from 2018, which is a movie about Dick Cheney's career, essentially. And this clip shows Dick Cheney participating in It starts out with him participating in a kind of conference or meeting where they're discussing how they're going to reframe the estate tax as a death tax and that it was the result of work by Frank Luntz.

00:26:33:17 - 00:26:42:17
Grant Ennis
And then they show how Frank Luntz runs his focus groups discussions and how he creates the term climate change. So I want to roll the clip.

00:26:42:19 - 00:26:44:01
John Simmerman
Yeah, we we're all the clip.

00:26:44:03 - 00:27:07:09
Speaker 5
Let's go ahead and start with the estate tax now, this has been hard to eliminate because the tax only affects those estates with over 2 million. But we've made strides and marketing guru Frank Luntz is here to help.

00:27:07:12 - 00:27:39:03
Speaker 5
Hello, all. Getting regular people to support cutting taxes on the very wealthy has always been extremely hard. We've had some success in the past, but the estate tax has always been very difficult. However, I think we may have had a breakthrough. Now the estate tax kicks in on anyone inheriting over $2 million. How many of you have a problem with that?

00:27:39:05 - 00:27:49:06
Speaker 5
Okay. How many of you would have a problem with something called a death tax.

00:27:49:08 - 00:27:52:14
Unknown
Instead of global warming.

00:27:52:16 - 00:28:01:05
Speaker 5
Which we all agree sounds very scary. We call it climate change hoax.

00:28:01:11 - 00:28:17:24
Speaker 4
The government is taking your money. After all, the Democrats fight tax cuts for less money to get rid of the death tax. That's what I don't want to get taxed just cause I die. I mean, give me a try to find you something, my kid. I want to pay the tax. I got to pay again cause I like being chastised.

00:28:17:27 - 00:28:24:01
Speaker 4
The death tax has to go. The elite liberals in Washington, the taxes for laughing or crying, if they could.

00:28:24:07 - 00:28:41:23
Speaker 5
Service one of the biggest media and political machines ever created behind them, Cheney was able to squash action on global warming, cut taxes for the super rich and gut regulations for massive corporations.

00:28:41:25 - 00:28:44:22
John Simmerman
Brilliant.

00:28:44:24 - 00:29:24:26
John Simmerman
And here's an example of the normalization of road deaths. Because it's happening. It happens all the time. It's like in in fact, when when you when you kind of are trying to have conversations with people about the need for decreasing the number of casualties on our roadways, in some in some cases, people are just oblivious. They don't even know that, You know, nearly 115 people plus per day die in traffic crashes in the United States, you know, to the tune of about $43 million or 43,000 lives annually.

00:29:24:28 - 00:29:37:24
John Simmerman
And then when they do their if they do know that and they just kind of say, well, yeah, well, it's it's kind of the car, it's normal. I mean, this is this is this is the risk that we take. Talk a little bit more about this normalization effect.

00:29:37:26 - 00:30:12:08
Grant Ennis
Yeah. I mean, you hear people saying it's the cost of progress in these kinds of things. I mean, the it's all this is really the research from Peter Norton, Dr. Pete Norton, when it's just incredible. He wrote this book Fighting Traffic in 2008 and it remains it's had really long legs. It's a it's a very important book. But in do in writing that book, he went deep into the archives and found that the term accident to refer to road deaths was something that was created by the automobile industry, sending pre-written newspaper articles to newspapers.

00:30:12:08 - 00:30:40:11
Grant Ennis
Every time somebody died using the word accident instead of crash, or at the time people were using auto murder and these kinds of more flamboyant terms, there was an effort, just like in the case of changing the the term from climate, from global warming to climate change, there was an effort to change the term collision crash, motor murder or whatever to accident, and that that framing has normalized the problem very successfully.

00:30:40:15 - 00:30:56:27
Grant Ennis
So any talk about road death, people think why is that even a problem? And you have public health people saying that it's a pandemic, a pandemic of road death. You have 1.3 plus million people dying per year and yet who cares about accidents because the framing has been so successful?

00:30:56:29 - 00:31:00:05
John Simmerman
Yeah, and we did have Jesse Singer on the podcast and.

00:31:00:08 - 00:31:00:17
Grant Ennis
Again.

00:31:00:24 - 00:31:29:03
John Simmerman
With her her new book, There Are No Accidents. And so and I do encourage everybody also to go back into the archives. I did interview Peter Norton with his first book, Fighting Traffic. And you're absolutely correct, the research is just really astounding. And in fact, you know, when we he he points out that in the United States, the communities, you know, protested and came out and took to the streets to try to create a safer environment.

00:31:29:05 - 00:31:53:09
John Simmerman
You know, just as we point to in the Netherlands and say in the 1970s, you know, they came out and said, stop the child murdered Ed. And because of a variety of factors, it was successful over there in terms of being a turning point, heading towards more safer streets and roads here in the United States. It was very successfully quashed in part because of these nine dubious frames.

00:31:53:11 - 00:31:58:07
John Simmerman
So talk a little bit about this boomerang effect and the Jevons Paradox.

00:31:58:09 - 00:32:21:11
Grant Ennis
We'll be delighted to before I get deep into it, though, I want to say that the first three frames you look at, we're looking at are all frames that are a little bit easy to understand. The following frames are all proposed solutions after industry can no longer quash dissent by just trying to say the problem isn't a big deal.

00:32:21:14 - 00:32:47:27
Grant Ennis
And I'm not saying here with this section, I'm not suggesting we shouldn't be doing some of the things industry suggesting or talking about. I'm only like, for example, ambulances, which we'll get to in a moment. We definitely need ambulances. We need a lot of things. But that industry uses these framing devices, these techniques to keep our focus away for it from from ending automobile subsidies.

00:32:47:29 - 00:33:17:23
Grant Ennis
Right. So and in that sense, we really can't do both. You can't propose that you vote yes and that you vote no. You know, policy always is a zero sum discussion. So any effort to promote one frame distracts from another. And that's I think that's really important. And so the silver boomerang frame, which we'll get into with the in a moment was famously used by the tobacco industry in order to sell safer cigarets.

00:33:17:26 - 00:33:42:16
Grant Ennis
And so the tobacco industry created this product with the cigaret filter. And what happens with a cigaret filter is you inhale more deeply and you end up actually having just about the same amount of carcinogenic content in your in your lungs. So you get really no gain in the concept behind the Silver Boomerang is it's a frame where the more you you engaged with it, the more you just keep the problem going.

00:33:42:22 - 00:34:16:13
Grant Ennis
You don't actually eliminate it, it boomerangs back on you. And so here for for global warming, that framing is energy efficiency. You know, for for well over a hundred years, industry has been telling us that we don't need to, you know, stop using fossil fuels. We just need to be so efficient that we use less over time. But what happens in Jevons is Stanley Jevons in the 1890s he realized that the more efficient you made a fuel carbon what's it called in a coal power plant, the more coal you just ended up using.

00:34:16:15 - 00:34:23:21
Grant Ennis
And this is called the Jevons Paradox and there's a huge amount of research that I quote in my book to substantiate this.

00:34:23:23 - 00:34:50:08
John Simmerman
That's sort of the basis to induce demand to. We know that if we add additional lanes to a roadway and make driving easier, then more people will drive. There's less friction there. And therefore, that's the reason why, you know, because of the induced demand, we don't see that relief of, oh, let's just add another lane. It goes on to infinitum because you just continue to induce demand.

00:34:50:10 - 00:35:10:25
John Simmerman
But induced demand can be actually done for good too, because we can actually increase the amount of bike parking, we can increase the amount of bike lanes, and that it makes it easier and less there's less friction in that that process, too, to try try to support the positive behavior that we'd like to see.

00:35:10:28 - 00:35:25:27
Grant Ennis
So absolutely. I mean, this is kind of this is exactly what NIMBYs know. In fact, they know if you create a coffee shop or a bar in the middle of their neighborhood, people will go there, right? You know, people will walk to it. And who wants that?

00:35:26:00 - 00:35:48:21
John Simmerman
Yeah, who who wants who wants other people around us? I mean, we're enjoying our isolation. Yeah, we say jest, but we understand that, yes, things you can have the tragedy of the commons where too many people, too too much can happen. And that's part of what gets drummed up in terms of the fear factor and the fear mongering that takes place.

00:35:48:21 - 00:35:56:13
John Simmerman
And we can probably touch upon that a little bit because it's part of the playbook. Oh, here's the photo.

00:35:56:15 - 00:35:56:29
John Simmerman
Yeah, this.

00:35:56:29 - 00:36:20:21
Grant Ennis
Is this is an incredible photo. This is Tulloch. Spike. Yeah. So Dr. Tulloch was a professor, I think, at University of California. You can't recall but famous for inventing this spike, he said this was the most intelligent safety device that could be invented. Because if somebody drove this car, they would be so terrified that they would never crash.

00:36:20:24 - 00:36:45:14
Grant Ennis
And that is the underlying principle between behind risk applied in the opposite. And I don't I don't actually propose that we shouldn't be trying to improve safety technology. I think it would be ridiculous to say we shouldn't be trying to make things safer. I'm only saying that in the end the road deaths are a result of driving and it doesn't.

00:36:45:14 - 00:37:10:12
Grant Ennis
You don't end up really reducing population level road deaths with technological gizmos. And I mean, we do find that I mean, you can go to this next slide. It'll help me to to show this or the next one actually, sorry, I put them in the wrong order. This this is a diagram showing Atlanta versus Barcelona in 1990, but the numbers are actually similar to that.

00:37:10:12 - 00:37:33:13
Grant Ennis
I just didn't have them quite as precise as I do in the book. And what you see from Atlanta from 1990 is they have the same population as Barcelona, but they have what is that, five times as many road deaths. All right. So Barcelona is about what would it be, 1/10 the size or one 5% the size in terms of landmass.

00:37:33:15 - 00:37:57:18
Grant Ennis
And so in Barcelona people can walk, they can cycle, they don't need to drive. And they have 3.1 road deaths per hundred thousand. In Atlanta, you have nearly 15 road deaths per 100,000 as a result of people driving. People need to drive in Atlanta. You have to have a car. It's called forced car ownership or car dependency. And and that's that's just how it is.

00:37:57:21 - 00:38:29:03
Grant Ennis
You don't have a choice in Atlanta. Now, Barcelona and Atlanta don't have wildly different cars. The technology is not so different. To explain this 500% increase in road deaths, it just doesn't work. But all of that said, corporations use technological gadgetry to say they can make cars death proof and say that we just need to wait until safer cars will save us.

00:38:29:05 - 00:38:32:20
Grant Ennis
Safety technology will save us. And if you can go back to that once slide, just.

00:38:32:20 - 00:38:42:24
John Simmerman
Going to say, yeah, that's that's the science promise. And this was a big part of of Peter Norton's second book a Rama to Death.

00:38:42:26 - 00:38:57:17
Grant Ennis
Exactly. I mean this little the screen slides says science promises a future free of traffic accidents. Yeah. And then shows all of these kinds of gizmo cars from the sixties traveling around quite safely, I'm sure. Yeah.

00:38:57:19 - 00:39:06:03
John Simmerman
Yeah. And I think when I had Todd Litman on the podcast, he's like, You know, where's my jetpack? I want my jetpack.

00:39:06:06 - 00:39:09:00
Grant Ennis
Yeah, I'm say as well.

00:39:09:02 - 00:39:09:27
John Simmerman
I'm still waiting.

00:39:10:00 - 00:39:44:19
John Simmerman
I do want to go back to this particular graph of Barcelona. You know, we know the data is a little old. This is 1990. It would actually be interesting to see what the the road deaths per 100,000 population are now in in Barcelona. At this point, it's seeing 3.1 road deaths per 100,000 population. But Barcelona has actually gone through some major transformations to try to make their their street grid even safer because, again, I want to emphasize cars are not banned in Barcelona, but they are managed in Barcelona.

00:39:44:19 - 00:40:23:21
John Simmerman
There is a car plan and they have launched what they're calling the super neo. So the super blocks. And in these nine block grids where the exterior of the of the the roads around the exterior of the super block is a 30 kilometers per hour zone. But interior those those streets are grids of ultra slow speeds. So like seven miles per hour, right around 15 kilometers per hour in the interior in many of those streets, you know, have divers and making sure that, you know, they're not being used by motor vehicles as cut through.

00:40:23:28 - 00:40:42:02
John Simmerman
So it would be interesting to see, you know, we're getting a little bit off topic from from the reason why the slide was there, but that just popped into my head was that it would be interesting and fascinating and maybe unfair because it has had such a profound change in terms of the built environment.

00:40:42:05 - 00:41:02:19
Grant Ennis
Yeah, I think I think there are probably two things going on with that. Not to say is that it's safer now. It's actually I know that it's like 2.5 or something like that. It's gotten safer. I think the reason why the numbers aren't more dramatic is that historically cities haven't been so great and counting road deaths, they've actually improved.

00:41:02:25 - 00:41:11:17
Grant Ennis
So in 1990, in Barcelona and in Atlanta, it was probably higher for each right. But yet when it has gotten safer quite a lot.

00:41:11:17 - 00:41:45:02
John Simmerman
Well, and to your point, too, is that even if the core of of Barcelona where they've they've done the the super blocks is much, much safer. I would be shocked to see any real serious injuries or deaths happening in an environment where the motor vehicle speed is seven miles an hour. But just like the Dutch have seen through their recent analysis, the 50 kilometer streets that they still have, the main roads that are still very a little bit more analogous to our roads.

00:41:45:05 - 00:42:15:10
John Simmerman
Those are the most dangerous streets that they have in their urban environments. And now they're committed to getting rid of all those 50 kilometer per hour streets because the death rates and the serious injuries are unacceptable to them, which gets to sort of their positioning in terms of at the very high level of what they mean by a systematic safety and in structures within their political environment to try to, you know, do a debrief after a fatality and say, no, we need to do better.

00:42:15:10 - 00:42:35:06
John Simmerman
They're trying to hold themselves accountable. So that could also be happening. You know, in in the case of if Barcelona is still seeing 2.5 deaths, deaths per 100,000, I would be thinking that it's got to be out on those dangerous streets, those dangerous roads where speeds are in excess of 30 kilometers per hour.

00:42:35:08 - 00:42:45:03
Grant Ennis
Yeah, I couldn't agree more, couldn't agree more. And just to go back and before we move on from that, we do want safer cars. We want more.

00:42:45:05 - 00:42:46:29
John Simmerman
We're not proposing make safer.

00:42:47:01 - 00:43:14:09
Grant Ennis
No way. And I'm not proposing by any means that we cut investment in safety research or anything like that. But it is important to note this framing is really devious and has distracted us from improving the built environment and reducing vehicle kilometers traveled in the cities where we live. I think the average American city I has a per person rate of 25 miles per person per day.

00:43:14:11 - 00:43:40:04
Grant Ennis
That's again, including children who aren't driving, you know, that's that's a huge amount of of distance traveled to non-mobile every day. And that leads to death. I mean, Todd Lichtman's research is is right on that rune. Alec came out recently with a study that found that 90% of road death reductions in Norway over the last ten years were the result in reductions in vehicle kilometers travel.

00:43:40:06 - 00:43:49:19
Grant Ennis
I mean, that's a huge and important variable that we get distracted by when we focus on technical gadgetry. Oh, yeah.

00:43:49:21 - 00:44:18:18
John Simmerman
And I love just lingering on this shocking, shocking photo. It is gory. I mean, if you if you can just imagine what this is like, it's kind of what driving was like before we had the seatbelts, before we had the safety equipment, before we had airbags. It was it was actually quite scary to be driving because if you did have a crash, if you had a collision, if a mistake happened, there was a very good likelihood that there was going to be serious injury and or death and so, yes, I'm with you.

00:44:18:18 - 00:44:41:03
John Simmerman
I don't want to go back to the dark ages of, you know, quote unquote, death traps as automobiles. But at the same time, the point of this photo really is if you knew that when you were driving, you know, and you made a mistake and you had a collision, death would occur, you know, even if it meant for you or your loved ones, would you would that change your behavior?

00:44:41:10 - 00:44:57:08
John Simmerman
And, you know, so so that's part of it. But we're going to get to it later. That is part of one of the devious frames that is also about kind of shifting the blame. So we're going to get to that later. But we're going to talk about right now.

00:44:57:11 - 00:45:13:04
Grant Ennis
So the magic frame. And now we're we're going to start with carbon capture storage. Yeah, I hated writing this chapter. I hated doing the research, the whole thing is just so ridiculous. I didn't even know where to begin. So many people have already talked about it. I can't believe that the US government just invested more money in this.

00:45:13:07 - 00:45:35:27
Grant Ennis
It's throwing bad money after bad money. Yeah. It's the idea that we can take energy and use it to on machines that will pump emissions back under the ground. It's good, it's crazy. And maybe I'll pass it to you, John, if you have anything to say, there makes no sense. I imagine. Frame for global.

00:45:36:00 - 00:45:55:14
John Simmerman
I think the magic frame we should do is switch right over into Peter Norton's world of of often a rama and talking about the fact that yeah we've this is this is a frame that's been sold to us you know forever This is a 1956 advert. So let's take a listen and watch this.

00:45:55:17 - 00:46:13:27
Speaker 5
Well run Firebird, too. You're now under automatic control, hands off steering.

00:46:13:29 - 00:46:15:11
John Simmerman
Gear. We go on the high speed things.

00:46:15:11 - 00:46:33:22
Speaker 4
You lane. Oh, this is a life saving you comfortable? Mind if I smoke? Rising up?

00:46:33:24 - 00:46:34:28
John Simmerman
I love that too.

00:46:34:28 - 00:47:01:22
John Simmerman
Because that was actually in the audio book. Really, what we're talking about in that particular frame there is that. Yeah, the magic solution technology is going to save us and we can just sit back and have a cigar while we are writing in our hermetically sealed metal box on our automatic. Did you notice that that was a a barrier protected fast lane?

00:47:01:25 - 00:47:21:08
Grant Ennis
I think they might. I remember reading about how they filmed that and I think they might have filmed part of it with like actually a remote controlled car at the time. Yeah. So for the listeners, you're not going to be able you didn't see the image or the video, but they do this motion where they drive very close to an impaling object.

00:47:21:11 - 00:47:30:05
Grant Ennis
Yeah, And I just was thinking to myself, they must have put those people's lives in danger just to film this nonsense and craziness.

00:47:30:05 - 00:47:33:28
John Simmerman
Okay, moving on.

00:47:34:00 - 00:47:50:08
John Simmerman
So now we were shifting over to the concept of treatment. So, you know, you know, if something happens, well, we're going to do something. So we get we've got to respond to this terrible thing that's happening. Talk a little bit more about treatment.

00:47:50:10 - 00:48:15:14
Grant Ennis
So in treatment frame is it's medical care instead of medical prevention. In the case of global warming, it's adapting to global warming rather than stopping it rather than mitigating it. And it's corporations have promoted this idea that we need to be doing both. But in fact, the more we mitigate global warming now, the more we are adapting. We don't have to adapt as much.

00:48:15:19 - 00:48:33:20
Grant Ennis
So by just by mitigating, we're focusing on adaptation. But again, adaptation is just it's something that we definitely are going to have to do in every place in the world, but all cities are already doing it. So when corporations are focusing on this thing, it's kind of like to me it's ignoring the fact that everybody is doing it by default.

00:48:33:23 - 00:48:58:28
Grant Ennis
But but by default, we are not mitigating climate change. We're not global warming. Sorry. And so here you have George with two quotes on screen. George Waddell is the co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund, and he said adaptation is the far preferable policy for the largest and richest corporations in the world. And we got this other quote from Gavin Newsom where he's saying Trump's doing everything right to respond to these disasters.

00:48:58:28 - 00:49:14:15
Grant Ennis
He's referring to the fires. I think in 2019 and everything wrong to address what's happening to cause them. And this focus on adaptation, it really comes at least in the media, really does come at the detriment to stopping global warming. It's very unfortunate.

00:49:14:17 - 00:49:40:16
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. Prevention. Taking me back to my original career. Thank you very much. Again, treatment is here. And when it comes to road safety, Ralph Nader is is one of, you know, the folks early on back in 1965, the day I was or the year I was born, this particular comment followed follow through on that.

00:49:40:18 - 00:50:08:07
Grant Ennis
So Ralph Nader wrote in and see if in any speech the true mark of a humane society must be what it does about prevention of accident injuries, not the cleaning up of them afterward. And he's saying we need to be preventing these crashes. I don't think anybody is saying we should stop investing in ambulances. But you have automobile corporations all around the world constantly as their primary CSR activity, donating ambulances.

00:50:08:09 - 00:50:22:03
Grant Ennis
It's a it's it's like you imagine a drug dealer. What would it be giving out methadone along with the drugs You know, use this one for later. It's a it's a framing technique. It's very successful.

00:50:22:06 - 00:50:44:14
John Simmerman
I had to chuckle too, when I saw this quote from from Ralph and when he said, prevention of accident. I'm like, oh, yep. He was brainwashed to it's end. That's the whole point is it's insidious. It's so incredibly powerful. The reframing of, you know, you know yeah let's let's not call it global warming, let's call it climate change.

00:50:44:14 - 00:50:52:01
John Simmerman
Let's not call it a collision or a crash. Let's call it an accident. Incredibly effective.

00:50:52:03 - 00:50:53:02
Grant Ennis
And sticky.

00:50:53:05 - 00:51:03:10
John Simmerman
Yeah, it is sticky. We don't have time to get to to play this this whole thing here or actually do have time to play this one. This one, this one's short.

00:51:03:11 - 00:51:34:04
Speaker 4
What size is your carbon footprint taking size of one. Haven't the foggiest idea. I couldn't tell you what That's what I had no idea. What are you? Me? The faintest idea. What does that. I don't know. But really, I don't know. Sorry. I don't understand what you mean. But you know yours and brilliant.

00:51:34:04 - 00:51:58:17
John Simmerman
Brilliant. It's brilliant because it's. It's. It's a form of victim blaming. And we see victim blaming all the time, especially in the road safety arena. In the reports from the journalism is like, oh, were they wearing dark clothing? You know, did the cyclist have a helmet on? These are all very, you know, not so subtle victim blaming now that we we can see it.

00:51:58:17 - 00:52:22:02
John Simmerman
But, you know, this is also a form of victim blaming the carbon footprint and the fact that literally that was a manifestation of corporate industry, that was a manifestation of BP. And that's what this graph is is indicating, is that, you know, nobody was looking at global warming on Google until 2005 or her carbon footprint.

00:52:22:02 - 00:52:25:03
John Simmerman
Until 2005.

00:52:25:06 - 00:52:56:13
Grant Ennis
Yeah. And in BP, you had the term ecological footprint kind of bouncing around in academic circles. And BP heard about it, latched on to it and created this campaign in 2005, essentially to to focus on carbon footprint. They spent millions and millions of dollars in this campaign. The term and the campaign associated with it won a big PR award that year, actually, which is crazy to think that PR awards are given out for this kind of stuff.

00:52:56:15 - 00:53:19:26
Grant Ennis
And it's been very successful and it's not that individuals can't take action on global warming, but they need to be actions oriented and changing the political system by the actions oriented towards organize for political action and getting people to not look upwards to the words, their political structures and look downwards towards their feet. Right? Yes.

00:53:19:28 - 00:53:22:05
John Simmerman
Oh, it's genius. That's why I said it was brilliant.

00:53:22:05 - 00:53:24:01
John Simmerman
I mean, it's just Absolutely.

00:53:24:01 - 00:53:48:08
John Simmerman
And again, this continues, you know, here in terms of. Yeah, I mean, they're literally just kind of laying it all out here for us. You know, next we we introduce the data or the idea of a carbon footprint before it was common buzzword and it just it just takes off. Wait a minute. We need to hire these guys.

00:53:48:10 - 00:53:49:23
Grant Ennis
To hire these guys.

00:53:49:27 - 00:53:52:18
John Simmerman
Yeah.

00:53:52:20 - 00:54:22:10
John Simmerman
So this is the one we won't go too far into, but it's another form of victim blaming and literally this particular video leans into the fact that they're shaming people who are the victims. And and it's it's several individuals. It's like nine individuals, right. That were hit and had amputations and etc.. And they were the victims of these traffic crashes, these etc..

00:54:22:10 - 00:54:35:12
John Simmerman
But they're literally leaning into and blaming them or, you know, they've been basically brainwashed into believing that, you know, they are really the sole reason that they're in the situation that they're in.

00:54:35:14 - 00:55:03:27
Grant Ennis
Exactly. And it's Buick motor cars created this campaign where they yeah, they took nine people in China who were victims of injuries or crashes. Yeah. And there were amputee victims and wheelchairs and on and it took Buick took them to dangerous places throughout China to stand in the middle of high speed busy intersections and filmed them standing on one crutch with signs.

00:55:04:02 - 00:55:40:20
Grant Ennis
And the end of the the spot campaign says signs are there for a reason. Obey the rules. Yeah I mean, it's a tear jerker when you when you realize what it is. Well, we'll have to post the link, I suppose, for your viewers and listeners. But really, really horribly good example of victim blaming. And I need to I should underscore that these kinds of framing devices and the PR focus groups that went into them, a lot of research has gone into them and a lot of research has been done on how these frames affect political will for action.

00:55:40:23 - 00:56:09:08
Grant Ennis
Right. We know that the more you're exposed to environmentally individualist messaging like carbon footprint, the more that you're exposed to carbon capture storage, to victim blaming, the victims of car crashes, safety, individualism, whatever you name it, any of these frames reduces your willingness to engage politically, to vote for climate policy, to vote for 15 minute cities, you name it.

00:56:09:10 - 00:56:11:21
Grant Ennis
Yeah, these friends have real impact.

00:56:11:23 - 00:56:15:23
John Simmerman
Yeah. Frame eight is not a web. What's the knotted web frame?

00:56:15:23 - 00:57:01:11
Grant Ennis
So there there was a great piece of research from the early nineties. I'm blanking on the name of the author in the article now that that found that this epidemiological technique of referring to webs of causality was harmful that that it confuses us. It makes us less likely to engage. And I realized it wasn't just webs. There was a number of other kinds of framing devices that were all focusing on this same kind of IED, of interconnectedness, of complexity of of systems that was harmful because it limited our ability to understand what was going on.

00:57:01:14 - 00:57:40:21
Grant Ennis
And so here the slide we talk, it talks about it gives three examples of three different industries using this this frame. And they're both using the word complex. So like the European Automobile Association says road safety is complex. Chevron says climate change is complex. But you also have BMW saying that they're engaged in that circular economy. You know, you have this kind of use of these terms, complexity, the web, etc., to to make it seem like people are proposing a solution, but not one you could really put your finger on what is a complex to global warming.

00:57:40:24 - 00:57:43:05
Grant Ennis
What does that look like? How would we do that?

00:57:43:07 - 00:57:56:02
John Simmerman
Exactly. And and that brings us to our final of the nine devious frames and that is the multifactorial side of thing, which does sound awfully complex, too.

00:57:56:04 - 00:58:18:21
Grant Ennis
And it's also pretty complicated. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a this is a slide from Philip morris, right? No, sorry, not Philip morris. And this is a tobacco industry internal memo that was confidential and it was leaked as part of the what are called the cigaret papers or the tobacco files. They were sent in cardboard boxes to Stanton Glance at the University of San Francisco, University of California, San Francisco.

00:58:18:24 - 00:58:45:21
Grant Ennis
And this one shows that the tobacco industry realized that it exists its existing dark PR wasn't working, and it's proposing that they use what's called multifactorial listen. So they should start saying that, you know, lung cancer isn't caused by cigarets alone. It's commonly caused by a combination of things. So we need a combined solution of many different kinds of interventions in order to stop lung cancer.

00:58:45:24 - 00:58:48:20
Grant Ennis
And this was very successful. Very successful.

00:58:48:22 - 00:58:54:05
John Simmerman
Yeah, that's almost a sign that they're there. They're getting towards the end.

00:58:54:08 - 00:58:55:15
John Simmerman
And, you know.

00:58:55:17 - 00:59:09:13
John Simmerman
You know, it's like it's like here, here BP once again. And they're starting to admit, oh, yeah, we've got a problem here. But guess what? You know, it's it's multi-factorial. There's all sorts of stuff going on.

00:59:09:16 - 00:59:30:08
Grant Ennis
And this is this is a slide from BP with their all of the above strategy. You've also you might have heard this concept of strategy called silver buckshot. Also, it doesn't make sense. You know, why don't we do why don't we prioritize, do what works best? What works fastest? This is a climate emergency. We need to take action.

00:59:30:12 - 00:59:49:07
Grant Ennis
But BP would prefer that we just do it all, all at the same time. And then in the end, what tends to happen is you don't really do much of anything or at least nothing meaningful. Yeah, great. I mean, I won't read this whole whole thing. It's quite long. But the key words are this. Professor Leon Robinson Robertson.

00:59:49:07 - 01:00:28:26
Grant Ennis
He's a famous expert in road safety and he's the Johns Hopkins University chair in injury prevention. The chair was named after him. He says it does not logically follow that multifactorial theories or analysis lead to rational prevention policy. And he gives an example of in New York, they apparently installed some kind of window barriers and he says, what if we try to multifactorial strategy and went after the drunk parents and we went after the distracted children that we probably would have implemented something meaningful like these window barriers much later, or perhaps not at the scale that was necessary.

01:00:28:29 - 01:00:37:16
Grant Ennis
And he's saying that multifactorial ism is treated as an axiom, but it's not it's not actually an accident. It could very well be very completely fallacious. Yeah.

01:00:37:18 - 01:01:18:13
John Simmerman
Yeah. And again, that brings us back to again, an overview of all nine of these devious frames. And I want to emphasize that the whole point of all of this and in into your point, you made earlier, is it's not that we're we're saying that, you know, innovations in safety are bad per se, but the way that these frames are being used is to distract us from getting to the problem at the very, very top, which is the continual subsidizing of these industries and this way of life in some ways.

01:01:18:16 - 01:01:45:03
Grant Ennis
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, especially for global warming. And the current number is something like $6 trillion a year governments around the world are paying to kill the planet. We're subsidizing fossil fuel, fossil fuels that much. And in if in that context, to be told that we need to recycle to save the planet is such a it's an insult.

01:01:45:06 - 01:01:46:14
Grant Ennis
It's just an insult.

01:01:46:16 - 01:02:11:28
John Simmerman
Yeah. And and we see that the same thing about motor dumb and the addiction that we have to a car dependent lifestyle an economy that's that's tied to that talk a little bit about the challenge that we have in front of us in the sense that one of the the main critiques that you know people will have for this is, yes, we okay, we get it.

01:02:11:28 - 01:02:42:14
John Simmerman
We we can see now we can actually see how these nine devious frames are at work and are so insidious and are shaping the way that we see things. And more importantly, they're they're used as distractions from us organizing and pushing for for change at the very, very top. But one of the critiques that I that I'm sure people are like is like, yeah, but the economy.

01:02:42:16 - 01:03:09:27
John Simmerman
Yeah, I mean, if you know, it's I mean, look at the desperate moves that governments are, you know, they're genuflecting and bending over backwards to try to deal with inflation and they're, you know, suppressing, you know, the price at the pump so that we can drive more because it's so integrated within our economy. It's like, yeah, Grant, this is great utopia that you have here.

01:03:09:27 - 01:03:20:01
John Simmerman
If we can kind of cut this off at the very, very top and, and cut those subsidies off, but will that destroy the worldwide global economy?

01:03:20:03 - 01:03:43:23
Grant Ennis
I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, you saw this study that came out, I believe, in the L.A. Times. It was republished there yesterday or the day before the high speed, wide roads in urban areas are draining our economies. They're not they're not good for our economies. Banning neighborhood daycare facilities is not is not good for our economy.

01:03:44:01 - 01:04:09:19
Grant Ennis
Banning multiple storey homes. Banning restaurants. Bars and shops in residential areas. That's not good for that economy. We've got a lot of successful economies around the world that don't use as much fossil fuels as other economies, that don't use cars as much, that don't drive with people. They don't drive as much. The most economically productive places in the world have places have very few vehicle kilometers per day per person.

01:04:09:22 - 01:04:39:18
Grant Ennis
New York is incredibly powerful economic center and people can hardly drive there. Right. So I think this this argument that we're going to harm the economy somehow by removing the laws that are killing the planet and ourselves doesn't really have much merit to it. And the way forward that I'm proposing is not that we not that we do something different, only that we remove the barriers to good policymaking right.

01:04:39:20 - 01:05:12:09
John Simmerman
And talking about removing some of the barriers and you and I were talking about this the other day is it's it's like, what do we have to subtract? You know, let's let's talk about, you know, removing something rather than like adding funding to be able to do something. It's like, how do we remove something? So what we're talking about here is removing some of the ongoing insidious subsidies that are, you know, that are at the root problem.

01:05:12:11 - 01:05:29:13
John Simmerman
And so talk a little bit about these these root problems and then we'll go to the final slide and talk about, you know, really how how do we actually focus on the target of policy change and not get distracted by the false targets?

01:05:29:16 - 01:05:54:26
Grant Ennis
Sure. So the kinds of policies that we could get rid of are mean minimum minimum lot sizes, single family homes. When people say they want to end the single family home, I think it's really bad framing. I mean, it's not that kind needs to happen, but it's not the it's not quite right. The framing really needs to be stop banning housing.

01:05:54:28 - 01:05:55:23
John Simmerman
Right.

01:05:55:25 - 01:06:10:20
Grant Ennis
You know, why are we banning homes? It's like forced homelessness is what we should be calling it end forced homelessness. When we say we want to end single family homes, it's like we're taking people's houses. Nobody likes that. It's easy to get on the defensive.

01:06:10:22 - 01:06:29:10
John Simmerman
But it's it's almost like what you're saying is, is is it's not a war on cars. What we're talking about here is a war on car dependency. And we want to see more freedom. We want to see freedom of choice in more than just one mobility mode.

01:06:29:12 - 01:07:05:16
Grant Ennis
Yeah, we don't want forced car ownership. We're being forced to own cars and I think we need to adopt that framing a lot more because we we need to be subtracting these policies that are forcing us to have these things. The root cause of car dependency is we're being forced to drive cars by public policy, by bans on on mixed use, zoning by subsidies to the fossil fuel industry that that artificially the price of of petrol and energy gasoline lot sizes all of the things that we talked about before that end up leading to for single families owning.

01:07:05:18 - 01:07:12:25
Grant Ennis
And when you do end all of those things, we need to make it so that people don't have to drive so much. We need to make it so that it's not so cheap to burn so much energy.

01:07:12:27 - 01:07:14:05
Speaker 4
Yeah.

01:07:14:08 - 01:07:34:05
John Simmerman
Who's doing a good job at this. Any, any countries, you know, at the, you know, sort of like leading the way in terms of us. I mean, we we obviously here in the United States, you know, we're challenged in the sense that it's it's going to be kind of hard for us to to decouple ourselves from this level of corporate influence.

01:07:34:05 - 01:07:43:13
John Simmerman
But are there any stars and, you know, from from a democratic world perspective of of, you know, helping us to to see a way forward.

01:07:43:15 - 01:08:06:24
Grant Ennis
There are lots there are lots. And I think the Netherlands gets so much good press and it's well-deserved. But I think when you look at road deaths per capita and car CO2 emissions, fossil fuel subsidies, you have quite a number of countries that are doing an excellent job. I mean, the UK on a much tighter budget has almost the same road death rate as Sweden.

01:08:06:26 - 01:08:24:16
Grant Ennis
I mean, they're doing a great job over there. I mean, and they're and they're fighting really hard to do to do better in terms of fossil fuel subsidies are very low, but in terms of really succeeding in removing a lot of these harmful subsidies, New Zealand is the world leader. They got rid of their agricultural subsidies. I believe in the seventies.

01:08:24:18 - 01:08:42:20
Grant Ennis
I mean, the bulk of them, they're leading the global discussion to end fossil fuel subsidies. They just, as I forget exactly which policy it was, but I believe they ended single families only last year. They're doing a fantastic job. They've got a long way to go, but they're definitely leading and pushing for these kinds of things.

01:08:42:23 - 01:08:56:17
John Simmerman
Yeah and hopefully that's going to help them to eliminating single family zoning, because they also are in a situation where it's very, very difficult to find housing. Housing is extremely expensive.

01:08:56:17 - 01:09:11:01
Grant Ennis
They're definitely definitely I mean, I think they made this decision out of political necessity a total bipartisan effort came out and just said, we can't do this anymore. Yeah, I hope I hope it helps them. They really do have quite a crisis there.

01:09:11:03 - 01:09:30:13
John Simmerman
You know, Grant, unfortunately, we've only scratched the surface of what is the dark PR and what we do about it. And it's unfair for me to like spring this last slide on you and say, okay, well, what do we do then? We know what we need to do. We've talked about it. We need to have political change at the very top.

01:09:30:17 - 01:09:53:21
John Simmerman
What we don't really need to do and you don't spend a whole heck of a lot of time of how to go about it. But you spend enough time to really give us a little bit of a a roadmap in terms of what we need to avoid. And those are the false targets. Talk a little bit more about how we get meaningful change when it comes to policy change.

01:09:53:26 - 01:10:18:03
Grant Ennis
So we do spend a lot of time as advocates demanding change in one way or another. And it's important to recognize that there's there is one one target that we should be focusing on. It is political change. It's political action. And we're we're very easily have our energies diluted when we go after the CEO of a company or corporations themselves.

01:10:18:05 - 01:10:46:25
Grant Ennis
That's because corporations and CEOs respond. And I don't mean to be apologetic to them, but this is the state of the world. They respond to incentives. They respond to government policy, CEOs and corporations. They try to influence government policy to their favor. They're responding to it in the way they act on a day to day basis. And the same goes I mean, it gets a little bit into the sociology, sociology, other, but the same for politicians, the same for plutocrats.

01:10:46:28 - 01:11:12:04
Grant Ennis
These stakeholders are responding to the incentives around that are set by politics, by government policy. And we need to be focusing on government policy. And one of the ways corporations try and distract from government policy was to voluntarily say, I will be the woke CEO or I will be what Joel Barkan calls the new corporation or the woke corporations sometimes called.

01:11:12:07 - 01:11:31:28
John Simmerman
As well as the apologetic leader. Like if we focus our attention on the CEO. Exactly. And they're like, oh, mea culpa, mea culpa, you know, it's like, again, it's these are false targets. In other words, it's shifting our focus away from political change. That's what we need to be laser focused on.

01:11:32:00 - 01:11:58:22
Grant Ennis
And sometimes you'll hear corporations say we need a multi-stakeholder approach and we need all hands on deck that we need. I mean this is just this is like somebody comes to rob your house and says, you know, really to solve this problem tonight, we need to work together. Right? You know, it's like we don't want to be entering into the partnership with a person that is trying to influence policy to have you killed.

01:11:58:24 - 01:12:02:26
Grant Ennis
It's not a it's not a good and good approach.

01:12:02:28 - 01:12:04:24
John Simmerman
Talk a little bit again.

01:12:04:24 - 01:12:29:28
John Simmerman
You as I mentioned, you you don't spend the entire book talking about what we need to do. Now. That's probably book number two. But talk a little bit about, okay, so we're now we're laser focused on what the target is, political change at the very, very top. We need to be working on this, but just say a few words about, okay, how how do we do that?

01:12:30:01 - 01:12:32:09
John Simmerman
Help us, Grant. How do we do that?

01:12:32:11 - 01:12:58:15
Grant Ennis
We need to be organized. We need specialized organizing. We get we're we're distracted from organizing now. I mean, I make the distinction between work organic social movements and atomized social movements. And atomized social movements are those that are that's what that's what corporations are really promoting. They promote three, three ideas, electoral ism. They promote mobilization ism and what I call consumer investor ism.

01:12:58:18 - 01:13:18:27
Grant Ennis
They try and break us down into individual parts. So they say that democracy is just voting. Democracy is just protesting. You know, how did women get the right to vote? It was not voting they did not vote themselves the right to vote because they didn't have the right to vote. They they organized and they protested. And this is something that's been long demonstrated.

01:13:19:04 - 01:13:43:03
Grant Ennis
This is not like something new. We know that democracy is more than voting. But over and over again, you're hearing people say like, you need to get engaged, go vote. That's not enough. Get engaged, go organize, get together with four of your friends and meet regularly, discuss the things that are important to you and your communities. Then Go meet with your policymakers, and then meet with other groups.

01:13:43:05 - 01:14:10:05
Grant Ennis
This is the classic form of organizing in human history. This is how we organize the Million Man March. This is how the women's movements organized. This is how we fought. I don't know the full way of saying it seeks to save the ozone. This is how we got led out of out of gasoline and out of paint. The history of improvement in human society is one of people organizing together, coming together and demanding change from political actors.

01:14:10:08 - 01:14:35:17
Grant Ennis
And we're we're distracted by this just vote narrative. We're distracted by just protest. But protests, they're they're the symbol of social movements. They're they're the the external externalization of it. They are not those movements. They're just an emblem of them. And then the other way we're atomized is we're told that we can boycott stuff or we can divest.

01:14:35:19 - 01:14:53:04
Grant Ennis
And I know it's a little bit controversial to say this kind of stuff doesn't work, but the the evidence is really clear. The same with the the inverse boycotting an impact investing. You're not changing political structures by doing this. You're still operating with them in the market. And so their narratives.

01:14:53:07 - 01:15:08:18
John Simmerman
Yeah, and I was going to say I was going to jump in and say, and this is exactly what industries, you know, and, and the powers that be want, because then it's again, you use the term atomized, then it's like us acting as individual.

01:15:08:20 - 01:15:09:03
Grant Ennis
Exactly.

01:15:09:03 - 01:15:31:03
John Simmerman
Angular atoms versus coming together as a powerful group. I see this all the time in on the on the channel and talking about, well, what can we do as individuals? And one of the things that I come back and say is, you know, is you need to start talking with your neighbors. You need to start coming together. You need to start, you know, creating a group, a coalition.

01:15:31:06 - 01:15:53:12
John Simmerman
And you do go through this and we're not going to have time to cover that. But folks, you need to get this book. You need to listen to it or buy it to really dive deeper into this. But, you know, one of the things I do say is, you know, you need to be communicating to your to your representatives that this is what the community wants, this is what the community demands.

01:15:53:15 - 01:16:13:26
John Simmerman
And this is the expectation of our society, of our neighborhood, of our community. And and if they're not listening to you, you do need to vote them out. So there is a voting component. You do need to run a slate of candidates that that will listen to your needs and do that. But the point about the electoral is a trap is the thinking that voting is enough.

01:16:13:28 - 01:16:39:24
John Simmerman
Not in the U.S. That's just the start. You know, that's making sure you've got the people leadership in power that is you feel committed, are going to, you know, resist those temptations, resist that the status quo of the system will fight to change the system. That's the whole point. We're trying to change the structure of the system that's getting us into this trap, you know, getting to the root cause.

01:16:39:26 - 01:17:09:17
John Simmerman
But the other point of of that is you can't just think that you're done. I did my voting we got the person in power that we wanted. Now, you still have to be constantly making sure that there's follow through. Again, steering this tanker that we have terrible analogy, but it's true. It isn't going to change. You know I wasn't really meaning a tanker were changing to turning this ship and I'm thinking well of a sailboat.

01:17:09:20 - 01:17:11:09
John Simmerman
You know, what I'm saying is.

01:17:11:09 - 01:17:21:07
John Simmerman
Is that we have to be diligent and persistent and make sure that these changes, these are difficult to achieve. Structural changes do happen.

01:17:21:10 - 01:17:44:20
Grant Ennis
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we got we were all so happy when we got Barack Obama elected and then Barack Obama, I mean, a lot of great things about the guy, but he increased fossil fuel subsidies almost every year when he was in office. Right. You know, and that's because we weren't we we assumed that we could politician blame you go after this false target.

01:17:44:20 - 01:18:03:07
Grant Ennis
We got we got who we wanted, we got Bush out was the idea. And now we've got Barack Obama in and now everything's taking care of it. But it's not about politicians. Barack Obama was responding to the same incentives around him. And we need to be changing that. We need you need to have a sustained push on government for the policy change that we need.

01:18:03:11 - 01:18:04:12
Grant Ennis
We want to be seen.

01:18:04:15 - 01:18:24:14
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm going to pull pull up the title of the book once again, the cover and and basically give you the last word. What would you like to leave the the audience with? Both the visual of the the viewing audience as well as the listening audience.

01:18:24:16 - 01:18:36:22
Grant Ennis
I think as we were, as we were discussing and continue with that go and meet with your friends organized and go out there and change to change the status quo.

01:18:36:24 - 01:18:43:17
John Simmerman
Fantastic. And it has been such a pleasure having you on the Active Towns podcast. Thank you so much, sir.

01:18:43:19 - 01:18:45:12
Grant Ennis
Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

01:18:45:14 - 01:18:47:02
John Simmerman
Everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in.

01:18:47:02 - 01:18:48:23
Speaker 4
I hope you enjoyed episode.

01:18:48:23 - 01:19:05:13
John Simmerman
With Grant Innocent. If you did, please give it a thumbs up. Leave a comment down below and share it with a friend. And if you haven't done so already, be honored to have you subscribe to the channel. Just on that subscription button down below and read the notifications bell. And if you are enjoying this content, please consider becoming an active town's ambassador.

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John Simmerman
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01:19:24:12 - 01:19:41:28
John Simmerman
You know, we've got some really cool streets here for people swag out there, the active town store, as well as if you are so inclined, you can leave a donation with the nonprofit. All of that can be accessed on the website at active towns Dot 4G. Again, thank you all so much for tuning in. It's always wonderful to have you along for the ride.

01:19:41:29 - 01:20:05:18
John Simmerman
Until next time. This is John signing off by wishing you much activity, health and happiness. Cheers. And again sending a huge thank you to all my active town's ambassadors supporting the channel on Patron. Buy me a coffee YouTube super. Thanks as well. Making contributions to the nonprofit and purchasing things from the active town store every little bit adds up and it's much appreciated.

01:20:05:21 - 01:20:06:28
John Simmerman
Thank you all much.