Episode 3: The Well-Behaved Scientists

Have you ever gone viral like so viral that someone on the other side of the world knew who you were? I went around the world. I even had this weird experience where a few days later I had to like call up AT&T and like change my plan or something and so I was talking to somebody at a call center in the Philippines and she was like, oh you're that guy who got arrested in Los Angeles like we love you here in the Philippines. It was surreal. So real because Peter is not a celebrity. He's not an influencer. He is a NASA scientist who works at the Jet Propulsion Lab and he and his friend Rose made headlines because they did something that scientists just usually don't do. It put their careers, their reputations, their research. It put it all on the line. It shocked everyone and ultimately it changed the trajectory of their lives. I'm Samantha Oldman. I'm Alessandra Rom. This is Sabotage from Good Luck Media. Episode three, the well-behaved scientists. Where are you guys based geographically? We're in the Bay Area. Oh, come. I'm calling from San Francisco and Alessandra's in Berkeley. We talked to Peter early in the morning our time if you remember. It was like 8 a.m. and neither of us are morning people. God, I know. To be honest, it was a little too early in the morning for an interview with an astrophysicist. I was nervous. My questions weren't going to be good enough. Yeah, I kind of felt the same way, but in the end he was really nice. Yeah, he was just a normal guy. Big smile, clearly a trekky. He kind of had dad vibes. Huge dad vibes. He made a lot of dad jokes actually. One final question for business. Do you consent to a recorded interview with Good Luck Media? Yeah, I do. Great. Okay. You guys aren't fed still, right? No, I'm just kidding. God. No, I used to actually be labeled a foreign agent under the self-administration. So I'm not a fan. I don't think I've ever been confused for a fed person. That was a joke. Again, dad jokes, dad vibes. But even though he's kidding, Peter actually had a good reason to ask if we were feds because he has been getting into trouble lately with his employer, with colleagues in the science community, and with the cops. Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's back up a little bit. How did this start? It all started about two years ago in 2022. So I hadn't broken any laws before, except for maybe like speeding or something occasionally. I'd never certainly never been arrested or charged with any misdemeanors or anything like that. I did think it was more likely than not that I'd be arrested. Peter decided to break the law on a sunny April day in downtown LA. He and three other scientists put on white lab coats, and then they handcuffed themselves to the doors of a Chase Bank corporate building. This is for all of the kids in the world, all the young people, all the future people. This is so much bigger. If you watch the video from that day, you can see Peter and his co-conspirators. They're handcuffed to these huge glass doors. It's not immediately clear what they're doing at first glance. You see a crowd start to gather, and people are asking what's going on. So I'm here because scientists are not being listened to. I'm willing to take a room here. Looks so grim here. Yeah, the friendly dad vibes from our caller gone, and he is a very serious dad in the moment. We're heading towards a plighting disaster beam, and we've been being ignored. The scientists in the world have been ignored, and it's got to stop. We're going to lose everything. And we're not joking. Listen to how emotional he's getting. He's basically pleading for them to listen to him. So that everyone, we have to stop the fossil fuel industry. We have to stop the financial fossil fuels. We have to stop new fossil fuel projects. Okay, so Sam, why Chase Bank? Right. It's important to make that clear. So JP Morgan Chase invests more in fossil fuel projects than any other bank, and it's significantly more. Billions of dollars more. That's something that most of us just don't think about when it comes to climate change, how big banks are funding it. And to some extent, this protest worked, even though it was pretty modest, it had four people in it. But it struck a chord around the world, which is why a few days later, you have Peter telling this story about how a random person in the Philippines recognized him just based on his voice and his name. This is so much bigger than any of us. He's right. It is much bigger than any of them. Because Peter and the three other scientists arrested in front of Chase Bank, they weren't alone. Hundreds of scientists around the world came out to protest that day. They were part of something called "scientist rebellion." It's a group of scientists/activists who are demanding immediate action on the climate crisis, and they were calling out the top 1% in particular for their outsized emissions. In Spain, dozens of scientists threw fake blood on the front of a government building. In Uganda, students and scientists marched publicly and even made national news. In France, scientists occupied the Museum of Natural History and held a teaching on the impacts of the climate crisis. And in Washington, DC, five scientists, including Peter's friend, Dr. Rose Abramoff, they caned themselves to the gates of the White House. So Rose is also a scientist from what I understand. She studies climate change and land use, and specifically how this affects plants and soil. Yeah. And like Peter until this moment, Rose was the kind of person who just did not get into trouble. This was a huge deal for her. The first time I interacted with the law was changing myself to the White House. You can see it if you watch the video. They're standing in front of a big fence that locks off the White House lawn. It is an overcast day in Washington, DC, so people are bundled up wearing hats and puffy coats. Yeah, there's drumming and chanting. This protest is already louder than has attracted more people than Peters. And like Peter, Rose is also wearing a white lab coat. There's another protester who you can see is helping her wrap herself in these big silver chains, and then she's attaching her to the gate with a big padlock. She's pretty calm considering where she is and what she's doing. The person next to Rose actually attaches herself to the gate by using a bike lock around her neck, and then Rose starts explaining why they're there. We want to buy the declared climate emergency, it makes these structural changes to live in more big shows. Close to 1.5 years of distance. Okay, so declaring a climate emergency would give the president a bunch of new powers, stuff like blocking new crude oil imports or even forcing the military to use renewable power. That's something that activists and scientists like Rose have been asking for for years. In the video, Rose is speaking into a megaphone, and people still ask her to speak up because she's a little soft spoken. Many of our waters are polluted and it affects everyone. If we go even above two degrees Celsius, our Arctic sea ice melts completely. And that's the secret service police who just showed up. So unsurprisingly, they're pretty aggressive, and eventually they clear everybody out. They arrest Rose, they load her into a police van, and then an officer starts talking to the crowd that's gathered. Folks, I'll change themselves to the White House fence, so they're getting arrested. You can't do that. It's a lesson learned, buddy. So, I'll call Billy. What scientists rebellion did that day? 25 countries with over 100 arrests. It got worldwide attention. And what Rose did got a lot of attention too, particularly from her bosses. You know, I'd been getting talking to from line management throughout the year for engaging in the, you know, chaining myself to the White House fence, they were not happy about that. But once you've changed yourself to the White House gates, it is hard to go back. This far, normally well-behaved scientists, they had gone rogue. The thing is, neither of them could have expected that their lives were gonna turn out this way. Both Peter and Rose have always been kind of like these mild mannered protocol following science geeks. - I was always a really good student and I was always really motivated to do well. And so basically you can imagine my childhood and my early schooling was basically one of that annoying kid who always did their homework early and on time. Everyone on this call is like that. - Yes. - And I know that Rose is pretty self deprecating here, but when we talked to her over video chat, her calling from her home in North Carolina, she came across as a really smart grounded person. - Right, it's almost like if Peter had dad vibes then Rose is that friend you always wanted to do group projects with. - Exactly. I would bet money that she did all the extrocredit projects in school. I mean, she told us how much she loved nature in a pretty nerdy way and that's a big part of why she wanted to be a scientist. - So I think it was partly like a really strong interest in the natural world and how it works and plants and rocks and trees and bugs and microbes that swim around in the scale. And the idea that if I did research environmental research, I would be able to provide the information that led to policy decisions that improve our environment or like safe guard health and safety for other people. I sort of really had that idea of like, "Oh, this is a good job, a good profession." - Yeah, I think at the core of everything, she just really wanted to help people. - I also had this idea that if I behaved well and played by the rules, that like I could make the world a better place using the rules of the world as the arenas existed, right? Like if I studied all the science and wrote up all the science and communicated the science through appropriate channels, people would listen, policymakers would listen and take action. And Peter was a Boy Scout literally. I mean, I could have guessed that. Yeah, he was a model student. He, his hobbies were playing piano and when his scout unit took him outside of the Chicago suburb he was growing up in. He said that he started a love affair with nature. - I think since I was a young kid though, I had this very deep sense that something was broken in our society. It felt like everyone was disconnected from the natural world. And I was having this heavy love affair with nature. I'd been to this Boy Scout camp in New Mexico in the Sagarrity Crystal Mountains and I fell in love with the pine, the ponderosa pine forests up there and with the stars at night 'cause there was no light pollution. And it was just this other world the really kind of almost romantic or erotic experience of like falling in love with the whole planet. - You can hear it, he's almost swooning. - That's why part of why I study dying ecosystems like coral reefs and forests. - Yeah, Peter even switched his career focus from astrophysics to earth science. But that wasn't cutting it. So he started to make radical personal changes. - I'd been a climate activist since 2006. So what is that like 17 years, almost 18 years now and I've tried over the course of that time. I've tried so many different things. Like we could spend a whole podcast talking about all the other things I've tried. - I hear you haven't flown on a plane since 2012. - Mm-hmm, that's true. I'm just curious how you get around. - Mostly train and car and it can be a sacrifice. I think that my career would have, my scientific career would have flourished more quickly if I had kept flying because it's so being a scientist right now the way we have things set up, which is not the only way it has to be set up but it's the way things are set up now. It's so contingent on flying around a lot. Peter switched things up at home too. He started growing his own vegetables. He got chickens and he started using a composting toilet. Oh God, that's taking it pretty far. And I don't think I could do that. I am sure that I could not do that. - 'Cause I was like holy shit, I reduced my emissions by like 18 metric tons per year or something, but there's like more than 40 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent being produced per year and that's still growing rapidly. So obviously what I did is not any sort of a climate solution. - Wow, all that effort and sacrifice for what's essentially a drop in the ocean. - Yeah, I mean, unless you are a multi-millionaire who flies a private jet everywhere, focusing on your personal carbon footprint is not going to make much of the difference. Like it can make you feel better, but that's kind of it. And even Peter gets that. - And it was always clear that reducing my emissions was never going to solve climate change. And I think it's really weird that it seems like a lot of people do fall into that trap. - Peter is a scientist and part of being a scientist is figuring out how things work, identifying problems, coming up with solutions. And Peter did the research. He figured out that when it came to climate, changing his personal habits was never going to fix the big problem. - I mean, for a long time, we've been told tackling climate change is our personal responsibility as opposed to the governments or corporations. And it's also nice to think climate change is something that you can control. It obviously makes me feel better when I bring my own bag to the grocery store, you know? But when you stack it up against all the terrible things happening to the climate, yeah, it's really hard not to feel a sense of despair. - Exactly. And speaking of which, Rose was starting to feel a really similar sense of climate despair. She was actively involved in research on the climate crisis. In 2021, she was one of the authors of a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is also called the IPCC report. - Right, that's a reminder of just how impressive Rose's credentials are. The IPCC report is essentially the gold standard report on the crisis and its impact. And it's really long. Like, okay, let me look it up right now. It's 2,409 pages long. So most people, they just read the abstract and tell you they read the whole thing. Rose is definitely the exception. Like again, she wrote the thing. But still, that did not feel like enough. - It was an overwhelming process for me to go through that report. And I really felt like, wow, I can't just keep doing the research that I'm doing. Like I can't just keep, my job can't just be to read this documents and sign off on it and say like, yes, this is what's happening. It just feels like, yeah, reading books while your house is burning down. - It is really hard for Rose to talk about this. I remember in the conversation, she had to look away. Her shoulders got really tense. And she smiled, but it was one of those smiles you do when you're trying to force yourself to stop crying. - You're getting a little bit emotional right now. Can you tell us what you're feeling? - Sure. And I think that this is something that a lot of scientists deal with, especially people who study climate change. And typically, when I'm doing math, I'm not thinking about like global scale climate impacts because there's no way. So I do feel like in general, I can be quite good at compartmentalization as our most scientists and most people probably when we need to. And maybe that's one of the barriers to action because I think one of the things that really spurred me to action was accessing these emotions, these like difficult emotions of like shit, this is gonna be really bad for everyone. And it's gonna be really unfair. - And neither Rose or Peter were able to compartmentalize anymore. - Scientists have been like, "Oh, we'll just write papers "and we'll advise policymakers to wear science "and then they'll do the right thing." But that was super naive. And it's quite clear to me that the most effective thing by far, by like an order of magnitude, was the civil disobedience actions. That was able to reach people's hearts and minds around the world. - Enter scientist rebellion. Here we go. - We better be ignored, the scientists in the world are being ignored. And it's gotta stop. - Getting arrested that April was just the start. Peter and Rose decided to take it up a notch. But to do that, they were going to risk pissing off thousands of the most credible scientists around. The American Geophysical Union, or the AGU meeting, is a gathering of some of the brightest minds in science. It's like if Peter and Rose were ice dancers, this meeting would be their Olympics. It's important. And something to keep in mind is that the people and attendants understand more than maybe anyone how bad climate change is. It is their job to study it and to predict how much worse it's going to get. But the problem is most of these scientists and experts, they're still playing by the rules. When we get back, our well-behaved scientists disrupt their Olympics. All right, Ollie. Remember all the work conferences that you've been to? Probably some like the Marriott and Tulsa, Oklahoma? So climate scientists have to do that kind of stuff too, but there's our existential. It's really, really weird to go to those climate conferences. And this is the biggest climate conference, the biggest or science conference. I'm completely inundated by talks and posters about how Earth is dying, literally. And just talk after talk, poster after poster, in surprising ways that I wouldn't even be able to imagine. Yeah, so you're at a work conference, but you are surrounded by reminders that the Earth is literally on the verge of collapse. It's like thousands and thousands of paper cuts all over the Earth system of like different ecosystems and agricultural decline and heat waves getting worse and sea level rise and ice melting everywhere. And how that sounds horrible. Truly. I literally had tens of thousands of these presentations at a conference. And yet to see like all the scientists just like acting like it's perfectly normal and having coffee together and being happy and meeting up with each other and like thinking mainly primarily about their careers, just like with any other professional conference, it like almost makes my brain break the level of cognitive dissonance there. That cognitive dissonance was driving them crazy. So Peter and Rose decided to do something about it. I'm also a very polite person, generally speaking like I don't feel like it's in my nature to like get up and start some shit. But they started some shit and there is a video of the whole thing. It is only 32 seconds long, so it is surprising. It pissed people off so much, but listen, I'm going to send it to you. Let's watch it, Ollie. Okay. Science director at the Nerture Nantes. So there's a taped video introduction plane. Peter and Rose, you can see them running on stage. They have a banner. It's kind of chaotic, honestly. The banner says out of the lab and into the streets. People are cheering. Okay. Now they have to leave. And that's it. Yeah, that was kind of my reaction when I saw it for the first time. I was like, wait a second. These two have done wilder shit than this. They have chained themselves to fences. They've gone viral. They've been arrested. And now their big protest is unfurling a banner. I know, but apparently it really pissed people off. The meeting organizer very quickly, you know, we had maybe 15 seconds and we were up there came and took like ripped the banner from my hands, escorted us out, told us that if we were turned, we would be arrested. You know, we so we were kicked out of the conference. They got kicked out of the conference and research that they were set to present later that week was pulled. The AGU also opened a scary sounding ethics investigation. So extreme. And then it got even worse. Later on Rose was fired and for several months I thought I might be fired too because there was an ongoing ethics investigation over my actions. So it seems like a really minor event, but it was really difficult. And I think a lot of people did take offense to the fact that, you know, like this was a situation in which there's like a specific kind of order that people expect and like a decorum that we were in following. That's right. Rose was fired from her job at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Oak Ridge said, listen to this, they said that she had misused government resources by engaging in a quote, unquote, personal activity on a work trip. God, isn't that the wording used to fire people for like using their business credit card on vacation or gambling of Vegas? Yeah. Rose wrote an op-ed in the New York Times where she talked about how, you know, she thought that she would get in trouble for protesting, but she really did not think that she would get fired for something like that. I mean, it does seem extreme. What did other people think? Like, I'm curious what the other scientists there were thinking. I mean, it did become controversial in the scientific community. In the end, thousands of scientists wrote an open letter announcing what the AGU did and how they handled the protest. Eventually, the AGU sort of seemed to cave to pressure and they reinstated Rose and Peter's research and they even invited them to come back and collaborate around climate activism and engagement in the future. Huh. Well, I wonder how genuine that was on the part of AGU leadership, but yeah, it sounds like a good for PR to do something like that. If you've angered a lot of people, but it didn't really matter because Rose did not get her job back, but she does not regret what she did. I feel like people's kind of knee-jerk reaction is to sort of catalog all the ways in which we're powerless. I felt powerless for a long time too. I'm an early career female scientists, not totally white, totally cis, you know, belong to some like marginalized groups, but I really want to encourage people, especially scientists to catalog the ways in which we're extremely powerful. Being a scientist gives me credibility and power and access to media. You know that saying with great power comes great responsibility. Superman, right? Or Spider-Man? Spider-Man. No, but not even him. It was his uncle. I thought, okay, not Peter Parker. His uncle. Okay. I have kind of a responsibility since I have this kind of platform and credibility to kind of use it in a responsible and ethical way, which is what I'm trying to do it, but also to kind of be a little careful to not destroy it, because it is such a, my credibility is such an incredible asset. It sounds like what they're saying is they feel like it's their responsibility to speak up about the urgency of this crisis, not to sugarcoat it. Right. Although I can't stop thinking about how differently this turned out for the two of them. Peter's a man. He's pretty senior. He works at NASA, which is one of the most important science institutions in the world. And then you have Rose, who as she told us earlier, she's a queer woman. She's earlier in her career and she's brilliant, but just less established. And they did the exact same thing, but she's the one who lost her job. Right. It's not like it's Peter's fault that he was treated differently, but it seems unfair. I mean, it goes back to the issue of their own credibility, right, of perception. And we should say Peter is a white man. He's also the most followed climate scientist on Twitter. He's afforded a certain level of trust and respect by not only other scientists, but by the public too. So do you think you being a scientist and getting arrested helps increase support like you or viewed as somebody with credibility? Yeah, a thousand percent it does. It's harder for the public to dismiss credible scientists who are doing disruptive action than it is if they just like see like so called like dirty hippies doing it. So we may never know why exactly Rose lost her job and Peter didn't, but it's a reminder of how much credibility matters and how someone's identity can factor into it. Yeah. But it's worth even though Rose got fired, she hasn't stopped speaking up and protesting. In fact, she's busier than ever. Two people are in custody after chaining themselves to pipeline equipment for hours. Yep. She's really busy. We caught up with Rose this past fall. We actually knew that she was going to be in West Virginia that week and it turns out, it was because she was protesting the infamous mountain valley pipeline. She did it with a group of elderly women. They halted construction by chaining themselves to a massive drill. Mountain valley pipeline to me, and I think to a lot of activists, is really a symbol of our country's failure. I've reported on movements against oil pipelines in a few different places, and it's striking just how many different types of people were talking Indigenous elders to health experts, environmental activists. They're also opposed to new fossil fuel infrastructure. And this is a huge natural gas pipeline that we're talking about. Every single year it would admit as much greenhouse gas as 23 U.S. coal plants. As you can imagine, environmentalists hate it. People who live near it are afraid that it's going to poison their land and their water, and people have vehemently opposed it ever since plans to build it were announced in 2014. I locked myself to a drill on the Greenbrier River side of the mountain valley pipeline. This drill was poised to go under the Greenbrier River. Near me, I was on the drill, and then next to a different part of the, change a different part of the drill was an elderly 79-year-old woman named Marty, and across the street leading into this construction site, we're four women, four also elder women, part of the Rocking Chair Rebellion. Rocking Chair Rebellion, by the way, is a group made up of mainly senior citizens who are demanding divestment and fossil fuels. Me and Marty had our arms and lock boxes, which meant that in order for us to be removed, the cops needed to cut us out. Can I ask how do you change yourself to a drill? I can't answer that. Really? Okay. I mean, I got it, but I'm not going to. Right. Eventually, the cops arrived. They got an extraction team to sauce off. Carefully, because again, it was mostly elderly women there, and then they arrested them. We were certainly told a lot of very scary things. We were told we would be charged with felony domestic terrorism. Yes, you heard that correctly. Felony domestic terrorism. Yeah. By chaining yourself to the drill, Rose is the first climate scientist charged with the felony for protesting a fossil fuel project. Since taking part in your first action, you've been arrested three times, right? I think we're up to six now. Six times. Okay. Yeah. So you have been arrested six times. Do you regret participating in these actions at all, like given how much it has cost you? I don't. After her public firing, Rose joined the board of the Climate Emergency Fund, which as we talked about in the last episode, was founded by Eileen Getty, and it funds groups like Just Stop Oil. You know, Rose is exposing herself to all of these risks, but she has a clear goal. Right. Getting other scientists to stop being so damn well-behaved. Everybody celebrates, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and sort of like accepts like these sort of like agonist periods of our past, like we forgive quite a lot of destruction on the part of the suffrage, that's right, because we have no no, yay. And so I think that there's, I get a lot of paths on the heads from people. Sort of, you know, like you're so brave, good job, but I could never. A lot of the support that I've received for the more high-risk activism that I've done has been privately communicated. In other words, many scientists are just keeping their heads down. And I think I think people in the community are pretty terrified of being perceived as biased or emotional. Like I think maybe we were all kind of like deeply indoctrinated by like Mr. Spock when we were growing up in Star Trek, but the whole point of Mr. Spock was that he was actually emotional and that the whole like logical scientific thing was kind of a facade, right? Are you disappointed that more scientists are protesting? Extremely, yeah. And at first I was like, maybe I shouldn't say that because it might be discouraging to people, but yeah, if I'm being honest in my heart, I'm extremely disappointed. Like how can they dissociate and just like act like it's any other science? Clearly we need a huge shift in order to make any progress on the climate crisis. Clearly, and not just in the science community, but the whole world order. We kind of have to address the crisis that's at hand at the moment. Sort of like during World War II, like we need to make sacrifices during this period of transition in order to get their successfully because there's just no way to do it otherwise. I think that since I got arrested last April, I noticed a very clear change in how the media started rewarding things. Yes, I think there were probably multiple factors in that, but I think scientists starting to risk a rest was one of those factors. And scientists starting to speak with emotion and clarity and without missing words, as I did in the kind of video that one more. I do think that being a scientist helps both capture the media's attention and lend credibility to the activist movement, right? Like the use are obviously stakeholders in their own future. And like indigenous people in front line groups, people who are living in like the chemical shadow of refineries are obviously stakeholders. But I think there's definitely a perception by a lot of the public and the media that climate activists are just crazy hippies, you know, and alarmists. And I think it helps to have some, you know, credible scientists who have published research on this work to say, these like activists are not crazy. This is a real problem and we're not addressing it. On the next episode, we take you inside the group that launched a thousand think pieces and memes. That's next on Sabotage. Sabotage is an original production from Good Luck Media. The show is hosted, reported, and executive produced by Alessandra Ram and me, Samantha Ultman. Our producer is Hannah Chen. Our consulting senior producer is Rebecca Senanas. Our audio engineer is Eric Gomez with original music by Daniel G. Harmon. With executive producers Adam McKay and Stacey Roberts Steele, produced in partnership with Yellow Dot Studios. Sabotage is represented by Drew Wellborn from WME and Andrew Randoni from Bala in Los Angeles. Our show art is designed by Luis the Baton Court. Special thanks to Nick Carden of Carden Audio. Good Luck Media is an independent journalism studio where climate is the main character. We'll see you next week.