Interview— philosopher Craig Callender
The Right to Repair with Tino Belli
IndyCar’s Director of Aeronautical Engineering and a legend behind-the-scenes of motorsport
Craig is Tata Chancellor's Professor of Philosophy and a Founding Faculty and Co-Director of the Institute for Practical Ethics at the University of California San Diego. He is also part of the Campus Climate Change Committee, which has seen some historic enactment relative to the university and environmental policies.
Here he and Andrea discuss disinformation and ethical responsibility within the realms of academia, corporations, and particularly the automotive industry, exploring the broader implications for environmental sustainability and change. Craig outlines the historical challenges of academic freedom versus corporate influence, exemplified by the similarity in various scandals such as those involving the tobacco industry and Volkswagen’s Dieselgate, to discuss the intricate dance between personal accountability and the necessity for structural evolution. The narrative underscores the importance of transparency, the impact of social norms, and the proactive role of education in fostering a sustainable future. Moreover, even as both speakers talk of the importance of vehicles in their own lives and the cars they have loved over the years, the conversation takes a long look at the automotive sector, from its ethical quandaries to the potential of its innovations like electric vehicles, highlighting the delicate balance between economic objectives, environmental stewardship, and the drive towards 'ecological motoring.' Through these discussions, the script paints a multidimensional picture of the quest for integrity and sustainability in an age fraught with challenges.
#fossilfuel #funding #university #sustainability #motoring #transportation #ecological #craigcallender #andreahiott #way-making
More at
• Desirable Unknown (Nature & Environment)
00:00 Tackling Disinformation in Academic Research
01:41 A Personal Journey Through Motoring Memories
03:11 The Environmental Awakening of a Late Adopter
06:50 Exploring the Philosophy of Motoring and Movement
20:10 The Impact of Fossil Fuel Funding on University Research
24:57 The Complex Web of Industry Influence and Climate Change
28:57 Navigating the Ethical Landscape of Academic Funding
39:17 Reflecting on Personal Responsibility in the Climate Crisis
40:50 Reflecting on Social Norms and Tobacco Strategy
42:01 The Shift in Academic Funding and Social Acceptance
43:04 Exploring the Impact of Fossil Fuel Funding on Academia
43:52 The Power of Social Norms in Changing Behaviors
44:28 Government's Role vs. Social Movements in Public Health
48:44 The Complex Relationship Between Individual and Collective Responsibility
51:23 The Challenge of Structural Changes for Environmental Ethics
56:56 The Role of Transparency and Ethics in Environmental Change
01:03:17 Academic Freedom and the Influence of Corporate Funding
01:09:04 The Interplay Between Freedom, Truth, and Responsibility
01:24:04 Envisioning a Future of Ecological Motoring
Find Tino Belli on LinkedIn
AAIA bio of Tino Belli
Andretti Motorsports
Robin Herd and March Engineering
Dan Wheldon
Microtube Heat Exchanger Mezzo
EMI: the Ecological Motoring Initiative
Transcript:
Fossil Fueled Funding with Environmental Ethics Philosopher Craig Callender
Craig Callender: [00:00:00] that's what I really want to target in the paper is, is disinformation. So, money will always affect things. any money will affect anything, right? Any type of funding. But this sort of active use of things in this kind of merchants of doubt, tobacco strategy of disinformation that I think, so what I tried to do in the paper is that, the, you have to walk this really fine line if you don't want it to conflict with academic freedom is you don't want it to be that, it becomes whether you can get funding for your research hangs on a kind of political litmus test.
Because, okay, if you have the politics I do, then, the fossil fuel industry isn't like a shining example of awesomeness. And, but, you always have to imagine that, different people have different political views and this sort of any kind of policy you come up with could be then also used against you.
Or against your, your personal interests in some way. So is there something that [00:01:00] these companies are doing that's wrong where you could say it's wrong without saying that it's because you know, it's violating your conception of the social good.
And so on this kind of view, you, again, I'm not pursuing this myself. I'm just going after the transparency. But if I were to go after this, then the way I would do it would be focusing on disinformation.
Andrea Hiott: Hi, Craig. Thanks so much for being on the show today. It's really good to see you.
Craig Callender: Hi, Andrea. Thanks a lot for having me.
Andrea Hiott: So I usually start by asking, what's a moment in your life that you remember being moved or some early memory that you have motoring or even a more recent one that's changed your idea of motoring. Anything come to mind?
Craig Callender: Yeah, I guess maybe one, one or two things come to mind. One is. Yeah, when I was [00:02:00] a kid, I wish I could, could have, called my mother and found out what type of car this was, but my grandfather was so proud of, he had this ancient car.
It was it was, it was like a 1940s something Ford. So I can remember getting picked up and driven around in that thing. I remember the the feeling of the seats Of course, there were no seatbelts back then.
Andrea Hiott: Bouncing around
Craig Callender: I think I think, those kinds of safety rules get grandfathered often. And anyway, there were, there were no seat belts in it
and you had, yeah, great freedom there in the back seat if you were a little kid.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Bouncing around
Craig Callender: like that. And the car was
awesome. It was just so cool. It was maybe, I don't know, 20, 30 years old older than everything else on the road then.
Andrea Hiott: Do you remember progressively the cars of your family and so on?
Craig Callender: Yeah. I think I remember all the cars that the families had. Yeah. Most of them haven't been really very good, but.[00:03:00]
Andrea Hiott: So, in what context do you, have you thought about motoring, over the course of your life? Like when, when do you think you started to think about what it actually means for the environment, for example?
Craig Callender: Oh yeah, I guess, late adopter. Everyone starts to realize, the, the cost of what they do and that kind of seeps into your life and different realizations here and there, why, so I was just, Realizing, well, why, why am I using these plastic toothbrushes all the time?
I could be buying bamboo ones or something. Right. Yeah. I just realized this two weeks ago. And so, you why didn't I, why did I not realize it years ago? I don't know.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Craig Callender: And, do you
Andrea Hiott: drive a car? Have you all through your adult life always owned a car?
Yeah.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Yeah. I've always driven right from 16. Yeah. I was chomping at the bit to drive.
It meant, getting freedom from your house and everything. Yeah, that had one of the worst cars probably ever made. I think that I had the Plymouth [00:04:00] Velari. Oh, it was it was boxy. It was Chrysler made those Chrysler made those K K cars and God, they were ugly.
And this, this thing was terrible. Then I moved even further down from that. Then I had a Plymouth horizon, which the, I remember the floorboard underneath the, where you, the driver's seat had fallen through. And so I could see the ground as I was driving. And so I could actually do, it was almost, And it failed so often that it, it really was tempting to turn it into a kind of Fred Flintstone car running with your feet on the ground.
That one also had this transmission problem that was awesome, which was coupled with some other thing where, it was stall out if you didn't put a lot of gas into it when you started up.
Andrea Hiott: Oh yeah. But the transmission
Craig Callender: was really sketchy. And so you, when you put it in drive, you might've been in reverse or reverse drive.
So you pump it with a [00:05:00] lot of gas, but you didn't actually know which way you were going. Oh God.
Andrea Hiott: That sounds really dangerous.
Craig Callender: That was terrible.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Craig Callender: I actually gave it away and lost money because I had to get towed away. The towing cost more than what I got for the car.
Andrea Hiott: Did you still love these cars, even though, you haven't described them as being very reliable or beautiful, but.
Craig Callender: No. I think the only car I loved, and then that had. But that had a major transmission issue too, was I had a, I did have a convertible Mini Cooper.
Something, something John, something , I don't know, whatever version that had fancy English leather seats. It was beautiful.
That's probably the only car I've had that I really like.
Andrea Hiott: Did you take a lot of road trips? We're both from America and there's this kind of road trip association. Did you do that much?
Craig Callender: Not as a kid growing up. I am from Rhode Island, very small.
The idea of moving, driving more than like 15 minutes is, It's almost unthinkable.
Now you're
Andrea Hiott: in [00:06:00] California. That's a big drive. Yeah. And
Craig Callender: so now, now we will do these road trips go up and see the national parks and Yosemite and we're into Utah or something like that. And were just at Joshua tree a couple of weeks ago and that's a small road trip.
But. But still, somewhere deep, deep inside of me is the, the original Rhode Islander who's thinking, Oh my God, I can't believe I'm in a car this long.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I remember we moved just like 30 minutes away from our sort of hometown and going back to visit my grandparents. I just felt like it was like days and days, and it was like half an hour.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
We would drive from
Providence to the southern Rhode Island. And then I remember being at the beach and, meeting kids and they were all the way from Connecticut. And I thought, Oh,
Andrea Hiott: wow,
Craig Callender: that's funny.
Andrea Hiott: So you're a philosopher. So I. I, there's something I think about a lot but I'd love to get your perspective about the word motor itself, [00:07:00] motoring just like maybe you can Brainstorm a little or think with me about could we apply that word to any form of Powered like a unit that's generating movement power.
We talked about electric motors, of course But do you see where there might be a line like a bicycle for example?
Craig Callender: Yeah Yeah, well, I guess loosely, I guess anything that produces work is a motor.
Andrea Hiott: And people
Craig Callender: do use it, they can And sports like in basketball that you might say, well, that person can't shoot, but he's got a, he or she has got a a high, a strong motor, very energetic out there.
Andrea Hiott: The motor system in the body, the word is used a lot.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so the other thing I might thought of when you asked the original question is yeah, I, I spent my life, paddle, paddle [00:08:00] boarding. And so then I think of, well, in that case, then I'm the motor.
Andrea Hiott: I was going to ask you about that. Because you do you still do you do that in the mornings, right?
Really early or. You live in San Diego. I guess we should
Craig Callender: tell people. Yeah, three or four days a week, I go out and, and then we, well, it's a bunch of us usually and we go out and train, train for race, for various races that are happening in California or, or elsewhere.
So I'll be doing a race at the end of the month. I did a race, I think a month ago.
Andrea Hiott: So speed is important for you too.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Yeah. And speed. And yeah, so you're, you're motoring that thing and you hope it, and there's yeah. And so I can remember the first time I, I got on a race board. So, there's like your standard paddle boards where you're just floating around and people want the paddle the wrong way.
If the, if it's stand up paddle, if it's prone, just use your hands
Andrea Hiott: and
Craig Callender: everything wrong. And then just drifting around with the wind thrown around. [00:09:00] But the race paddle board, is a different story. You've got this carbon fiber, really thin, light just an object of beauty, it's just really thin, so they maximize the water line and get really, It minimized the width so you can go past and I remember, I still remember the first time I got on one. It was this big race called Battle of the Paddle that used to happen. It was the biggest one in the world and at Dana Point. But all the vendors from all over the world would be there and it would let you win.
They would lend you their equipment so you could try it. And so then I, I remember I tried this bright red carbon fanatic board and
Andrea Hiott: I
Craig Callender: just couldn't believe it. It was just so fast, all the water coming off the front. And, I came in and my daughter was with me and she said, Oh my God, dad, you, you had white water flying off the front and I said, I know, and I'm buying it.
Andrea Hiott: Was that the start of the [00:10:00] racing? Yeah. Oh, so you, okay. Yeah. So it really it's very similar as in with other vehicles. Once you do it once you want more and more.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: The sensation of speed, I guess it's not that different, from depending what kind of instrument or vehicle we use, it's still giving us a similar feeling, but I don't know.
Do you feel free when you're on those boards? Is that part of the job in the same way it would be with a car or a bike?
Craig Callender: Yeah. That's funny because you do feel like you're going fast sometimes and really you're going very slow. Yeah. Comparatively. I do. I do. I do. Doing a race, if you're, if you're a racer, you're trying to hold, to have some self respect, you're trying to hold that board over five miles an hour, you know, six is like really very, very hard to hold.
You can't really hold it for a whole race. And so you go very, so slow.
Andrea Hiott: Sounds very sweet. Feels
Craig Callender: so fast because your face is down on the board and then you see all those little waves going by and you feel like you're flying [00:11:00] and then you look and you're going only five miles an hour.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, but you can feel like that.
I remember feeling like that as a kid on a, like just a wave board catching a wave and who knows what, so, yeah. I'd like to hear when you did, we didn't get quite to the question, but when did you start to think about your motoring choice?
Or do you think about your choice of car? I assume you still have a car now. Do you still have a car now?
Craig Callender: Yes. And yeah, I have the traditional car of the, Professor, which is the gas guzzling Volvo,
Andrea Hiott: and
Craig Callender: we have a Prius but yeah, maybe this summer I get an electric car, but yeah, I have definitely started well, especially in the last few years been thinking about it a lot.
And so now the Volvo has been relegated to basically becoming a paddleboard car to transport my massive paddleboard. Okay. Then when I'm going to [00:12:00] campus and things, if, if, if the light and temperature work out, then I'm taking the electric bike.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, okay
so you bike to work?
Craig Callender: Yeah.
Well, just, the electric bike. So it's not really like real biking. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Well, in terms of the environment or in terms of the use of fossil fuels, it's very different.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Yeah. It's great. And it's amazing the transformation around it's highly non uniform I think in the U S but like in my town, it's just armies of people on e bikes everywhere.
Oh really? I saw some study that said that the e bikes have saved something like more like four times as much as EV. Cars so far,
Andrea Hiott: that's, that's inspiring.
Craig Callender: I can't vouch for it because I'm really not an expert and can't, didn't study it. But that doesn't surprise me. Think of all these high schools all across the U S you just see armies of e bikes [00:13:00] and those all would have been, parents or kids driving their kids back and forth.
So all those, All those trips have all been, they're, they're gone. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. How, when has that change started? You've lived there quite a while. So is that just in the past couple of years, would you say, or?
Craig Callender: Yeah, I'd say the last three, three, four years I did start thinking more ecologically about cars.
And this will get into one of the topics we'll end up talking about, but. Yeah, in the mid well, like 2000 I guess 2015 or something like that, 14, then, then the two cars we had were a Prius and, and the, the Volkswagen the TDI Sport wagon. And then I had such good mileage, so that was before all the EVs started hitting the marketplace. And so then I thought at the time, I thought, Oh, I'm about as good as it can be, because I had these two cars, which both had extremely good mileage the Prius and TDI sport wagon.
And then of course we know then what happened with [00:14:00] the Volkswagen diesel gate.
Andrea Hiott: Yes.
Craig Callender: But at the time I thought, Oh, I'm on this clean diesel and I'm getting 40 something miles per gallon and the Prius is, about the same, I think. And I thought, Oh, this is really good.
Andrea Hiott: So did you and your family choose the Prius and the Volkswagen TDI diesel wagon for reasons of gas consumption mostly, or were you already thinking about the environment or was it both?
Because we have to remind people that was the time when we. Volkswagen was saying that these are clean diesel cars, so it was it was being marketed as something that was good for the world, but also good on gas mileage, so.
Craig Callender: Yeah, I, I think, it would be hard to tease apart the different factors in the decision, but it, it would have been a bit of both you were already
Andrea Hiott: thinking about all that is what I guess I was getting at. A little bit, yeah. Not
Craig Callender: as much as, now I should probably should have been thinking about it more, but I wasn't. [00:15:00]
Andrea Hiott: Most of us weren't. Weirdly, it's only like 10 years ago, but it's changed a lot.
Craig Callender: Yeah. You can see it even in the, so it now there's all this push against carbon neutrality.
So back, back then you weren't really thinking about. Just cutting co2 source emissions, you were just thinking about scaling them back a little bit, and then you would get, hopefully you could get to something like carbon neutrality. Now, carbon neutrality, it seems like a kind of, accounting, accounting trick usually.
And you want, let's, you think, well, let's just cut the emissions and just go electric. But back then, you weren't really thinking that way. So you see a lot shifts in people's thinking now. So the University of California is just, finally, they were supposed to be carbon neutral by two by next year but admissions on every single campus just keeps going up more or less.
And, how are they going to achieve carbon neutrality? They were going to spend, 20 to 30 [00:16:00] million a year on, on carbon offsets. And so it was really more like an accounting trick than a, an actual emissions reduction, like you say, back then we weren't really thinking in terms of just cutting, cutting emissions.
It's more about reducing.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it was before there were a million programs for how to offset your carbon footprint. Now it's like you you can almost feels like you could just use the car as much as you want so long as you do something to offset your carbon. But back then that was kind of a new idea and it didn't seem like a trick at all, it seemed, and it wasn't a trick, it was a way of trying to get people to realize what they were doing and think about it, but now it's become a whole business of how to offset your carbon footprint.
Craig Callender: Well, the offsetting is, I would argue, ethically, ethically sketchy and ultimately gets used as a reason to drill more and to emit more
Andrea Hiott: So what is the university, what did they decide [00:17:00] to do?
Craig Callender: Well, they have more emission reduction targets now. So the committee I work on, we push this memorial through the, to the regents all the way through the whole campus system, all, all 10 campuses. And the faculty voted 85, 86 percent in favor of it.
And it asked for 60 percent reduction by 2030, 90 or 95 percent reduction by 2035, the university responded and to not get anywhere near that, those numbers, which is unfortunate. But on the other hand, they, they did, they are scrapping the, the, buying your way out of it through offsets.
Andrea Hiott: What's the committee that you're on? Is that the campus climate change or what is it called?
Craig Callender: Yeah. So CC, CC campus climate change committee. And it's the only. Standing Academic Senate Committee on Climate Change [00:18:00] in the UC system. So I'm hoping that other campuses will follow us.
Andrea Hiott: Did you start it?
Did you start that program?
Craig Callender: No, but I was on the inaugural uh, team. So the great climate scientist Ramathadon chaired it first I think four years ago. And then it's been pretty amazing what we've been doing because we had that, that big thing. And then we had we just had passed and it starts in September, a climate change education for all requirement.
So every student will have to take some kind of course on climate change.
Andrea Hiott: Is that new? Has any other university ever done that?
Craig Callender: No, it was just written up a little bit in the Chronicle for Higher Education. And they couldn't think of any other school that has done it. So I think we're the first.
And then we're hoping to push it or encourage other campuses to do it. And yeah, it's it's amazing really when you think about it because this little committee ended [00:19:00] up started this and it, took a long time, but the end result is that, next year and for every year after at UCSD, so UCSD has 42, 000 students, all 42, 000 are, going to end up taking this. Well, 42 includes the grad students. So I think it's probably seven, 8, 000 undergrads who will end up taking. this per year. And so if you then think of other campuses, they, by the time I'm, retired or dead, hopefully, hundreds of thousands of students will have taken, such a course that otherwise wouldn't, they wouldn't, otherwise wouldn't have taken.
Andrea Hiott: That's really a huge change. How big is this committee and how did you all come together? Who started it? It wasn't, was it initiated by individuals?
Craig Callender: Yeah, there are all these climate activists on campus and especially Adam Aron in psychology, and they got this kind of Senate task force on climate change.
And then the recommendations was the [00:20:00] formation of this camp, this committee. And then we've been doing that. And then we've been doing another project. Well, we have a bunch of projects, but one is also on that connects up with some of this kind of industry bias stuff that you get with Volkswagen.
It's basically a kind of disclosure funding, disclosure policy. Industry can be a great partner for the university, but also something, we know that. Studies funded by industry tend to be favorable to industry. That's been demonstrated many, many, many times. And, and the, and the work that gets produced often is used for things that are contrary to the public good.
So you're talking about like
Andrea Hiott: big oil companies funding research, like BP or something, or who, yeah. Yeah. And that's a huge, that's billions of dollars, right? You've actually written some really articulate papers about this. So I wanted to talk to you. It's one reason I wanted to have you on the show.
I'll [00:21:00] definitely link to all that. But for people who haven't even ever thought about this as a professor, as an academic, you often need like the university needs funding, right? And a lot of this money comes from these big companies, which are often something like a company that's making money on, on fossil fuels.
Right. But nobody knows it, that that's where the money's coming from.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Sometimes it's not known. Sometimes it's not disclosed. And then that, it allows that work to be used in various ways. So yeah. So, the university, the university, needs money from the outside.
Yeah. So we've stepped away, way, way back. University of California was, you know, it was a state public school in 1980, I believe roughly 80 percent of its budget was paid for by the state. Oh. So it's now, and I think it's more like [00:22:00] 12%. It's dropped so, so, so much. And so the university, to be a great university, it needs to make up the gap.
And so all these kind of industry partnerships and stuff like that happen. Some of them are huge though, in
2009, I'm guessing, maybe eight BP, British Petroleum, gave this consortium led by Berkeley, a half of a billion dollars for an energy institute. And so that's a huge, just absolutely, massive sum. It's just happening all over the U S. And uh, it does happen to some extent outside the U S.
But Of course, in, in Europe, where you are,
It still happens, like VW is massively influential in German universities.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And also in the arts, or there's lots of things that are funded by that, which ends up being educational, but.
Craig Callender: And it's not just that people think that, these companies are giving hundreds of millions of [00:23:00] dollars just for green washing or ethics washing.
So BP's got their. When you look, go to a gas station, it's all like green, forest or something trying to literally almost literally greenwash you. But if you think that they're giving that much money for that, for that, then, you're, it's, it's naive because I give an example of what's, the power of this.
So they could give money and they have, to a, there's a MIT energy Institute. And they famously produced this document called the future of natural gas, and they were heavily conflicted. So they had, they announced some just, they disclosed one, one conflict of interest or one funder, but they didn't disclose most of them.
So almost all the authors were tied to really the biggest, you know, uh, gas producers in the, in the world and even had positions, not just. So they're [00:24:00] financially conflicted, they're organizationally and positionally conflicted. None of that is mentioned in the, in the thing. That report though, now it gets used when they go to Allegheny County and say, Hey, can you open up such and such a place for fracking?
They then say, well, it's not just us, the fossil fuel company. It's also, these independent experts at MIT are calling for so this gets used again, again, again, again. And you can even trace language from it all the way up into Obama's 2014 State of the Union address. And then his choice of energy secretary was the author of this report.
And so that, I wouldn't say that that report, caused the fracking revolution in the US, but it was, a part of it anyway. And so when they're, when they're giving all this money, that's what they're getting is this kind of research that ends [00:25:00] up shaping policy.
Andrea Hiott: It's like undercover or something.
Craig Callender: Sorry?
Andrea Hiott: It's kind of undercover, because greenwashing, we just want to think that they're doing things for the environment, to help the environment, or they're changing their behaviors in order to be more sustainable, which is something else. But this is literally funding huge research studies, but without disclosing necessarily Those studies when they're done, which are done really well, as you point out in your work, they can be really good studies, but they're coming from a frame of, of being funded by these companies.
And then the study itself might say, yes, it's good to do A, B, and C to Fracking, for example because of this and this and this, and it's presented in a very scientific way and scientific language with actually real good research, which is what's so confusing. So then other people see, oh, they can cite these papers.
So it becomes a matter of thinking it's science and [00:26:00] that the science is supposed to be separate from The company, but it's not, so it becomes very complex, right?
Craig Callender: Yeah. And so they have this clear, yeah. So you could think of yeah, some of it is just kind of image, reputation management. So, Exxon used to fund the Sally Rider Academy.
This was like a thing that you would send so it was Girls in STEM program. And so Sally Rider is the famous astronaut. And so your, daughter wants to become an astronaut and then they go to this camp as the Sally Rider Academy brought to you by Exxon. And so they're not getting any kind of policy, product from that, that, that's just kind of image image management, but this other thing I'm talking about is really like the manufacturing of a kind of manufacturing of science and of policy that, ends, ends up having, making a big difference in the world.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. You have someone like [00:27:00] Obama who I think. A lot of people would just generalize as against this sort of thing especially back in, at that time. And so then it becomes very confusing to think that he was citing a report that was funded by kind of the people that he's campaigned on reigning in, which is a common pattern that you point out.
Yeah, he might not even know.
Craig Callender: Yeah, because it wasn't disclosed
that's why I've been pushing for at least disclosure, then, then, and then you could look and see is the word good or not good.
Andrea Hiott: And why don't people disclose? You talk about sunshine, right? Like why, why shouldn't it just be standard that universities have to disclose where the funding comes from?
I believe you said in your article that no one discloses all funding.
Craig Callender: Yeah I don't believe any university has a completely general. Disclosure policy. So if you take so in the US, if you take federal money from the big funders like NIH and [00:28:00] NSF, all that gets disclosed. So a lot of things automatically get disclosed, but and then also you're always disclosing privately to the university.
So they can take a cup of the money to pay for the lights in the building and all of that. So the universities know, exactly what everyone is doing. But none of us, a lot of it isn't public. And so, so for instance, so I, the, our, the Institute I run, the Institute for Practical Ethics, it received a gift from the Reed family.
But I don't have to disclose that and, there's nothing, there's nothing that makes me publicly disclose that. And so if we replace them, but suppose it was Exxon, then, well, it'd be a little odd if all of the publications from the Institute for Practical Ethics all turned out to be, Exxon friendly, but there's nothing stopping that.
Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: But so most, like just in general, if I want to read, if I read a paper, if I read that [00:29:00] I'm trying to figure out is fracking okay. For the environment and I read these papers. There's really no way I would ever know who funded it, right? I can't find out so that's what you're saying is that should be easy to find.
I think that
Craig Callender: should be standard Yeah, and so I think what happened is, you know after so there are many, many scandals with big pharma. If we dial back 10, 15 years, we'll probably find any, a scandal in any year, but yeah, some high profile ones that then led to this transformation and biomedical biomedical research where they really disclose everything.
So you go to a talk and the last slide of the PowerPoint is, thanks to. It's like Merck, Pfizer, all, all those things. And it's all there. You go to a lab website and you see it and it's all the journals, they're very strict, they probably like the gold [00:30:00] standard for transparency the biomedical journals.
And but then if you switch into the energy world, that's not going to be the case, you might not have to disclose that the journals that you. Your website does not disclose. And then since no one is forcing anyone to disclose, that's when this kind of, so called dark money can then work because they can then, influence you.
Again, the research might not be good. It might, might not be bad at all, right? Because they can selectively pick who they fund and who they don't fund. So they can do what the tobacco companies did. So they would fund, other causes of lung cancer, so, does asbestos cause the lung cancer and.
They could fund a really good study on that and that makes it also, distort the evidential landscape because now there's all this, all these other causes of lung [00:31:00] cancer when really the smoking was the main thing.
Andrea Hiott: Right. So you get all these studies about lung cancer being called as caused by A, B, and C, not smoking.
And so all that stuff gets talked about inside it and so on. And in this case, it could be something like a lot of studies done. energy sources are as bad when it comes to your carbon footprint as other things. Like maybe that could be funded and then you would focus on that or something. But you were talking about the medical thing.
Has it changed the funding and the framing of research now that you have to disclose it all?
Craig Callender: Yeah, that's what I keep saying. I don't believe it has. And so when I, when, when public disclosure meets resistance. They, they say, well, this it's going to be the end of our field. There won't be as much funding.
There'll be, all these different problems. The sky is going to fall, but then, if you, if they say [00:32:00] this, and there's somebody from biomedical research in the, in the room, they say they'll point out, well, no, it hasn't, it's,
Andrea Hiott: yeah, it hasn't changed much,
Craig Callender: but it's not like.
Biomedicine died, in the last 10 years because they had to disclose. Now, they didn't, they thrived really.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. So you're saying everything should be disclosed as might not necessarily change the problem, but we haven't really talked about the problem. Talking about all these oil companies or big car companies as if they're evil or bad or something, and that's also not.
That's a bit of a caricature too, because we're all participating in this. So I'm I'm wondering how did the universities get so tied up in motoring? And do you really think that this fossil fuel world is, As unhealthy as the tobacco industry and that it really is now the tobacco of, of today in terms of what [00:33:00] it's doing.
Not only in terms of in the universities funding things that are taking attention away from their own issues or funding things that will help them, but also just actually lying and presenting a view like, it was once said that tobacco is healthy and that smoking is good for you.
And there are all these kind of doctors even saying, yes, a cigarette a day is good. So is this, do, are we in the same situation when it comes to this whole fossil fuel world, which can't be disconnected from all these huge companies and all the cars we're driving?
Craig Callender: Yeah, I think we're in exactly the same situation except far worse.
Because well, tobacco, it's estimated killed 100 million people in the last century or so. It's a lot but of course, climate change is worse and then these companies are also, I would say, behaving some of them are behaving just as badly or worse than the worst [00:34:00] offenders of tobacco. And so it's always about delaying any kind of anything that will reduce emissions.
And so you'll have the creation of all these kind of bogus concepts, net zero oil and things like that. But you'll also have, the, the, the attacks on scientists attacks on they can ruin people's lives. They have effectively infinite money really because they're so profitable.
And they can, they can do a lot. They can manufacture science that can capture regulatory agencies that can. They can create journals, they can create societies, they can, they can, they can do all, everything tobacco did and more because they'd be in more money. And then it's even worse because the stakes are higher.
Andrea Hiott: Do you think the truth has come out about the tobacco and do you think the truth will come out about fossil fuels?
Craig Callender: Yep, I do. I think in both cases it's a [00:35:00] little different because you had the massive tobacco lawsuits and then eventually the big settlement in the U. S.,
and right now you have many climate lawsuits happening, and, but, of course, it's harder to prove causation. In a with a particular kind of harm and endure and link it to climate change, but that's where there has been a lot of work on that. So there's the climate attribution center at Oxford they will like, give you, you give them a a massive weather event, so all the flooding in on the East Coast right now.
And, you tell them, how much of this was, what percentage of this, what was the percent causal responsibility due to causal climate change of this? And then they'll say, 33 percent or something. And so this stuff is getting more sophisticated. [00:36:00] It will get in a climate litigation stuff is more sophisticated.
And so the eventually, and so all these lawsuits all over the, I think there's about six of them in California, plus the one by the state of California, the fossil fuels fighting is, really heavily because, they're worried that if one goes, if one goes against them, then, others will follow and then there'll be a kind of avalanche of groups finding a way to successfully prosecute them for some of their actions.
So I think it is a matter of time before one of these lawsuits, goes against them. And then we'll see, but yeah, you could go to, and you can look at all the incriminating documents. If you go to Industry documents, maybe dot u c s f dot e d u e d u or maybe it's just industry documents dot org.
It was University of California, San Francisco [00:37:00] houses 14 million tobacco documents and some many, many, many documents on climate showing that they knew what they were doing. That's been the most interesting thing, really. Being revealed in the last few years is, of course, the scientists at Exxon, some of them are great scientists and to see how well they nailed climate change predictions.
Back in the nineties, so there's all these documents where you can see they, they knew what was going on and they knew as well as the climate, the, the, the climate scientists who weren't working for them, they basically nailed it. It's amazing to see the graphs and lay it up, lay them up against the.
what actually happened since then. So there you have some hard evidence that they, they knew exactly what they were doing.
Andrea Hiott: So they already saw that we were going to get to this place where we are now, which [00:38:00] is a place where it's almost, we don't know how, we feel like almost helpless, but we're not, and there's stuff we can do and we were doing it.
But basically we, knew that we knew that decades ago, but it was all not presented as the truth,
Craig Callender: yeah, so they I don't know what we're at like today, but, on the, like the Keeling curve, I think we're probably like at 414 parts per million. And I think if you look at what Exxon predicted for this year, for what we would see, as we're having this conversation, they were like pretty darn close.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, that's just so frustrating. It's so
Craig Callender: Had to cover it all up and then attack scientists would Produce that same work. They would attack them even though they knew it was right
Andrea Hiott: Do you think that could be at some point considered criminal?
Craig Callender: Yeah, that's why I think this will end up getting This will end up in some litigation.[00:39:00]
Andrea Hiott: So that people could actually get prosecuted against, as individuals, do you think?
Craig Callender: I don't know about whether individual or just, I don't know how exactly that works for the company itself.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I guess it's just, it's, it's hard for me to see how, how we shift cognition, the cognitive landscape relative to all this, and maybe we can talk to a little bit about how we understand our own, our own sort of position in it in terms of just like just saying, okay, corporations are bad and oil companies are bad.
People can say that, but you're, you're still smoking, right? You're still using the cars. You're still taking the money. for your research. Yeah, I've got that gas guzzling
Craig Callender: Volvo, old Volvo. Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: I just rented a car, it's an ICE, it's in an internal combustion engine, because I got rid of my car, but I still have to rent cars all the time I don't have to, I could take a million buses and get somewhere, but we're moving house and you need, you know, so I guess [00:40:00] what I'm trying to first get at is, do you, do you, There's been a call, for example for a ban on all fossil fuel research money being used in universities and you've written about this and is that kind of like the, is that, how do you, do you see that as a step towards starting to change this overall understanding of, of the connections between all these parts?
Because really it comes down to individuals changing their habits., but through something like funding research, perhaps, I don't know what you think, we re, we learn our habits or what we should have as habits. So it, for me, it's very like, where do you get into this weird circle and start to change things?
Do you think this ban on all fossil fuel research could do something like that? Or would it also just be another, Another good try, but not much change.
Craig Callender: Yeah. I think of all these things as just like little pieces. Yeah. So maybe, being, being the [00:41:00] age I am. I, I, I always think about the tobacco case, and so I, I grew up and, lots of people smoked, lots of friends smoked.
I've lived with a smoker. It was just part of, part of life. And then, you start to see all these, all of a sudden that, certain cafeterias, you would see these screens and the smokers had to sit over there and the nonsmokers there eventually, then they're booted out of the, you couldn't smoke inside.
And then I think, and so you had all these little rules. So did, putting up a glass screen in a cafeteria and making the smokers sit on one side and the nonsmokers of the other. Did that really like change things? No, it did probably almost nothing. But I think. What happens is eventually these, if you enact some of these things, the, the, the kind of social norms change.
And so when we then think [00:42:00] about tobacco using the so called tobacco strategy to manipulate academia why did, so now how many schools actually banned it? I, when I count them, I can only find like maybe 15. So most of them did not ban tobacco money for, for,
Andrea Hiott: Interesting
Craig Callender: for It's like Harvard Public Health and Medicine did in maybe 2002, 2004 , and then it got a lot of attention, but most of them didn't.
So why did it, why is there not that much tobacco money, well, that it's, some of it's coming back, but why is there not that much tobacco money funding research in the U. S. universities anymore? I think basically the answer is because it became not so cool to say, in the faculty club my, my lab is funded by Marlborough.
That then became not a very cool, students are students attracted to work in that lab are, you, you're now facing these kind of social [00:43:00] norms. So I think that would happen, with fossil fuel money as well. It's not going to be so cool to have, your climate center.
funded by, that's teaching students about the climate crisis. It's not going to be so cool to have those things all funded by Exxon, especially given what we know, how they, that they're not getting nothing for the money.
Andrea Hiott: It's not so cool now. It's, but it's, you just don't know. I guess that's kind of part of the sunshine idea of yours.
If it was, if it was clear. It would already not be so cool. It's just, it all gets pushed away and in the inertia of over information and you just, you would have to go really, really dig for it and no one has the time to do that, so.
Craig Callender: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. If it was just clear in there, it could be changed. But I think what you're saying is really interesting about the smoking and the habits and the, that it actually starts in an interesting way because that's true.
Like it used to could smoke in all kinds of bars and stuff like in Berlin, not, not [00:44:00] that long ago when I was studying the first, for my first degree. And then, it changed. It's just not cool anymore to smoke and you don't feel, people don't want it around anymore. But when it first, when those things first happened, it was like, Oh, big, against our freedom and all this.
And then, but now it's no, no one would choose to have a bar that's full of smoke because you realize how disgusting it feels because you've had the opposite. Right. So maybe something like that is starting to happen now, but do you see that as like a, is that still a government initiated change?
like that we decide you can't smoke in public spaces and all this stuff that you described. What's that interplay, right? Because people didn't just decide they don't want to smoke in bars. They never probably would have. Or did they? I don't, I don't know.
Craig Callender: Yeah. And if government enacted something where there wasn't already some kind of groundswell, or at least a significant amount of people who are willing, who accepted that, then it probably wouldn't have worked.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And [00:45:00] there probably were a lot of studies by then. showing what the real truth was about. You couldn't, you couldn't avoid the truth anymore that tobacco was killing people so that, you're killing innocent people who don't even smoke, but are around it.
Craig Callender: It's just absolutely amazing to me how, How successful that tobacco strategy was because in the U S they, it was the surgeon general announced that it was causing cancer.
I think in 1964, it was done already to scientists and again, to have tobacco scientists much earlier, probably early fifties or if not earlier. And yet, they were, they were still getting subsidies from the U S government in the early two thousands. And so we were subsidizing a thing that was.
Killing us. And so there's all this kind of delay tactics. It worked for decades. It's, it's just amazing.
Andrea Hiott: Which is another parallel to what's happening with oil companies and so on. [00:46:00] Because there's, there's a few philosophical theories, right? I I can't remember, like John, the Johns, I think, John Nolta maybe, or Nolts and John Brown. There's been these kinds of philosophical ideas that, that say that the way we act as individuals just are, or as a Westerner, I guess, too, would have to be that your patterns of emission actually result in deaths, this is one theory, I think, or that, it takes time off of the average lifespan, even for people who never use anything that has emissions.
So I guess I'm wondering, has anything been applied like that to companies philosophically?
Craig Callender: Yeah, I don't know. But you could imagine looking at I don't know if this is what you're thinking, but I guess you could imagine You know, take some company like Exxon and then see I don't know how you like imagine how much, how excessive their production is in some way. [00:47:00] You could just take the social cost of carbon and just multiply that by something and then see, see what the true cost is up there. This is what it's all about really is that the, the they've externalized all their, they don't put into their price the, the social impact of what they're, the harms that they're, they're sending out.
Andrea Hiott: They don't have the warning on the label, right? That was a thing with smoking too, right where you had to start putting the warnings on there. And then these kind of in Europe, at least these awful pictures of what it looks like to have lung disease and stuff would be like on the, I guess it still is on the cigarette pack.
Craig Callender: Yeah, you could imagine if you were at a gas station and you fill up and you had, shown pictures of future people that you harmed.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, or if you could see exactly oh, this, this amount of gas leads to this and this and this, almost like when you're shopping and you see where the, produce came from, I don't know what the equivalent of that is, but some kind of way of [00:48:00] tracing how much non renewable resource you are now taking away from the earth and what possible what you're putting into the future, would be, it would be a very immediate way of starting to realize that your actions actually have consequences by,
Craig Callender: Yeah, it's true.
Andrea Hiott: Partaking in this.
Craig Callender: Yeah, your question also raises the, just this kind of question of responsibility for it is you mentioned this before, too, about, so I'm still taking gas. I'm still, using a lot of fossil fuel. Of course, some of my emissions are necessary, for like breathing and And that but others aren't.
And so, where's the, so then you have these philosophers who, say that there's, you have no individual responsibility for climate change.
Andrea Hiott: Can you give the example of that, of the one that's used most for the individual not being responsible, that you could just go take a joy [00:49:00] ride in your car and it's not your fault.
Craig Callender: That's right. Yeah. So you have a gas guzzling, SUV, and on a Sunday afternoon you just go for a pleasant drive. And then the, I'm not an expert on this argument, but I, I think the, the kind of intuition behind it is that the kinda counterfactual would there be, would there still be climate change if you didn't? do it? And this is yes. And if you so it's not, it's neither your drive is neither necessary nor sufficient for the climate climate change. But I really don't, I don't like that argument at all because it's I don't know. It's weird. What, what caused climate change then if it not, if not for all the individual contributions to, to this.
Absolutely. It's,
Andrea Hiott: I guess it's cause it's Sinnoh Armstrong. Do you say Sinnot or Sinnot? Okay. Yeah. That's the one argument where it's it based. I feel like I haven't read it actually in a long time, but I feel like there's a kind of sense of, yes, there's a group responsibility, but [00:50:00] that doesn't mean individuals are responsible, which.
In the same way you just said, I find that really hard to, to buy. Of course, logically, you can create a logic argument that, that works, but I'm talking about in real life, like the way Why is it either or, group or individual, and you can logically say yes, that the individual didn't cause it. Even if they're part of it, they didn't cause it and you can separate it out in all these logical ways.
But just in terms of this conversation and every day it goes back to what you were saying about the smoking. It's, it's, it's always this more, it's not a linear thing. It's much more of a complex system style thing that's going on, isn't it?
Craig Callender: But it does raise this interesting issue that I think you were getting at before, I spent a lot of time last quarter teaching environmental ethics and talking to my, talking to the students about this issue, which is, so, okay, so, so I think Senate Armstrong is wrong and that I do have individual [00:51:00] responsibility and, I, I, that morally I need to, I need to get rid of my Volvo and so I think, that's on me and I need to do that on the other hand, the, a lot of my people point out though, that there are these structural changes that individuals can't enact themselves, right? So, here in the U S some cities and towns are going to community power versus their traditional electric. And sometimes those things are then 100 percent or very high 90 percent based on renewable. So here where I live, you can get the 100 percent renewable but if I lived in a neighboring town, that's just not possible.
And so could I really live, just can't live without some power. As students point out, they can't partake in, composting in the dorms if there is no composting program, that's not like just invent one overnight by yourself.
You [00:52:00] can't, if, if you are taking the bus to school, whether the bus is gas or electric is. That's not up to you. You could vote and write letters or something, but
Andrea Hiott: you could ride your bike, but if the streets are dangerous. Here it's so easy to just walk, in Holland to walk wherever you want to go or bike wherever you want to go. Cause the system is set up that way, but in the States, probably also for your students and.
Places where they come from. You can't really walk. There's no sidewalks. And if you try to bike on the highway, you're going to get smushed. So, like all of that is part of it too.
Craig Callender: Yeah. And even, even like in the Netherlands, a lot of people live in cities that are not the city in which they work or go to school.
And so then now you have to take the train. Maybe you stash a bike at each, each end, which I know often do there, but still, it's not up to you whether how the train is powered.
Your individual responsibility, but it's good, it's at the. At the train stop level, you [00:53:00] can now choose to walk or bike.
It's supposed to take a car, but, it's a structural responsibility really, the whole train system.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. And a lot of it's just historical inertia. If you don't have these options, but I think it's, it's interesting, How quickly things can change, and I think it goes back, I don't know what you think about this, but to what you were saying about it becoming cool or trendy, I don't know what that is. It'd be nice to dig around in that philosophically, like what happens when something becomes cool, but things do change quickly.
Here it's totally fine to take a bus and a train, for example, but I remember when I went to California to LA to visit friends, I thought, Oh, I'll try to take the bus just to try. And it was like, first of all, it took all day for me to get from one side to the other if I was going to do it.
And also when you tell someone you're taking the bus, they're almost embarrassed for you or something. So I don't know. Maybe if all of this becomes cool, then. Which it is starting to do, then you would have those changes where, [00:54:00] for example, at the university, you have the option to compost or cities are designed for bicycles because, but how do you see that like shift, is it a shift of awareness of the possibility?
Does it come from seeing it in movies and TV or like people who others think are cool choosing those options? Or is it more a matter of what we were talking about at the beginning, this like real research oriented, I guess the answer is all of the above, but how do you see all that?
Craig Callender: Yeah, yeah, I was going to say all of, all of the above, because I think some of it is the, you have this kind of I don't know, threshold effect it seems.
Well, a lot of it is economic, right? So if you think of, it's just unbelievable. The, the number non renewable advances and markets change so fast. Don't haven't done it, but you know, you could, you could probably. look on Google and see what projections were for non renewables, 10 or 15 years ago.[00:55:00]
I'm sure they've underest, they're probably badly off most of them. Is this so fast?
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think the peak was really different.
Craig Callender: Yeah. And then all of our kind of social norms and all of that, then all, all start to develop then as well. My neighbor got solar before me.
I was horrified. Yeah. They don't even have the same, political politics as I do. But the opposite team is, is more. More and more green than I am at this is, unacceptable.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It's like keeping up with the Joneses or whatever from the fifties, but that becomes trying to be more sustainable or it's also about making the things easier to access and cooler themselves, like even thinking about how we design.
The electric bike, for example, that you were talking about, that's like a cool thing now. Or, electric cars, Tesla created a cool [00:56:00] looking car, or the brand itself also becomes something trendy.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Are there any electric cars you like? You looked at one. Did you look at one? Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: I haven't really looked into buying one.
I was going to say earlier that I feel a little guilty because I've, I work Yeah. Yeah. I, I can advise like companies and stuff, but when it comes to actually owning an electric car, I haven't taken the step yet. Renting an electric car because I had to move all through Europe I was nervous to rent the electric version because I wasn't sure yet about how to charge it like when traveling
Craig Callender: Places where there aren't so many charging stations.
Andrea Hiott: Mm hmm, but it's getting better, you know Even on the GPS now, it says every little charging station, even when it's not a electric car. So that's part of it too, is how we change these kind of habits and so [00:57:00] on. Do you, do you feel like feel like you have some sort of Power or, or potential for, for changing this situation.
You do from my end, because you're working in a lot of groups at the university, you're a teacher that people respect, you're a philosopher. So you have a voice that people will. will listen to, but I wonder in your own, we're talking about our own personal lives and how we still have these things we have to improve.
Do you, how do you see all of that? Like your, your role as a kind of a voice for these things and then, you know, not getting the solar panels before your neighbor, is that, do you think about those? philosophically that person group exchange?
Craig Callender: yeah, it's, so I don't well, I don't think anyone really does try to divide a wall in their minds between the personal and their professional.
But on the other hand, I, I have learned to, just, maybe I shouldn't have learned really, but [00:58:00] just to. Go easy on myself that, you're not going to be perfect in any way. And that you could just do what you can to move the needle a little bit. And if lots of people move the needle a little bit, then the needle gets moved.
And so if my, if my personal life isn't completely caught up with my, what I think, you know, you don't get to redo your life. And just think, well, if I redid my life, knowing what I know now, would I have bought this? Would I have bought that? Would I, everything would have been scrapped and massively changed and that, but you don't really get to do that.
And so there's a inertia in your life that is hard to then fight.
Andrea Hiott: You can't change it, but you can change it in the present though. And
Craig Callender: that's right. Yeah. So going forward, you, you have now. Yeah, so I had those, a certain understanding of climate crisis in 2014.
Now I have a [00:59:00] very different one. I, I'm not gonna kill myself over the fact that I had that. I, Craig of 2024 now thinks Craig of 2014 was naive. And
Andrea Hiott: I'm
Craig Callender: not going to kill myself over that. In
Andrea Hiott: fact, you could be glad that you see it differently. That's part of, feels like part of the biggest shift is, I keep saying it in a way, this conversation, but it's a shift of how we think about it all.
And in a way, once you've shifted that, you start shifting, helping others around you shift and them, you too, of course, like your neighbors and it's this kind of ongoing.
Craig Callender: Yeah. And I'm lucky. Yeah. I, I think in my main contribution is, is. Not, not actually through these committees and these policies but just teaching the, the students I teach in the environmental ethics class are just, they're just so awesome.
They're, they're so, they're so clever. They're, they're, they're like a more sophisticated understanding of things than I [01:00:00] do, I think. And then so many of them go on and, do really awesome things that I just see myself as like shepherding them out into the world. Can you give an example,
Andrea Hiott: a more general example, because that's something inspiring to think about.
Craig Callender: Yeah. Some of these students are just incredible. I, I wish more would keep in touch, often people keep in touch with their high school teachers, later in life, but they don't with their college professors. But yeah, there was one student in a scopes oceanography class that I would teach she went on and helped create, she basically was the force of creating a marine preserve off an island in the Caribbean.
She used her social science skills to survey fishermen for diving and biology skills to figure out where would be the best location for this and just being charming and energetic to sway, move politicians. And, I think before she was 30, she, I had created this marine [01:01:00] preserve, which is wonderful.
Andrea Hiott: Real change.
Craig Callender: Seriously. I give that example and then I immediately want to take it back because that's like putting too high a burden on anyone, I think to be able to do something like that.
Andrea Hiott: Well, it's just good to know what's possible. Everyone has their Their own interests. And all of these
Craig Callender: things all the time.
I, there were some that got compost bins into the Muir college. Some are real experts on campus climate issues on campus and some with food issues and really pushing for transport, better. Greener transportation on campus. So every, every class, have like 40 in there.
Probably six or eight are doing something really pretty meaningful like that.
Andrea Hiott: And those are huge shifts if it's, it reverberates, there's a lot that happens off of those, of those actions. But also, just [01:02:00] even talking to people for the show and stuff, maybe your students don't contact you, but a lot of, People end up saying that it was a teacher who said one thing, or, or showed them one source, or happened to encourage them, or even just say what you just said, that wow, you got your, you have a lot of skill, and you're doing great things.
Because, you don't get told that a lot when you're that age, even if you are doing amazing things. So it's amazing How much that shifts, maybe you don't know, but just that you're recognizing that and I think nurturing that even if not explicitly, but just by your style and what you care about.
It's a huge thing, I think, but I you talk a lot about, so there's the fossil free research, which I, which I mentioned, and this idea of trying to ban money coming from, from the fossil fuel research. Is that just for climate research or is it all kinds of research?
Craig Callender: Yeah, so there's the, there's what the, this group called fossil free research have [01:03:00] called for. And so they have this letter. And so then that letter calls for a ban on, on, Yeah. From fossil, taking money from fossil fuel industry for climate research.
Andrea Hiott: Climate research. Okay. And how is that project going?
Craig Callender: So I think it's got a lot of movement. It's also has a lot of controversy because people react, faculty react and say that it violates their academic freedom. Okay. And so yeah, you have a lot of pushback. And so right now so well near you, VU Amsterdam.
Mm-Hmm. implemented that kind of ban. And Princeton did, although the, they, they had to when they divested, and so they had some sort of weird rule caused them to have to do this. And so they, they call it disassociation and they disassociate from 90 companies. Hmm. And then. Brown and Brown university and a few other places are [01:04:00] contemplating this.
Some have studies going on like Stanford. And so there's a kind of movement but I haven't really pursued that I've just pursued the transparency because the actual funding ban is a much tougher sell. At a university, and so I didn't really see any
Andrea Hiott: chance of it feels like just raising the dialogue.
Even if there's controversy, it's just getting people to, it's one way that people start to realize that there is such a, there is such funding going on. So hopefully, the sunshine gets, there's more light will be put on where. What money is coming from, but there's two things I want to talk about and then we can go, you just mentioned the academic freedom thing, and it's interesting because in your paper, which I'll link to, you talk about how this idea of academic freedom even started, and it was I'm probably going to get this confused, but it seemed to be to keep corporate to protect the institute from the corporation in a way. And then now it seems like it's the [01:05:00] other way around that now people are saying it's a matter of academic freedom to let the corporation influence the university. Is that right?
Craig Callender: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Craig Callender: Yeah. So it's a really weird about face, I think because, and well, academic freedom has been around for hundreds of years in some form or other.
But in the U S It was really, the champion of it has been the American Association for University Professors, and in 1915 they put forth their proclamation of what academic freedom is and immediately, you know, they so this was like these amazing philosophers like Dewey and Yeah.
love Lovejoy. And Lovejoy had come from to Columbia, from Stanford, where he quit and protest. At Jenny Stanford's into interference and just academic affairs. Anyway, one of the first cases they considered was this famous case where Scott Nearing, who was an [01:06:00] economist at the university of Pennsylvania.
And he was super popular but a good teacher, a good researcher. But he was, progressive and he was arguing against he's arguing for. regulations against child exploitation and employment. He was doing this in Pennsylvania, which employed the most, relied, their economy relied the most on child labor of all the states then.
And the trustees of the university of Pennsylvania. We're not happy and so they, they long had hated them and then they eventually got rid of them. And so there, you had these companies, basically the companies were represented in as the trustees of the university of Pennsylvania.
Yeah, there's this quote you
Andrea Hiott: say where you couldn't really tell the boards apart. Somebody says the company board, university board, it's the same people.
Craig Callender: Upton Sinclair calls the University of Pennsylvania, the University of UGI United [01:07:00] Gas Industry Improvement, United Gas Improvement, and then the UGI, still exists now.
And in fact, recently was You know, I was looking, looking at what they're up to now. And they were recently exposed as having secretly funded some anti solar, anti, anti
Andrea Hiott: electrification
Craig Callender: stuff. So now, but now, if, if you, yeah. So academic free, so AAUP said Nehring's academic freedom was violated.
And the whole idea of academic freedom was to protect somebody like Nehring from a company like UGI. Now, fast forward. And if a faculty member were told that they can't take a grant from UGI they would say, well, my academic freedom is being violated.
Andrea Hiott: It's not
Craig Callender: a logical contradiction because you might want to say, well, companies shouldn't have the right to decide academic matters, like who's, who's hired [01:08:00] and who's fired and that, but can still take money from them. So awkward tension, because, you know, so in my paper, I have this argument that sort of Mill's argument that you can't use the liberty of free expression to to give up your free expression so that the very grounds for the liberty in the first place prohibit prohibit you from selling your liberty that way.
And so the idea is the same thing here is that you can't use academic freedom as a ground to give up your freedom. You can't use academic freedom as an argument that you should take funding from a funder who's aiming to undermine the mission of the university,
Andrea Hiott: which
Craig Callender: is knowledge production for social good.
Andrea Hiott: Weirdly though, we do it all the time, don't we? We use that argument I'm free to let someone have. my freedom in a way. I guess what I'm trying to get at is in the article, which is really [01:09:00] interesting, you do talk about Mills and truth tracking. There's a lot of talk of truth and information, disinformation, misinformation, and I'm wondering about like how you see this relationship between freedom and truth.
And because sometimes I felt like what we're talking about is truth, not freedom. Because if you're really free, you would know that there's disinformation that you're partaking in. So it's something like with the Volkswagen, for example, which we didn't really talk about, but you bought this car thinking it was clean diesel.
And it was. not clean. They were, it was diesel gated. They were tricking the emissions. So Luke Bovens wrote this article about that. And you can get into all this complexity about, okay, but maybe the emission standards were just way too high to try to keep diesel cars out. And diesel technology in Europe is different than here.
And you can just go on and on about like ways to maybe think about Volkswagen is not completely evil. But at the end of the day, I felt like he was saying, but. [01:10:00] They lied and they knew they lied and it was the misinformation and I was reminded of that too, reading yours, that there's something about what you described about Exxon.
They knew this was going to happen and they said it wasn't going to happen. That seems like the problem. Is that freedom? What, what's the relationship? Yeah, that, that,
Craig Callender: that's what I really want to target in the paper is, is disinformation. And so, money will always affect things. any money will affect anything, right? Any type of funding. And, but this sort of active use of things in this kind of merchants of doubt, tobacco strategy of disinformation that I think, so what I tried to do in the paper is that, the, you have to walk this really fine line if you don't want it to conflict with academic freedom is you don't want it to be that, it becomes whether you can get funding for your research hangs on a kind of political litmus test.
Because, okay, if you [01:11:00] have the politics I do, then, the fossil fuel industry isn't like a shining example of awesomeness. And, but, you always have to imagine that, different people have different political views and this sort of any kind of policy you come up with could be then also used against you.
Or against your, your personal interests in some way. And so the trick was, could I find something that is there something that these companies are doing that's wrong where you could say it's wrong without saying that um, it's because of, Um, you know, it's violating your conception of the social good.
And so on this kind of view, you, again, I'm not pursuing this myself. I'm just going after the transparency. But if I were to go after this, then the way I would do it would be more of the the way Brown university is where they're focusing on disinformation.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Craig Callender: Then on this kind of [01:12:00] picture, then big solar, if big solar started doing, became a merchant of doubt doing disinformation.
You could ban them too.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, because, if it does become trendy, that everything needs to be renewable, that's going to be a lot of power in those companies hands.
Craig Callender: Yeah, and you're not banning Exxon because they're creating a climate crisis. The odd thing about the position, I guess, is that you're not banning them because they're creating, helping create a climate crisis that will kill, many, many people.
You're banning them because of the misinformation tactics.
Andrea Hiott: It relates to the sunshine and to the transparency too, doesn't it? Because That's the way you know if there's truth or not. If you have, because luckily we do have all this record keeping that can't really quite be erased anymore.
That's how Volkswagen got in trouble. And a lot of people, because you can see, oh, you, you did know this at this time, even with what you were describing with Exxon. You can see in their research, they did know it. You can't erase that anymore. [01:13:00] So if there's transparency and people have easier access to look at that stuff.
that disinformation argument, which seems really the only one we can really make, because we're all so complicit in all of this stuff. That becomes really strong, doesn't it?
Craig Callender: Yeah, I think so. And, knowing what's out there is then since you know that the funding ends up can, can affect the research, then lets you search for that to see if you can find
Andrea Hiott: patterns that you wouldn't look for if you If you didn't have all that, and you can also see clearly that there were things that could have, that were just said falsely, presented in a false way.
The same that we now see with the tobacco, but that took all that time to see it.
Craig Callender: The Volkswagen case is amazing because, that stuff that David Michaels talks about where they tried to produce evidence, with these, that hideous experiment with these 10 monkeys, sucking diesel gas.
I think it was from this ancient old [01:14:00] Ford. And then they was going to look at what
Andrea Hiott: can use what I don't I didn't read the Michaels book. Totally. The one book, right? I haven't read that yet. I just read
Craig Callender: evidence that they're clean diesel was healthy. So it wasn't producing as much nitrous oxide and related products that would irritate your lungs.
So first they thought of having an X. So they contracted with this Company in New Mexico to run these experiments. And for the first idea was to actually run it with humans. That have humans on exercise bikes, but then sucking diesel exhaust. Oh my
Andrea Hiott: God.
Craig Callender: And, but then presumably they decide because of the, a company with a long, whose deep history is connected to the Nazis.
It's not really good branding to have, gassing with, so they did it with monkeys. And then it's the weirdest thing. So they wanted to, so [01:15:00] they didn't want to use a, so they wanted to use an old diesel, but didn't want to use one of their old diesels. So they found. Old. Ancient old Ford pickup. I forgot what year it was, but it's really old.
They use that, then they were going to use their compare that then to their clean diesel. Volkswagen then had somebody come and help with the experiments to set things up, which of course is like kind of violation of, the law. normal scientific protocol basically to make sure the cheat device was on so that so that, it wasn't actually admitted winning as much.
And so they wanted to produce this data. And then the, the, it's funny, really, it's not funny because of the poor monkeys. But the clean diesel, even with the cheat device, Ended up irritating the monkey's lungs more than the old Ford.
Andrea Hiott: Really?
Craig Callender: And so even with evidence that they were basic, even with the experiment with that, which they basically [01:16:00] bought and doctored, they got the wrong result.
And suddenly they have all the testimony and emails where they're basically withholding payment to the New Mexico facility. And so they got the right result. and published it. And
Andrea Hiott: so it was
Craig Callender: really super, dishonest. But you see the lengths to which companies will go to, to manufacture evidence that they can then use.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, because of this growth economy model where we have to always, like that's part of the system too that will have to change in some way that everyone's stuck on, on this, it must be what a company is. This must be what a corporation is and you have to, profit is the only thing that matters and growth and people can really quickly become, just lose their ethics, can't they in a system like that?
It seems to getting, be getting more and more distilled now that it's. So much easier to become unethical in that system. I don't know what, what it is about that, but [01:17:00]
Craig Callender: yeah, it's just the profit above all, I don't know if you've ever looked, have you ever Googled? I just did one, one person yesterday, but Googled what happened to the, so Volkswagen tried to pin the blame on a number of their, some small number of their employees and then where are they now?
And so the first, one of the first people they tried to pin the blame on now is now today, like very high up, higher up than before.
Andrea Hiott: So they
Craig Callender: suspended him pending and pending an investigation, but he's obviously been rewarded for his, willing to, fall on the sword for the company to some extent.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of them are,
Andrea Hiott: yeah. I think a few took a really hard Blow like the one guy who had to go to jail and stuff like that But otherwise it just all they just wait this relates to your other philosophical topic of time. There's something about time, you know [01:18:00] let's not even go in there, but the Volkswagen thing is just it's just painful because to get to complicity again, it's very hard for me because I wrote this book about the Volkswagen Beetle and it's the story of the opposite of all of this, right?
It's like that car's story is, is about transparency and thinking small and not keeping up with the Joneses and like all this stuff. And that's what made them, the name. And now it's just I don't know, been used the other way. But before we go, because now we have been talking a lot, I feel like we've been talking really as if.
All these companies are terrible, and, but they're actually made of people, and not all those people are bad, and it's much more nuanced, at least from my perspective, it's much more nuanced, it's much more of a culture that happens, especially at Volkswagen, that you become part of, and, Like it's the system itself is just so unhealthy that you're unhealthy.
I wonder how you see that. Or, or are you more, or more optimistic and you think, okay, all these car companies are starting to, [01:19:00] even only because it's becoming trendy, they all have to make electric, even Volkswagen and everyone's shifting.
And maybe there's going to be some shift that then comes to our energy sources. I don't know. How do you see all that stuff?
Craig Callender: Yeah, I definitely don't think of, it is a kind of all or nothing thing at all. I do think, the, basically many of the big companies have shown again and again and again, that.
They do view life as cheap if it doesn't hurt profits. And so they have opportunities for safety devices and things like that, that they could put in, but choose not to, because it's always the bottom line. But that doesn't mean everybody's working for the company is. Bad or anything like that, and then so I think of it from what's happening now is like before, when I would, I've only I've taught environmental ethics for a long time.
And so when you would think about, the and also my grew up in Rhode Island all blue collar family and that, and it, and you have these kind [01:20:00] of skilled blue collar workers often particular town will be employed in particular ways. And so in Rhode Island, Southern Rhode Island, there'd be a lot of fishermen and lobstermen.
They get hit heavily by the different regulations about overfishing. They, when they probably, when they started, they didn't realize they were contributing to the overfishing crisis, or think of like on this coast, you think of like loggers and the Pacific Northwest, but it's, and what really I find just tasteful, is that if environmentalists just think, well, they need to get new jobs.
Well, it's easy to say that, but, it's actual people's lives. They might've been logging for many generations. That might be the only source of employment in the town. It, it's, to, to say it casually or that there should be some, training [01:21:00] programs for new skills or something like that.
Well, yeah, there should be. They have a lot of that for coal in the, in a lot of the coal places trying
Andrea Hiott: to be skilled
Craig Callender: labor force but to think of it as but that's not a huge thing to ask of people when you're not going to harm about a lot of people. And to think that they're evil because they were in that business when it just, it gets discovered before, well, well after they're already in that structure and in that system where
Andrea Hiott: their life is built around
Craig Callender: it, maybe they didn't even really have any good choices apart from that.
So to then all of a sudden condemn everybody who works in it is, is really not thinking through not thinking it through enough, I think.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and I think that comes to, loops back to some of the themes in a nice way because it is about this disinformation and truth and transparency and options, the more that is possible for people, the more [01:22:00] they do have choices and hopefully, the more we change these systems that we have.
Like the economic system, cause really a lot of it stems from like the profit motive or needing to grow or just, on an individual level, you think you got to go to college and you got to get a job and like the business, this kind of, these things that we assume have to be that way. Like those maybe can start to shift too, the more we have.
Truth. And transparency. Because then you start to notice the systems, right? Like I know you're not doing the fossil free research thing, but just like having that out there starts to make you look at the system in a way that you wouldn't before. Right. From the outside.
Craig Callender: Yeah, most, most people don't know that.
Andrea Hiott: No, they don't think about it. The university seems like a church that's completely separate from, from all that, just if you, in a common day assumption, which is why. You, they trust it if they hear Obama [01:23:00] cite a scientific study.
Craig Callender: Right.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Craig Callender: Yeah. That's another sort of motive, motive is, rega regaining trust in our work.
And I think studies show, and, but also just common sense shows, who do you trust more? Somebody who, is hiding something or somebody who just says, look, I've got an interest in, in such and such.
I think you want to trust the second more.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, just that stance of taking that stance of even saying, okay, I'm not doing perfectly with all of this, but I see what I'm doing.
That's, that's an important stance. So okay, so here's the last question. I don't know if you can connect it to all your study or years of teaching environmental ethics and, and so on, and what you've seen in terms of patterns of, of change or what might be hopeful or what you've seen that really, that young people respond to or [01:24:00] that the world responds to.
But if you think about motoring, we're going to have some kind of movement, even if it's virtual, I don't know what, We want to explore, we want to connect, there's some kind of motoring, even if, if it's our own bodies or something. This idea of ecological motoring from this kind of standpoint that we've been talking about, how could you, like, how would you see that?
Craig Callender: Yeah, I don't know if I have a good answer. I was never going to get motoring with strict forever, because, ultimately we run up against.
Physics.
But you know, in a more realistic sense, if we're we can imagine a world where there's always going to be a kind of chain problem, I think, so if we go completely electric, then of course there's the battery issue. And then you might imagine new materials for batteries being discovered.
Craig Callender: And then those being depleted and there being issues, and then we've gone to another one and another one and another one, [01:25:00] where is that, but we're not going to have a kind of unbounded resources for the long run, we might have effectively unbounded resources in that way, or, or at least if you mean by ecological, it'd be increasingly more ecologically friendly means of motoring for a long, long, long, long time, I think.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. I guess you think the universe is finite, right? So,
Craig Callender: Well, even if it's infinite, uh, you know, probably we won't have access to, uh, well, I don't know how long we'll be around anyway, but Yes,
We
Andrea Hiott: won't have forever, but I guess there could be some kind of motoring or some kind of motoring or some kind of Powered movement for whatever forever means, but we don't know.
That would be another conversation. Well, thanks for your writing and for the work you're doing. And thanks for [01:26:00] talking to me about all these things, it's really helpful to get your perspective, so I appreciate it.
Craig Callender: Oh yeah. Thanks very much. It's been really a pleasure.