Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Peter Kalmus:

Right now it’s not looking great for keeping the planet under 1.5 degree Celsius of global heating, which is why I’m talking about emergency mode. I think part of the problem with these budget framings and these 2050 type deadlines, they create a false sort of complacency and a false lack of urgency.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Peter Kalmus. He’s a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. He’s also one of the most outspoken and activist-minded scientific voices on the dangers of climate change. A few weeks ago, Kalmas was arrested after chaining himself to the front doors of JPMorgan Chase’s offices in downtown Los Angeles as part of a protest against the bank’s investments in fossil fuels.

Peter Kalmus:

This is so bad, everyone, that we’re willing to take this risk and more and more scientists and more and more people are going to start joining us.

Preet Bharara:

We’re already seeing the effects of the climate crisis all over the world and we need to know what that actually means for us. Kalmas joins me to discuss the science behind fossil fuels, the need for climate emergency mode, and how everyday people can do their part. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes from Twitter user @chrisswartout who asks, “Do you think that even if Roberts finds out who the leaker was that we will ever find out, especially if it comes from the highest ranks of the court, I have my doubts.” Of course, Chris is referring to the fallout from the leak of a draft opinion from Justice Samuel Alito that would purport to overturn Roe V. Wade. Let me say a few things at the outset. Number one, I agree with those people who say the leak story is not the story. The story is the overruling of a fundamental right recognized by the Supreme Court and in our country for more than 49 years, but the leak story is a story and it’s newsworthy and it’s something that needs to be addressed.

Preet Bharara:

Now, let me also say, as a preliminary matter, I don’t know how easy it’s going to be to find out who leaked the opinion. As you may have heard, Chief Justice John Roberts asked the Marshal of the Court to conduct the investigation and that Marshal, to my knowledge, does not have any kind of experience and certainly not deep experience conducting investigations generally, and certainly not a leak investigation. In fact, I’m not aware of any prior leak investigation that related to the Supreme Court.

Preet Bharara:

The second difficulty is the Marshal doesn’t have compulsory process, can’t issue subpoenas, can’t compel people to come and testify or turn over documents, so that’s a challenge as well. And then one more challenge that I mentioned with Joyce Vance on the Insider podcast this week is that leak investigations generally, whether it relates to a Supreme Court opinion or national security or intelligence gathering, they’re difficult. Part of that is because the law protects, generally in most states, the media’s right to keep their sources confidential and most journalists and presumably those at Politico would maintain that policy and practice. That said, if the Supreme Court has a system by which you can see who’s downloading documents and see who’s transmitting documents, and that’s within the internal control of the Supreme Court, internal emails and the like probably are, and probably are accessible to the Marshal as the investigator, maybe somebody tripped up and wasn’t careful and the leaker can be found.

Preet Bharara:

To your question about whether or not that will become public, I understand why you have your doubts, but I really do think it would be unimaginable for Justice Roberts having declared publicly an investigation and with lots and lots of people, some in bad faith, others in good faith, asking for the identification of the leaker and punishment for the leaker that in those circumstances, if the leaker was identified and that person was in fact the person who passed along the draft opinion to Politico, that it would be incumbent upon the Chief Justice to make that public. Part of the whole issue of the leak of the opinion relates to the public standing of the Court and the integrity of the Court and it would be odd to me if the leaker could be identified to keep that confidential while at the same time publicly making utterances about how horrible it was that the opinion was leaked.

Preet Bharara:

One final point about the investigation of the leak generally is that it is interesting as people have pointed out that Justice Roberts asked the internal Supreme Court Marshal to conduct the investigation and not some outside investigative agency. That could be in part, because as I’ve said before, there’s no real statute that you can allege the violation of with respect to the leak. It’s not grand jury information, it’s not classified or intelligence information, so I’m not sure what statute would apply that would implicate the FBI in doing the investigation. Then second, and maybe just as importantly from the perspective of the Chief Justice, by having the investigator be the Marshal of the Supreme Court, it’s more likely that the investigation will remain confidential and controllable, and that’s probably what the Justice wants. That may be a reason why, Chris, you have your doubts, but I think for all the reasons I stated before, I can’t imagine if the leaker’s identified, we don’t learn about it.

Preet Bharara:

I thought this week as I’ve been doing over the course of recent weeks, answering a basic legal question that I get over time, I thought I would do that again this week and it’s a question that I’ve frequently gotten when I was in office and even since being out of office, why on earth, why does the Southern District of New York get so many cases where the defendants or the conduct of the case appear wholly outside of the Southern District of New York, whether it’s people who are planting terrorist attacks or international arms or drug traffickers, and the like? People have often joked about the Southern District of New York being the Sovereign District of New York. I remember once an inspector general of an agency ask me when I was in office, “Remind me again what the jurisdiction of the Southern District of New York is.” And I said, “Are you familiar with earth?”

Preet Bharara:

Let me explain as a general matter what venue is about and where venue properly lies and where people can be charged with crimes, even though it may seem from a layperson’s perspective from the outside that it doesn’t make a lot of sense. As a preliminary matter, let me mention that venue where a case can be brought criminally, whether it’s in the state court or federal court is something that has to be proven just like each element of the crime. In fact, that requirement is of constitutional dimension. The constitution itself provides that the accused shall enjoy the right to trial by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.

Preet Bharara:

Basically, as a fundamental constitutional matter, if you’re accused of a crime, the trial can be brought only in a district where the crime occurred. What’s interesting about that is even though it’s of constitutional dimension, the standard of proof required to prove the venue element is not the very, very high bar of proof beyond a reasonable doubt like it is for the other elements of any crime, but is in fact the lower bar, a preponderance of the evidence.

Preet Bharara:

It can also be the case by the way that a defendant chooses for various strategic reasons or personal reasons to waive the venue requirement. I remember in my time in office, there were occasions where somebody was charged with multiple crimes, some of which had venue in the Southern District of New York and others of which may have had venue only in the District of Columbia or the Eastern District of New York. And so, some of those times, the defendant and counsel would agree to waive the bar on venue so that there could be one proceeding in one court and sometimes they didn’t, and there would have to be two trials, and you would send out assistant US attorneys from your district to the other district so that venue was not a problem.

Preet Bharara:

What does that mean? The district wherein the crime shall have been committed. Well, some crimes are very easy to figure out. Let’s say I’m walking by a bank and I decide in that moment to rob the bank, and I do that in Manhattan. Unless I’m missing something, the only district in which you could bring that federal case would be the Southern District of New York, because nothing at all happened outside of Manhattan and Manhattan is in the Southern district. If on the other hand, I conspired with other people, Joyce Vance, for example, to rob a bank and she and I had communications while she was in Alabama and I was in New York, and one day I went and I bought a gun in Pennsylvania, and another day I bought other materials like a mask in New Jersey, there’s lots of different districts in which the crime was committed.

Preet Bharara:

Any district in which an overt act was done or the agreement to enter the conspiracy happened, all of those places are legitimate locations for venue to lie and for the crime to be prosecuted. It is not the case that a prosecutor has to bring a criminal charge in the district where most of the activity happened or all of the activity happened. Only one bit of activity can suffice. Then there’s the example of cases that the Southern District has brought and many other districts have as well, where none of the conduct really happened anywhere in the United States, but it’s still conduct for which US law provides a penalty and the possibility of prosecution, and that presents a little bit of a dilemma, but there’s a statute that addresses it and it’s titled offenses not committed in any district. It’s 18 US Code 3238, which says that the trial of all offenses begun or committed upon the high seas or elsewhere out of the jurisdiction of any particular state or district shall be in the district in which the offender or any one of two or more joint offenders is arrested or is first brought.

Preet Bharara:

For example, there are sometimes international narcotics traffickers, arms traffickers, people who are engaged in conspiring to commit terrorist acts against the United States, they are all prosecutable and they may not have committed any conduct in the United States. From time to time, the Southern District would take advantage of that statute that had just quoted, and you would make sure that if the person was being brought to the United States, that person was first brought to the Southern District of New York.

Preet Bharara:

For example, Viktor Bout, notorious arms dealer who was arrested in Thailand and underwent a lengthy extradition process when he was extradited, he was brought to an airport in the Southern District of New York, that satisfied venue even though he hadn’t lived in the Southern District of New York or committed his offenses in the Southern District. The same is true with respect to a famous pirate case that we brought Somali pirate, you may remember him from the movie Captain Phillips. Multiple of the Somali pirates were killed by the Navy SEALs, but once survived and was brought first to the Southern District of New York to face criminal charges for piracy on the high seas.

Preet Bharara:

But sometimes the conduct does happen in the United States and it only takes, as I said, one act, one connection to the district for venue to lie and be proper. That was true, for example, in a case we brought against an Iranian national named Mansour Arbabsiar, who we alleged had conspired to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. After law enforcement authorities learned of the plot, they set up an undercover to have interactions with Arbabsiar and others, and even though a lot of the activity was happening in Iran and also was happening in Texas with respect to a confidential informant, as we alleged in the complaint, when the Southern District got the case, there were two wire transfers that happened to have passed through for a brief period of time, banks located in the Southern District of New York. Even though that seems very minimal, it was sufficient for venue to be proper.

Preet Bharara:

Now, you may find all of this peculiar and some courts also find it peculiar and I’ll end with a personal story of a trial that I conducted when I was an assistant US attorney a lot of years ago, maybe 17 or 18 years ago. It was a heroin trafficking investigation and prosecution with multiple defendants who went to trial. The problem was that most of the conduct that took place that was identifiable and that we brought evidence of to bear in court happened near LaGuardia airport or happened in Texas.

Preet Bharara:

As folks may know, but if you’re not from New York, maybe you don’t know, JFK Airport and LaGuardia Airport and its immediate surroundings are located in the Eastern District of New York, not the Southern District of New York and venue was actually challenged in that case and the basis for venue that we arrived upon, and again, you may find this peculiar but it’s the law, was that in connection with the narcotics conspiracy, one or more flights took place in furtherance of the heroin conspiracy. We had to show that that involved the Southern District of New York. Now, how do you show that when both LaGuardia and JFK and Newark, the main commercial area airports are not in the Southern District of New York?

Preet Bharara:

Well, I can’t remember how we happened upon this. I was compelled to call kind of on an emergency basis in the middle of trial, a supervisory air traffic controller, who testified very compellingly about how we could have venue in the Southern District of New York even though the airports were not in the district. He testified that as a matter of policy and procedure of all flights in the New York City area, whether you take off from LaGuardia, you take off from JFK, or you take off from Newark, and you were flying west, and the flights that we alleged were part of the conspiracy were being taken to Texas, that every single one of those flights, the pilots would route the plane through something that’s an imaginary area in the sky, which was known to air traffic controllers as the Westgate.

Preet Bharara:

If you take off from LaGuardia or any of the other airports, you fly through something called the Westgate. That’s how they control traffic in the area and prevent collisions and all sorts of other things and they manage the traffic of the airplanes. He testified further that necessarily by flying through the Westgate on the way to Texas, you fly over land that is located in the Southern District of New York. That my friends was the basis for venue in that case. By the way, if you think it was tenuous, so did the defense lawyer and the defendant, they appealed that matter to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, but they did not prevail. That in a nutshell is the crazy law of venue.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with my conversation with Peter Kalmus.

 

Energy has been in the news recently. In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many countries, including the US made domestic energy production an urgent priority, but what does that mean for our climate? Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA, studies the impact of CO2 on our planet and understands the danger we’re in if we don’t make changes now. Peter Kalmus, welcome to the show.

Peter Kalmus:

Thanks for having me, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

For the record, Peter, you are a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and as you reminded me before we started taping, you were speaking in your personal capacity. Am I right?

Peter Kalmus:

That is correct. That is factually correct.

Preet Bharara:

Pardon my ignorance, but could you explain in your personal or professional capacity why there’s a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Peter Kalmus:

The Jet Propulsion Lab doesn’t just… It doesn’t have anything to do with airplanes. It’s-

Preet Bharara:

Well, I don’t know. When I was a kid, I was very interested in astronomy and I cared a lot about NASA’s doings. And so, in my older age and in my ignorance, I didn’t realize we had climate scientists at NASA.

Peter Kalmus:

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory does a lot of amazing science in the areas of planetary astrophysics and earth science. That supports a lot of the flight missions that they do. It’s one of the, if not the premier center in the world for putting up satellites that orbit the earth and monitor the earth for things like temperature changes, moisture changes, records of climate, biodiversity, sea level rise, melting ice sheets. I mean, a lot of the information that we have about the changing earth system and all of the impacts of global heating.

Peter Kalmus:

This rising temperature is making a lot of changes occur on the planet from melting ice to animals and plants changing their… moving closer to the poles, for example. A lot of this information we get from satellite observations and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory develops those missions, implements those missions, puts those missions in orbit, makes the data records from those missions, and actually does a lot of the science with those data records.

Preet Bharara:

You didn’t begin as a climate scientist, explain your transition to this work.

Peter Kalmus:

I got my PhD in physics from 2004 to 2008 at Columbia in New York City. I was originally interested in cosmology, the big questions where the universe came from. Then there was a new faculty member at Columbia who was working on searching for gravitational waves with the LIGO collaboration. And so, I got really fascinated by that. I ended up working on that for about eight years for my PhD and then for a postdoc afterwards, I came to Caltech to keep working on that and I actually searched for… Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time that propagate from really violent astrophysical events like the mergers of black holes at the speed of light through the universe so they basically can’t get stopped by anything. They can go basically all across the universe.

Peter Kalmus:

I was searching for gravitational waves from these really, really strong magnetic neutron stars called magnetars, but over that time period, I kept learning about climate science. I kept reading papers about climate science and my concern for the state of our planet just grew and grew until I got so basically distracted by climate change that I couldn’t keep… really, my brain just couldn’t keep focusing on gravitational waves. It was a really hard decision. It was sad. It felt like I kind of had no choice, but I switched into climate science and that’s when I kind of moved about two or three miles up the Arroyo from Caltech to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask a dumb question? Does your physics PhD aid you in any way in your climate science?

Peter Kalmus:

Absolutely. When I first came to JPL, I joined a group called climate physics. JPL science is organized in different groups originally looking at the physics of clouds. Since then, I’ve moved into studying biodiversity and something called ecological forecasting where we try to use climate models and relate those climate models to ecosystems and even to humans, which is just another kind of ecosystem.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about climate change and I want to get into how serious a problem it is. Obviously, many people have been sounding the alarm bell for some time. It’s not been heated as much as people like you and others think it should be, but I want to get a sense of the scope of the problem. Now, you have said on a number of occasions and I presume you’ll repeat it here that based on the data we have and the research that you and others have done, we need to enter into what you call emergency mode as a society. First question is why do we need to enter into emergency mode and what does that mean?

Peter Kalmus:

Great question. The rate of change that, kind of the society milestones and kind of rates of change are usually… for social change are usually kind of phrased in terms of these deadlines like net zero by 2050. What is really clear to me and what I’m trying to make clear to everyone is that we’re at 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the global average, and this is already unsafe, especially for most affected people. For example, in the global south closer to the equator, we’re entering this huge heat wave right now in the Indian subcontinent, which is going to affect more than a billion people. We had people die in the heat dome event, people dying in floods in their apartments. We are already seeing kind of crop yield declines. In my opinion, 1.2 degrees Celsius, where we’re at right now, isn’t safe. Every day-

Preet Bharara:

Could we pause on that?

Peter Kalmus:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

Because I want to get into the degrees, the various degree levels and what they might mean, not to minimize the 1.2 degree increase over pre-industrial levels. If we maintained at 1.2 and didn’t go any higher, there would not be an existential threat, fair?

Peter Kalmus:

Well, it depends on who you are and where you’re living, I would say, but if we stayed at-

Preet Bharara:

Well, destruction of the planet, which is I think what some people are concerned about.

Peter Kalmus:

We have to define what that means. There are these things called tipping points that loom murkily in the future. One that I’m kind of concerned about is losing the Amazon rainforest potentially through a kind of feedback loop, where as you have less rainforest, the rainforest itself produces less rain so you can get into this cycle of increasing drought. Eventually, the whole thing burns up and turns into a savanna. It’s possible that even we’re at now, that that tipping point has already started, that process has already started.

Preet Bharara:

You say in some period of time, even if we plateau at 1.2 degrees higher than usual, we could lose the Amazon rainforest?

Peter Kalmus:

Yes. That I think is a fair statement. Other impacts that could continue even at this level of global… If we stopped fossil fuels basically as quickly as we could now, we would stay pretty much at this level of global heating. A lot of the impacts that we’re feeling would stay at similar levels to what they are now. One notable exception for that is sea level rise. It takes a long time for… We’re at a certain level of heat right now and ice doesn’t melt overnight. It’s going to keep melting because of the heat we’re already at. And so, that will continue to drive sea level rise, which could cause coastal areas to be abandoned in coming years and decades. If we stop the heat now, that would definitely be a great thing. There are some impacts that would kind of continue to sort of spool out into the future.

Preet Bharara:

What is the difference in threat if we go from 1.2 degrees to 1.5 degrees?

Peter Kalmus:

That’s a great question. There was an IPCC report that was released in 2018, which looked at the difference between… projections for what the planet would be like at 1.5 degrees Celsius versus one 2.0 degrees Celsius of global heating. Basically, everything, all of the impacts from that additional global heat would be intensified. There could be new emergent impacts and synergies between impacts. If you have things like crop failures, for example, starting to occur more frequently, then there might more likely to occur sort of simultaneously in different regions, for example.

Peter Kalmus:

But overall, my main statement would be that with every fraction of a degree of global heating, so from 1.2 to 1.3 to 1.4 to 1.5, and each of those right now are on track for each of those tenths of a degree Celsius to occur after about five years, each of those increases will make the impacts that we’re already experiencing and a lot of people are experiencing, so the wildfires, for example, especially in California where I live, the heat waves, those things will just continue to intensify with every fraction of a degree.

Preet Bharara:

If it’s appropriate, I want to mention how you and I came in direct contact because I want to talk about the reason you reached out. Back in January, I had my friend Ian Bremmer on the show, he’s been on a number of times. He’s not a climate scientist, but he writes compellingly about risk, all kinds of risk. You, I think, as the kids say, slid into my DMs that evening and said, “Interesting conversation with Ian Bremmer, maybe I can come on and talk about climate change sometime.” I’m sorry it took so long for that to happen.

Preet Bharara:

I wonder what it is about that conversation that you found interesting. I’m guessing there’s some points of disagreement. I want to quote from what Ian said back in January because he struck a somewhat optimistic note and he says, “The impact of two plus degrees centigrade in warming, the extreme climate conditions, I mean, all of those things are going to cost humanity a lot.” But then he says, “But it’s not existential. And frankly, if you were reading books even five years ago, nevermind 20 from the top experts in the field saying here’s what five degrees of warming will look like.” He says, “That is not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen and we’ve broken the back of that and I think that that’s extraordinary.” And he says, “We made a lot of progress in recent times.” Is that fair or not fair?

Peter Kalmus:

I disagree with that level of optimism. I think it’s underappreciated how essentially irreversible the changes occurring or system currently are. I feel like we need to come out of this sort of sense of complacency or incrementalism and just really start fighting for every tenth of a degree because once we get to 1.3 degrees, we can talk about some of the possible techno fixes, but I don’t think it’s going to be easy or fun or nice at all to come back down from 1.3 to 1.2 or to get from 1.2 to 1.1. Unless we do something like stratosphere geoengineering, like putting aerosols up in the top, the higher levels of the atmosphere to literally reflect sunlight, which comes with issues, right?

Preet Bharara:

Right. No, I definitely want to talk about that and future technology, but let me make an observation, you tell me if that’s fair or not. There was a time when there were a lot of people who denied, I mean, there’s still some obviously, denied there was any climate change at all, denied that it was manmade in any way. You had the alarm bells being sounded by Al Gore and he wasn’t alone, but he didn’t have a lot of people with him in the way he might now.

Preet Bharara:

There used to be a debate on just the existence of climate change and its impact and the overwhelming science we were told and I believe, said that we did have climate change and the temperatures were going up and a lot of that is from carbon emissions caused by human beings. Now, there seems to be more of a good faith debate about what you and I have just been talking about, the difference between 1.2 degrees or 2 degrees, above pre-industrial levels, what that means. A, is that a fair assessment of how the debate has changed? And, B, how clear is the science about the effects of these things or is it your view that we can’t take the chance and the science is good enough?

Peter Kalmus:

That’s absolutely my view. I mean, precautionary principle. I think that the climate science community, I think it’s fair to say that we were surprised by the heat dome in the Pacific Northwest. Was that last summer? And so, it feels like I’ve gone through a time warp, but I think that was kind of a wake up call for the community. The models are great. They’re not perfect by any means, but they’re very useful for projecting how hot the global mean temperature will be under different emission scenarios, maybe less good at kind of projecting how that global heat, that global mean heat is going to manifest in different regions, in different locations, and short periods of time in different parts of our system.

Peter Kalmus:

We already know enough just like how heat waves are going to increase, how wildfires are going to increase, effects on the water cycle. I think we know enough to know that we’re heading into very dangerous territory. I think we also know enough to know that we don’t know everything and that so far, the sort of projections of impacts seem to have been somewhat underestimated and that they’re coming faster than we expected.

Peter Kalmus:

I think we’re already out of safe territory at 1.2 degrees Celsius of global heating. Every day we wait to kind of go into that emergency mode and if we have these old thresholds that we felt were safe, like 2050, and two degree Celsius, I don’t think that those are probably as safe as most people think. As new information kind of comes in about how serious things are even now, we should probably revise our kind of sense of leisurely taking care of this situation.

Preet Bharara:

I want to mention something you said back in 2019, because I think you do have to take care not to make it sound like it’s all hopeless so that people know that there’s something they can do and I want to get to that continuum in a moment.

Peter Kalmus:

I don’t think it’s hopeless.

Preet Bharara:

You said back in 2019, “Today, despite all the grim climate news, I actually feel more optimistic than ever.” That’s about three years ago. Do you still feel that optimism and what was the basis for that?

Peter Kalmus:

I don’t remember what I was speaking to at that time. I kind of have waves of, I think like all of us, we have waves of feeling more optimistic and feeling more pessimistic.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s just, to give you some more context, it’s a piece you wrote for the LA Times that has an interesting title, which goes to the point that I was trying to make and ask you about how to live with the climate crisis without becoming a nihilist.

Peter Kalmus:

I think that the rise of the climate movement is that’s the main source of optimism for me. Right now, sort of feeling this kind of, frankly, rise of nonviolent civil disobedience around the world is a cause for optimism for me. I feel like there is, even the film Don’t Look Up was a cause for optimism for me. I feel like the mainstream is starting to get the message that this isn’t just another issue, that this isn’t just like garbage in the local park that you can just go clean up. This is something much, much bigger and that it needs to become a much higher priority for humanity.

Peter Kalmus:

Preet, what gives me hope and this will sound a little strange maybe, but I don’t think humanity has really tried to deal with this yet in a very serious kind of concerted prioritized way. It’s always been something that gets kicked down the road typically. If we do start dealing with it in a very urgent way, I think we could go a lot faster. We’ll surprise ourselves with how fast we can go.

Preet Bharara:

Well, humanity is a broad category and there is-

Peter Kalmus:

Yes, it is.

Preet Bharara:

Humanity is divided up as, last time I checked, into different countries, some of whom are at war with each other and some of whom are further behind in economic development and have more reliance on fossil fuels. How do we deal with the problem of fossil fuels when there’s still some dependency on it? And for-

Peter Kalmus:

More than some, Preet, more than some.

Preet Bharara:

No, there’s a lot. No, there’s a lot, but the point I’m getting at and we’re seeing it obviously very seriously in recent weeks given the war in Ukraine, given there’s a lot of dependence on fossil fuels and their geopolitical and national security reasons to be energy independent, how does that intersect with the goal of getting rid of our dependence on fossil fuels altogether? Do you follow?

Peter Kalmus:

I do. This brings us back to the question of whether Joe Biden’s been the best president of all time on taking climate action. I wrote another op-ed about this topic expressing my opinion that in the first few weeks of a borne invasion of Ukraine by Putin, there was a global kind of awakening, an awareness of our dependence, our addiction, if you will, on fossil fuels and how that was directly fueling, no pun intended, the invasion of Ukraine. This was a major source. It still is a major source of treasure for Russia that drive, that literally kind of keeps the war machine going. That was a moment which could have been juxtaposed onto the climate emergency. There’s so many reasons why fossil fuels are literally killing us right now.

Peter Kalmus:

There’s global heating, which is what I’m most concerned about. There’s the invasion of Ukraine. There’s also pollution. Air pollution from burning fossil fuels is, I can’t remember if it’s the top or if it’s in the top three killers worldwide. It has a huge impact, millions and millions of people every year dying from just air pollution from fossil fuels. You have all of these reasons to get off of fossil fuels and suddenly you have this moment where people in the United States and people all around the world are kind of aware of how fossil fuels are, because of the war Ukraine, how sort of problematic they are. That would’ve been a great moment for the Biden Administration to use the bully pulpit and educate to sell to the American people a very rapid transition away from fossil fuels into renewables, and I think that moment was squandered.

Preet Bharara:

Can we do something that I never seen anybody do because we all assume that everyone has some fundamental knowledge and I’m not sure I precisely know how it works? Could you give us a one minute primer on the science of why it is that the burning of fossil fuel in the various forms or the use of fossil fuel in the various forms warms up the climate?

Peter Kalmus:

Absolutely. All right. High school chemistry, you burn CH4-

Preet Bharara:

That was my worst class, by the way, in all of high school and I was a pretty good student.

Peter Kalmus:

My son’s taking high school chemistry right now. You burn-

Preet Bharara:

I told my kids once, because they’re asking me if I ever did badly. I said, “Yeah, once on a chemistry quiz in high school in 10th grade, I think I got a six.” And they said was like, “Was that out of 10?” I said, “No, it was out of 100.” Luckily, it was graded on a curb. Continue please.

Peter Kalmus:

We’ll keep this simple. All right. Hydrocarbons, which are fossil fuels are carbons with a lot of hydrogens on them, but no oxygens. You got like CH4, that’s natural gas. That’s methane. We could call it fossil gas maybe. That’s the simplest one. You burn that, you combine it with oxygen and you get carbon dioxide, CO2, the carbon from that methane and then combined with the oxygen. That goes up into the atmosphere and its additional… so there’s always been CO2 in atmosphere. It’s important because it keeps the planet warm enough for there to be life on it. Otherwise, it’d be basically a snowball, but you add this, you take this stuff from the ground, which is this really old carbon from plants photosynthesizing. You burn that stuff. You add more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Peter Kalmus:

Now, what does that do? Well, it turns out that quantum mechanically, CO2 has this vibration mode. If you think of the carbon as your chest and the oxygens, the two oxygens as your fists, if you kind of hold your fist onto your side and you vibrate your arms up and down, that’s a vibrational mode of the carbon dioxide molecule, which happens to resonate at the same frequency as infrared photons coming from the planet’s surface. What that means is you’ve got this, okay, take one step back. You’ve got sun coming into the planet from sunlight coming in. That’s a lot of energy. That’s energy going into the planet. You have the planet, which is a certain temperature, so it’s basically hot and it emits infrared radiation just like if you’ve ever seen an electric stove top. When iron gets hot, it turns red, for example. Even before it turns red, it’s going to be emitting invisible infrared, which is at a wavelength just a little bit above that red light.

Peter Kalmus:

Anyway, everything that’s hot emits infrared and that infrared going out into space is what balances the incoming sunlight. You have to have the same amount of energy going out from the planet that’s coming into the planet for the planet to stay at the same temperature. If you have more coming in than going out, it’s got to heat up. When it heats up, it’s going to start emitting more infrared radiation. That’s just kind of the Planck black-body law. Then it’ll reach a new equilibrium, but at a hotter temperature.

Peter Kalmus:

Now, what that CO2 molecule from burning fossil fuel does is you’ve got this infrared photon coming up from the surface, which might have gotten out to space, taking energy away from the surface, from the planet and cooling. It hits that CO2 molecule-

Preet Bharara:

And it gets trapped.

Peter Kalmus:

It gets trapped. That CO2 molecule will eventually re-emit it in a random direction. Some of that goes back down. In that way, it basically acts like a blanket.

Preet Bharara:

Couple other terms I want to clarify. When people say we need to get to carbon neutral or to net zero, what does that mean and why is that the goal?

Peter Kalmus:

Well, that’s such a big rabbit hole. It’s a really, really great question.

Preet Bharara:

Your physics degree is not going to help you there as you said, a little bit.

Peter Kalmus:

A lot of this stuff that is important to talk about goes so far beyond science and physics and climate science. It’s all about sociology really and it’s all about-

Preet Bharara:

And personal psychology.

Peter Kalmus:

Personal psychology.

Preet Bharara:

And political science.

Peter Kalmus:

Politics, political science, policy.

Preet Bharara:

Don’t avoid the question.

Peter Kalmus:

No, I won’t. The concept of net zero is pretty simple. Hypothetically, so, we emit about 45 billion tons of CO2 per year. That’s humanity’s total, something between 40 and 50. If we manage somehow to take 2 billion tons per year out of the atmosphere through some mechanism, and we should talk about what that might be, then that’s a net emissions of 43 gigatons. If we somehow magically could take out all 45 gigatons, then that would be net zero, we’d be emitting 45 by burning fossil fuels and we would be pulling 45 billion tons, which I don’t think we could do by the way, I should make that very clear, but that would get us to net zero.

Preet Bharara:

How on earth do you do that, sir?

Peter Kalmus:

That’s why it’s such a rabbit hole. First of all, I want to say that the fossil fuel industry loves the concept of net zero and loves the concept of direct air capture, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. There was a direct air capture facility that turned on about a year ago in Iceland. I couldn’t really find how much it cost to do this, but it took out, I don’t know how many millions of tons of CO2 per year, which sounded really good, but when I did the math, it turned out that it was three seconds worth of our annual emissions from this one plant. That plant runs a whole year, who knows how much-

Preet Bharara:

Just to understand what you’re talking about. You’re talking about technology, not something naturally done or natural consumer activity-

Peter Kalmus:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

… or reduction in the use of fossil fuels. You’re talking about some proactive technology that actually takes carbon out of the air.

Peter Kalmus:

That you run with energy. If we-

Preet Bharara:

That you run with fossil fuels.

Peter Kalmus:

You could run it with fossil fuels. You could run it with renewables, but right now, we’re in a kind of race to build out renewables to reduce fossil fuels. We don’t really have extra energy right now to run these plants.

Preet Bharara:

Is that a reasonable goal or is the goal instead to just reduce carbon emissions?

Peter Kalmus:

That is my opinion. The goal instead should be to reduce carbon emissions. We certainly know how to take CO2 out of atmosphere. The problem is it’s essentially, it’s like running the economy in reverse at some level. For the last 200 years or so, we’ve literally powered our economy with fossil fuels. Up until quite recently, it’s been… now with fracking.

Peter Kalmus:

Originally, you basically just stuck a pipe into the ground and you got oil. It was incredibly cheap. You could burn it, you could run all your machines. Eventually, you had airplanes, et cetera. You run the internet with electricity that you make from it. It’s this thermodynamic economic process. It’s like literally an economic engine that runs on the thermodynamic energy from burning fossil fuels. A byproduct of that was CO2 in the atmosphere.

Peter Kalmus:

To run that in reverse, you would have to put in probably almost the same amount of energy. I’m not quite sure what the energetics are, but no matter how good the technology gets, there’s always going to be an energy input needed and it’s going to be vast. Of course, that’s expensive. To get that energy, you’re sort of running the economic system in reverse.

Preet Bharara:

You’re not bullish on that?

Peter Kalmus:

I’m not bullish on that. The last thing I think it’s really important to point out is that to speculate that we might, that we, and that should be in quotations, the word we, that we might be able to scale up such technologies in the future. First of all, that takes pressure off of the main event, which has to be a rapid drastic reduction in the fossil fuel industry and our use of fossil fuels. Second, who is that we? It’s basically young people. You’re basically saying, “Oh yeah, at some point 20 years from now, we will figure out the technology to do this, and then we’ll just do this so we don’t have to worry too much about…”

Preet Bharara:

But also, what’s the profit motive?

Peter Kalmus:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

For the private industry to develop such a thing, at least with renewables, capitalism is at play, right?

Peter Kalmus:

Yeah, there is no profit-

Preet Bharara:

They’re selling energy and you can make a profit on solar panels or on wind. The thing you’re talking about to take carbon out of the atmosphere requires government expenditure, right?

Peter Kalmus:

Yes. I think if it ever were to happen, the rationale for it, and I’m not sure exactly how this would work in sort of a market-driven context, but the rationale would be these heat waves at 1.5, so we’re going to probably, at the rate we’re going now, we’re going to hit 1.5 degrees in the early 2030s. These heat waves and these crop losses are so expensive that it’s cheaper for us to create millions of these plants for pulling CO2 out of the air. I think that would be how it… But, at the same time, just think of what, if we stay on this fossil fuel track that we’re on right now and all of the impacts that we all know about, I’ve already kind of listed some of them, those lists of impacts are all over. We’ve all heard them.

Peter Kalmus:

But our children, young people today are going to be… Their hair’s going to be on fire just dealing with those climate disasters, which are going to be incredibly expensive for them. And there’s going to be, who knows what kind of geopolitical destabilization is going to be caused by that. They’re going to be putting out all these fires all over the planet. Do we really think that they’re going to be able to spend some huge fraction of GDP building machines and solar panels to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere? Are they just going to be trying not to get killed in whatever war they’re fighting in?

Preet Bharara:

Does hair on fire release carbon into the atmosphere? Nevermind. I don’t mean to make much, but can I ask some math? Can we do a little basic math cause I don’t…

Peter Kalmus:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

I think some metrics would be helpful at least for me to understand. You mentioned a figure a couple of minutes ago, 45 billion tons a year going into the atmosphere, is that a lower or higher number than five years ago?

Peter Kalmus:

It’s a higher number.

Preet Bharara:

We have not plateaued. We are still going up in that number?

Peter Kalmus:

Globally speaking, we have not plateaued. The Working Group III report, which came out in April 4th, it did have some indications that some countries have potentially plateaued in terms of their emissions. I think it’s a very slippery fish though, because aviation, production of goods, where do you draw the line around a nation’s consumption of fossil fuels? If China’s-

Preet Bharara:

Right, if it’s all one atmosphere.

Peter Kalmus:

If China’s producing all of your plastic flip flops and that there’s certain emissions associated with that, where does that get… where do you tally that?

Preet Bharara:

Let me ask a different math question. I don’t know if this works, is there a direct line or some ratio between the 45 billion tons and a time period whereby you can calculate and predict what the temperature rise is going to be? In other words, if we put up another 10 billion, does that increase the temperature over time by half a degree, a tenth of degree? Is there some relationship between those two things that’s direct that you can explain?

Peter Kalmus:

Yeah, basically, that’s the framing of carbon budgets. There are big error bars on these numbers, and I can’t remember exactly what the error bars are, but it’s basically 400 billion tons plus or minus 400 billion tons. Basically, between zero and 800 billion tons that we can emit before we have a particular probability, I think roughly 50-50 of surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius of global heating rate. That IPCC reports, they’re careful, they’re very meticulous. They have the actual numbers that were kind of guesses on my part, uncertainties, for example, like how much methane could be released from permafrost melting, for example, and how much uncertainty there is and the current estimate of how hot we are at, which is 1.2 degrees Celsius. There’s lots of uncertainties there, but roughly speaking, it’s about 400 billion tons. That comes out to about nine years, maybe a little bit less at current rates of emissions.

Preet Bharara:

That’s not a lot of years.

Peter Kalmus:

It’s not a lot of years. I mean, if we start ramping down really quickly like the IPCC report and scientists of the world recommend that we should be doing, then we might have a little more than nine years, but it’s not a lot. Right now, it’s not looking great for keeping the planet under 1.5 degrees Celsius of global heating, which is why I’m talking about emergency mode. I think part of the problem with these budget framings and these 2050 type deadlines, they create a false sort of complacency and a false lack of urgency.

Peter Kalmus:

Like I was trying to say early on in this interview, I think from a physics point of view and from a point of view of the humans on this planet and the trees that are dying in drought, the coral reefs that are dying from ocean heat waves, the real correct perspective is that every additional ton of CO2 that we emit from burning fossil fuels, every gallon of gasoline that gets burnt and goes up into the atmosphere, every day that we wait to shift into emergency mode, every time climate change… It’s fascinating, because the time scales. Climate change got one mention in Biden’s state of the union address. That’s kind of essentially a year lost in terms of the bully pulpit. That’s why I’m talking about emergency mode.

Peter Kalmus:

I think the problem is, like politics, of course, it needs budgets, it needs carbon budgets, it needs economic budgets, it needs deadlines, it needs plans. What I think we should do instead of saying net zero by 2050, which is problematic both from the net zero point of view and the 2050 point of view, what we need instead is a detailed roadmap like what’s the easiest 20% to reduce, like rich people’s private jets. There’s also, we have to realize that there’s this huge disparity in terms of what the very rich emit versus what the globally average or even the globally poor emit.

Peter Kalmus:

We need a roadmap. Can we get the easy 20%, the very low-hanging fruit, can we do that by 2024 or something like that? Then you have the easy 50%, when can we do that? Every year, what are we going to go after? What are we going to reduce? Then there’s the kind of the easier 80% and then there’s that really hard 20%, which is going to have a lot to do with things like food systems, cement, industrial processes. As we’re doing-

Preet Bharara:

It’s the Last Mile, it’s the Last Mile problem.

Peter Kalmus:

Right, but we need a roadmap. We need world experts, not climate scientists, really, but world experts in terms of all of these processes, these industrial processes, policies, economics, and not the kind of economics that like Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for, which is, I don’t know if you remember that, but he basically won the Nobel Prize for saying that it would be much more expensive for us to deal with global warming now than to just let our kids deal with a three or four degrees Celsius planet or something like that. I’m paraphrasing, but we need real economists to take a hard look at these systems that we have and how we can go that fast. Then, we need a year by year roadmap.

Peter Kalmus:

Then, I don’t know what we do about China, but hopefully it’s a… that’s a problem that almost makes my head explode, Preet, because it’s hard enough to try to push for a change in my city, in the United States. I have zero influence in China, but if US administration had this kind of roadmap and got a lot of other countries on board with this, then at least they could go into negotiations with China and they could go into the global south and they wouldn’t be seen as hypocrites.

Peter Kalmus:

India is furious with countries like the United States who have had all of these economic benefits from burning fossil fuels, who have caused this problem. Then, they’re dealing with the fricking heat waves. They’re furious and they’re not going to be willing to be part of, for example, a global fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty if the global north isn’t starting to very rapidly go down this road itself.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Peter Kalmus after this.

Preet Bharara:

Now, you mentioned politics and I think that’s obviously extremely important. People emphasize the science, but without political will, nothing changes. I want to ask you about politics through a particular angle. Not only do you study climate and speak about it and write about it and advocate various things. You, yourself have decided to become a vegetarian. You no longer fly. I guess I have a couple of questions here. One, is that something you do because you have a personal commitment to doing everything you can with respect to your own carbon footprint as people say, or is that something that you realistically advocate that other people do?

Preet Bharara:

The reason I connect it to politics is that there are people who will say that folks who advocate for the stoppage of all flying, the stopping of eating all meat and sort of other things, they’ll say they’re kind of radical and it makes it easier for the fossil fuel folks to persist in what they’re doing and to decry people like Peter Kalmus as being radicals, because most people still want to eat a burger and get on a plane. How do you respond to that?

Peter Kalmus:

I would say that neither one of those are the reasons why I made those personal choices. There’s two main reasons why I made those personal choices. One is that it feels just kind of gross, I guess, sort of yucky. I don’t like the feeling of burning fossil fuels and the kind of connections between burning a gallon of gasoline, for example, or getting on a plane-

Preet Bharara:

Do you have a car?

Peter Kalmus:

I do have a car.

Preet Bharara:

Is it an electric?

Peter Kalmus:

It is an electric car.

Preet Bharara:

Just checking, just checking.

Peter Kalmus:

It’s just really like to burn gas, to do anything like this, which is for me, very obvious and potentially unnecessary burning of fossil fuel just doesn’t feel good to me on a personal level. I think if I got in a plane right now, I’d probably feel really nauseous. I’d probably have potentially nightmares about it. In 2012, my last flight, I was on there, the door shut, and I almost, I was pondering should I beg to get off, should I stand up and make a… That’s when that door shut and I was like, “Oh man, this doesn’t feel right to me.” That’s when I’m like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Preet Bharara:

You’re saying it’s a personal choice.

Peter Kalmus:

Very personal choice.

Preet Bharara:

But are you advocating that people take your lesson?

Peter Kalmus:

No, I’m not. Surprisingly, I’m not. The second reason-

Preet Bharara:

But why not?

Peter Kalmus:

I’ll get to that. The second reason, I went through this process from 2010 to 2012, 2013, where I was examining where my emissions came from and I was like, “Oh, I’m going to make this kind of a game and see where I can reduce.” It was fun. It was fun, it was satisfying, it got more connected to the community. I started growing food and doing a lot of fun stuff, got into some fun hobbies that way, met a lot of new people.

Peter Kalmus:

Interestingly, it really caused me to become much more aware of how we’re all kind of trapped in these larger systems and you got to take your kid to school or you got to get to work, or maybe you have to go visit your grandmother. We’re trapped by the thing that’s cheap is to get on the plane, the thing that’s convenient, and there’s all these systems that kind of channel our actions and kind of influence our decisions and to push back against those systems and make other choices that aren’t sort of encouraged by those systems, to go against those systems is very hard. It takes a lot of planning, a lot of thinking, people don’t understand it.

Peter Kalmus:

But I enjoyed it and I was like, “Wow, no one’s saying that this stuff can actually be enjoyable.” That led to me writing a book, which came out in 2017 and it was kind of an experiment I did. My hypothesis at the time was maybe if I tell people that you can reduce your own emissions and it’s kind of this fun, satisfying thing, maybe a lot of people will be inspired by that and it will actually start to create social change, shift norms around fossil fuel, maybe even reduce a little bit of emissions, and it was an experiment and it didn’t work. Too few people were able and willing and in a position to kind of push against those systems.

Peter Kalmus:

My theory of social change has changed a lot since then. I think it’s a great thing for climate advocates to reduce our emissions, but I think it’s a little bit dangerous, because I have seen some people get obsessed with that and then there’s two problems with that. They won’t do other stuff. They won’t kind of get politically engaged and raise their voices and try to push political leaders, et cetera, do potentially civil disobedience. They can get trapped into just thinking, reducing their own emissions is enough. Then, another problem is they can get a little bit toxic sometimes and sort of bash people who are advocating for systems change and then you get this kind of infighting-

Preet Bharara:

But are still eating steak.

Peter Kalmus:

Yeah, exactly. There are some people like that and I think it’s great-

Preet Bharara:

There’s a lot of people like that.

Peter Kalmus:

There’s a lot of people like that that are pushing for systems change. They’re still flying. They’re still eating steak. I don’t want them to leave the movement. I want them to keep advocating for change even if they’re not ready to make those, but-

Preet Bharara:

That’s good. I’m glad you say that, because the other thing people will say is to the extent you shift the debate or the responsibility to individuals to reduce their own carbon emissions, you’re taking the heat off of the real culprits. It’s a little bit like what you said before, it can play into the hands of the fossil fuel folks-

Peter Kalmus:

That’s right.

Preet Bharara:

… and the folks who don’t want to do anything about climate change. I’m glad you said all that.

Peter Kalmus:

That’s right. There’s another thing that’s really important to remember too. Don’t get distracted by personal reductions. They’re a good thing to do. They might make your platform as an activist more powerful. They might make you feel better because you’re more internally aligned with what your kind of explicit principles are. It’s a good thing to do, but don’t get distracted by it. Don’t also get distracted by things like carbon offsets, direct air capture, planting trees, recycling.

Peter Kalmus:

What we need is a drastic reduction in global fossil fuel industry. That’s kind of job number one. Probably job number two, Preet, I don’t know how much we want to get into this is kind of rethinking economic systems and the goal of the system of our economy right now. I kind of think of it as a sort of extractive capitalist system whose main goal is to accrue capital for people who already have capital, whereas I could imagine economic system which has a goal of flourishing for all people and flourishing for life on earth.

Preet Bharara:

I haven’t done this in a while and by this, I mean, I haven’t run a rap sheet in a while, but if I ran a rap sheet on you, Peter, would I find a recent arrest?

Peter Kalmus:

You would.

Preet Bharara:

I would! Would you rob a bank? What’d you do? It has something to do with the bank, am I correct?

Peter Kalmus:

It did has something to do with the bank. I think probably listeners have kind of realized by now that I’m starting to feel increasingly desperate by where society’s going and how hot the planet’s getting and how rural leaders seem to be really hell bent on increasing, expanding the fossil fuel industry and when the scientific consensus, especially clearly delineated in the IPCC report is that we need an immediate moratorium on an all new fossil fuel infrastructure to start to peak and go down. Now, part of why this expansion is able to happen is because of financing. The bank in the world that contributes the most to invest the most in new fossil fuel infrastructure projects is JPMorgan Chase.

Peter Kalmus:

Two days, there was a kind of a call from a group called Scientist Rebellion, which has been around for about two years. It’s scientists like me who are just feeling increasingly desperate and we’re not being listened to and they’re willing to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience, which sometimes leads to arrests. They decided it would be a good idea to have a global action. Lots of different scientists around the world doing civil disobedience on April 6th, two days after that IPCC Working Group III report was released.

Peter Kalmus:

And so, I’ve been thinking about civil dis being for several years. I thought that sounded like a good idea. What I did with three other activists, two of whom were scientists, one of whom was an engineer, we, the four of us walked up to the doors, the front doors of the JPMorgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles. We took out a couple of the… There were two double doors with these long door handles. We took a couple of kryptonite bike lock chains, locked those handles together so no one could go in and out of those doors. There are many other doors into the building. At some level, it was kind of a symbolic action, but we certainly didn’t want to endanger anyone or cause anyone to feel endangered. Then we simply chained our wrists to those door handles and waited.

Peter Kalmus:

After about three hours, we were arrested. We were in jail for about five hours, kind of in the head police headquarters, sitting on a steel bench, handcuffed for three hours, and then we moved to the actual jail for about five hours. We were in custody for about eight hours and we were charged with trespassing and we were released shortly after midnight and that was that. I guess you could say I’m a hardened criminal now. It was worth it though, I have to say.

Preet Bharara:

No, I respect that. My question is why’d you choose JPMorgan… I understand their connection to the financing of the stuff that you decry, but why not protest instead and maybe you’ll do this in the future and you’ll let us know? Why not protest instead slow-moving government entities or the fossil fuel industry folks themselves? What’s the thinking there?

Peter Kalmus:

A lot of it’s just pragmatics. If you or one of your listeners were to sit down and start to think how could I do non-violent civil disobedience to start to create more urgency around climate change, that you really did that, and you were committed to it, it’s not so easy to come up with the right location for your action.

Preet Bharara:

Well, first of all, you don’t want to fly to West Virginia because that’s multiple problems right there.

Peter Kalmus:

I would not choose to do that. The group Extinction Rebellion Los Angeles, which is, it sounds like a scary group, but it’s just a handful of people who really, really care about the planet and are willing to stand up and fight for the planet, really trustworthy, amazing people. I know that the word extinction rebellion sounds scary, but they’re really just people like you and me who are really, really concerned about what’s happening on the planet. They tried, and I was at this action before COVID, they tried doing an action to block the entrances of a natural gas storage facility in Southern California called Aliso Canyon, which had a huge blowout kind of accident a few years earlier that led to sort of a cancer cluster in the area, et cetera, et cetera.

Peter Kalmus:

Thinking just like you’re saying targeting fossil fuel infrastructure itself for nonviolent civil dispute seemed like the right thing. It was kind of in an out of the way location. There are many entrances and exits to the facility. They blocked one of them. They locked down and locked their hands into these kind of barrels so that it would be sort of hard for the police to move them and nothing happened. The police just waited them out. Eventually, they got hot in the sun. They had to go to the bathroom. They had to eat. They realized there wasn’t really any media there, so eventually they just left.

Peter Kalmus:

It’s not so easy to pick the right place to kind of make a splash for civil disobedience. Before we did the JPMorgan Chase action, we really had no idea what would happen. We didn’t know if it would get any media at all, we didn’t know if we would be arrested or not, we didn’t know what the police would do, we didn’t know if we would get assaulted by security guards for the building. We didn’t know what would happen, but we’re just like, “This is a fairly simple action.” It felt, actually honestly, fairly low risk. My biggest concern was losing my job or…

Preet Bharara:

I was going to ask about that now, so you’re a government employee?

Peter Kalmus:

Well, I’m actually not a government employee. I’m an employee of Caltech actually, but I am affiliated with NASA, which is, I have to be very, very careful.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a government entity, right? Do I have that right?

Peter Kalmus:

It is. I had to be very careful and conscientious to do things like take a vacation day on the day of the action. We’re having this interview early in the morning, so it’s outside of kind of normal working hours. I have to be careful about things like that.

Preet Bharara:

If you were to protest at the White House, would that be a problem for you?

Peter Kalmus:

That’s a great question. I don’t think so.

Preet Bharara:

You don’t want to test that.

Peter Kalmus:

There was a Scientist Rebellion action at the White House that occurred simultaneously with our action in Los Angeles. There was another scientist who was affiliated with the government lab who was at that action in Washington. She has not been fired from her job either. I think that there has to be a sense that although we’re scientists, although we’re affiliated, some of us with government laboratories, we’re still also private citizens in the United States and we’re still fathers, we’re still humans. We have a right to do things and to raise our voices in various ways, including nonviolent civil disobedience on our own time as private citizens. I think that’s an important distinction that should be respected, I think. I think NASA does respect that.

Preet Bharara:

Peter Kalmus, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for your work on this issue and for your advocacy and for shining a light on something that’s so important.

Peter Kalmus:

Thanks for having me, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Peter Kalmus continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Peter Kalmus.

Preet Bharara:

If you like what we do rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @preetbharara with the hashtag #AskPreet or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and The Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director who’s David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy, and the CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Sean Walsh, and Namita Shah. Our music is by Andrew Doss. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.