COP28, the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, recently took place in the UAE. The controversial conference included 2,500 fossil fuel industry lobbyists and featured billionaires flying into Dubai on private jet. Yet, as Maya Lilly—a film, television, and digital media producer who focuses on activist documentary storytelling—tells Derek, it's one of the few places that so many nations and world leaders meet to discuss climate change. And, she says, the financial incentives exist to make even the richest men salivate. Governments just need the political will, and citizens need to vote more climate-forward legislators into office.
Show Notes
Maya Lilly’s Curated Climate Reading List
Earth on verge of five catastrophic climate tipping points, scientists warn
Right-wing media use COP28 to dismiss climate-related deaths
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And in today's brief, we're going to discuss how some of these forces converge to spread misinformation and perform sleights of hand around the topic of I'm Derek Barris.
My guest today is Maya Lilly, a film, television, and digital media producer who focuses on activist documentary storytelling, and Maya's resume backs all of that up.
You have worked in producer roles on The Big Fix, which examined the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
Immigrant Prisons, which looks at for-profit immigration detention centers.
Generation Wealth, about income disparity and pathologies that infect the uber-wealthy.
Resist and Finding Justice, which both look at injustices Black communities face around the country, like police brutality in Minneapolis pre-George Floyd.
And you directed Fighting Pollution Industry and Cancer Alley, which looks at racial disparities in health and environmental protections.
You've also worked on a few films on solar power and renewable energies.
So, Maya, given all of this work, do you have any hope that humans can turn things around in regards to climate change?
Derek, coming in hot at the jump.
Thank you, Derek.
Get right in.
Get right in there.
Biggest question of all time.
Well, you know, I was thinking about this the other day.
I think hope is kind of like forgiveness.
It's a constantly moving target.
And so I am hopeful about certain things and not hopeful about others.
It's super nuanced.
So I'm hopeful that the folks on the ground that are fighting the hardest battles in climate right now, They already had a strong community for reasons other than climate, like, you know, faith based communities in Louisiana that were already fighting pollution in their black communities that are suddenly climate activists and that know everybody in town and have like the amazing like spread of information already.
You know, so like black women that won us the vote four years ago, and they're helping the climate fight as well.
That gives me hope.
I'm hopeful that, you know, a grandma who used to teach disabled kids in Louisiana could shut down a multi-billion dollar plastics plant like what I showed in that documentary.
And she did, you know, because it would have tripled the air pollution in her neighborhood.
I'm hopeful that climate activists are finding really cool new ways of tackling the problem.
So instead of just doing like direct action banner drops, which weren't getting anywhere, You know, they are, like, targeting the banks, you know, and trying to get banks to stop, you know, funding future oil and gas.
They're targeting insurers, like in the Willow Project in Alaska, trying to get them to pull out of those projects.
They've created campaigns like Stop the Money Pipeline, just to show, like, who all is funding what.
So that gives me hope.
Another thing I'm hopeful, deeply, deeply resonant and hopeful with is the youth climate activists.
You know, in 2019, when Greta came on the scene and I got to film with her, and then the kids flooded their schools and struck all across the world, like, that basically shifted the Overton window.
Entirely.
It made climate a conversation piece.
And yeah, the right came out of the woodworks to kind of, you know, and Trump started tweeting at her saying she should have a movie night.
But, you know, it completely changed the scene.
Before it was like us nerds in the background and scientists who were who were screaming into the void.
And then all of a sudden, like the kids did it.
And it was because the kids had Google and the Internet.
Thanks to our generation.
And, and the kids had all read the Paris Climate Accord.
They had all read about 1.5 degrees, or maybe let's, let's be honest, like maybe they skimmed, right?
But they had all read about 1.5 degrees of Celsius.
So they had read, like, what happens when we, all the coral reefs in the world die?
Or what happens when we have, like, extreme unadaptable heat, you know, and precipitation?
Like, they knew about it.
So they, and shout out to David Wallace-Wells, who wrote The Uninhabitable Earth, which is one of the better, most terrifying reads.
So that's all that I have confidence in.
What I don't have confidence in is like, honestly, the UN COPS, or business as usual models, or relying on the tech bros to create carbon capture, or like market on big scales, figuring this out.
Because What I've found in my work is that people don't think about the planet.
They think about pollution in their kids' lungs because of their gas stove in the house.
You know, they think locally.
So, you know, I think it's that people I think people are just trying to preserve their business, their way of life, their money.
And so I don't have a lot of faith that those systems will help us.
First, I want to flag that in the show notes, you have created a curated reading list.
Thank you.
And that will be for anyone who wants to look at what you read and what you learn from.
Second point, Gen X has created everything good and we will never get credit for it.
So I want to point that out.
But in terms of hope, You know, we're recording this on Thursday.
It's coming out Saturday.
But today's episode on the main feed, we end with what we're hopeful for about in 2024.
And I bring up the fact that this year, we saw the overreach with abortion and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and we saw the activation of so many people fighting that.
And then we also saw one of the strongest labor union movements that we've seen in a century.
And that is ongoing.
And both of those get to the point of what you're Referencing is that it is affecting people's bodies, which is very intimate.
It's affecting people's jobs, which they need to survive.
But in the situation with climate, it is a little different.
So I worked as a columnist for Big Think for nine years.
I wrote a number of stories dating back to like 2011 on climate change.
I actually started writing about the topic in the 90s when I worked for a newspaper in Princeton.
So I've kind of seen many iterations of this throughout my own career in journalism.
Now, at one point, my Big Think editor said, hey, these articles don't perform so well.
We need to talk about other things.
So I was told to stop writing those articles.
And without that immediacy that affects your personal life, it's like, how many reports do we need to see before the public actually cares?
Or does it always have to be on the fact that someone's basement gets flooded out and then you have to deal with it right in the moment?
I mean, he's talking about my basement, people.
My basement was in the flood zone of this bad storm that we got.
This week, this week.
In 24 hours, so my sump pumps are going.
Well, you know, when I was a little climate and environmentalist nerd in the 90s, I remember reading Earth and the Balance by Al Gore.
And a piece of that book that I highlighted on repeat was he said, if a problem is so big that one simple human action can't solve it, Then instead of people taking a step to solve it, they shut down and they don't take any steps.
And I always remembered that.
And it's like one of the only things I remember about that book.
Because, you know, I feel like my trajectory, even as a film and TV climate producer is like, well, how do I get people to take that step if the problem is so huge?
I think we are undervaluing how much people care about the climate crisis.
I think journalists and editors are definitely undervaluing how much people care about the climate crisis.
I'm not sure why.
Maybe that's an answer for you, Derek.
But one of the tenets we follow in my organization, The Years Project, is we follow, Yale did like Yale's program on climate communication.
They identified six Americas.
On climate.
And we find it really helpful because it's way more specific and nuanced.
And the six communities are alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive.
Obviously, like MAGA Republicans are dismissive all the way over and then, you know, to alarmed, which is us.
But what's interesting about this work is that, um, you know, the alarms, they're most worried about like the threat and they support and engage in pro-climate action.
And then it's like all the way through, like, so concerned or worried about it, but they view it as less of a threat.
They're less motivated to act.
Um, so Yale is constantly surveying these groups and you can look at, you can look at their charts.
They're really interesting.
But so.
The Americans that are alarmed outnumber the dismissive two to one.
So 28% of Americans are alarmed as opposed to dismissive, which is 11%.
And that number of alarmed has doubled in 10 years.
So the next category down from that concerned is at 29%.
So one percentage point more.
If you add in, I'm totally using like a report to talk about your, do your reports work?
I know that I'm doing that, but it has a point.
So if we group alarmed and concerned together, that's 56% of Americans that fall into those categories.
That's big.
And also, Yale has found that the percentage of Republicans that are Either now alarmed or concerned as well has increased six percentage points over the past year.
So there are more Republicans realizing because they're seeing hurricanes on their doorstep and wildfires and floods and all of it that this is happening.
So, you know, the problem is, and this is the problem I'm always confronting in my work, is the majority of the people want climate solutions and policies, and we outnumber those who don't.
It's just that our elected don't think that's the case.
Well, to answer your question, there are a number of reasons, but it really does come down to so much media is driven by clicks, and the right really does control the conversation.
Watching a bunch of journalists this morning on Threads talk about how Chris Ruffo keeps telling you what he's going to do, and then he does it, and then journalists just cover it as if he laid it out without actually analyzing it.
And I would argue that we're going to get to the right in a little bit.
But I first want to talk about COP28, which just happened, which was the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Does this conference really mean anything at a governance level?
My best answer is kinda sorta?
I mean, it's so it's so it's the only function that of its kind that has brought the world together on this issue, you know, so that's good.
Yeah.
And it is a global problem, which is, you know, so that's good.
Everybody's coming together.
But it's non-binding, you know, like meaning that there's no Hague agency that's going to lock up the politicians if they don't stick with what they agreed upon and in 2023 at COP 28, you know, if they don't meet their own commitment.
So it's like it's like Every country making a to-do list with other countries, like, okay, cut my carbon emissions, check.
And then the only people looking over their shoulder are at the next climate meeting.
Right.
So, so this year they did right out the gate make So right out the gate, they basically gave vulnerable countries a fund so that the rich countries who have been doing the majority of the pollution will fund the vulnerable countries like the Marshall Islands that did nothing to cause this crisis and then are facing the first and hardest impacts.
So that happened right out the gate, which is amazing.
They made a global pact basically that mentions a transition away from fossil fuel usage instead of phasing it out, which means reduce, not stop.
All the climate activists I'm in communication with are pissed about that because we all know that the science says we have to phase it out.
We can't phase it down.
You know, it's about like how fast we can phase it out is how big of impacts we're going to face as a human civilization.
You know, so more than a hundred countries lobbied really hard for that phase out language and they signed it, you know, So now that means that the world can like, you know, can phase out certain emissions without shunning specific fossil fuels.
And yeah, it was run by like, you know, a CEO of an oil company who's also a sultan.
He's a sultan, right?
I think he's a sultan, yes.
So I guess to sum up that, I question if this to-do list, if oil and gas and coal are 80% of the world's energy, I question if this to-do list is something that every place isn't just going to kind of chuck down the road.
Copenhagen had one of the most advanced carbon plan for any country and they're not even meeting their commitments.
Well, you talked about right out the gate, but there was also a lot of happening before the conference, and the UAE was criticized for trying to greenwash their environmental record.
So, can you explain what greenwashing is to people who might not know, and why the UAE was implicated in attempting it?
So Greenwashing is that commercial by Exxon, you know, where you see people talking about how they want to help the earth and you see a girl in slow motion running through the field holding the leaves and the flowers with her hand and the sunlight streaming through.
But when actually like a really tiny percentage of their profits is going to helping the problem and the vast majority of their profits is from oil, coal and gas.
That's greenwashing.
Greenwashing is like Chevron pouring endless amounts of money into videos of little kids and cute animals while lobbying against the Clean Air and Water Acts.
You know, it's basically tactics for companies to downplay their carbon emissions and exaggerate their clean energy commitments.
And they're doing it.
It's like a little shuck and jive.
You know, they're doing it because they want to keep business as usual for as long as possible, but have people think that they're doing the right thing so they don't abandon them as consumers.
So at COP, you know, the UAE and the Sultan hosting COP, you know, that was announced.
Every climate activist almost had a heart attack and shrieked in horror.
And then they started to greenwash that record, you know, and some people stood by him, like John Kerry saying, like, but he's like a really liberal, progressive Sultan.
I keep wanting to say sheik, but he's a Sultan.
He's like really liberal and progressive, you know, but like, you know, it's kind of, it's like having a, It's like having a tobacco executive at your bedside with the doctor advising on the emphysema patient.
You know, is that really, is that really the best person you want advising on the situation of the person that's dying?
You know?
So, so another example of greenwashing that a lot of people don't know is it was basically Apply the whole idea of like lower your carbon footprint, your individual carbon footprint was created by British Petroleum to make the emphasis seem like it's just on individuals.
It's all these individuals all around the world that are causing this huge issue.
So if we all just like, you know, switch our light bulbs and drive Priuses, you know, and maybe carpool, then that's going to solve the problem.
When in reality, it's, it's these few companies that are creating the enormity of the emissions.
So a mom of two with, you know, a Prius changing her light bulbs isn't any competition for BP spilling oil in the Gulf, millions and millions of gallons, you know, or the, what they're putting into the atmosphere as well.
I lived in Brooklyn when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened, and I lived about three blocks from a BP gas station off of 4th Avenue.
And I am not a proponent of graffiti.
I am graffiti on public spaces.
I actually think it adds value, but I am not for it against businesses in this case.
People took it on their own hands, not me, but some Brooklyn residents, to let BP know how they felt about them continuing and all the commercials they were spinning out about how green they were after that.
But a moment ago, you mentioned John Kerry and sort of the interference they're running to try to greenwash.
But I also noticed that 2,500 COP28 attendees were fossil fuel lobbyists.
Many of the billionaires who attended COP28 flew their own private jets.
And so yes, there's long been this history of like, don't look at us, just recycle and we're going to be good.
So do you see this sort of sleight of hand often in your work?
And how do you advise people to notice it and push back against it?
I see it constantly, even with Toyota as an example, how Toyota is doing everything it can to not double down on electric cars, and it's actually kind of a climate criminal in that sense.
Here's the thing, it's hard to convince someone to do the opposite of something if all their money and their job hinges on that thing.
So, you know, it was easier for the Rockefeller kids to suddenly become climate activists because their job didn't depend on it.
They'd already gotten all this generational wealth from their dad creating the oil industry.
Or grandpa, maybe grandpa, great grandpa.
So, you know, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase, who is the biggest contributor, 96 billion, biggest contributor to future fossil fuel funding.
He signed the Paris Accord and he wants climate action.
He just doesn't think it's his role to tell his investors not to invest in oil and gas.
It's not my job.
He makes $35 million a year to shirk all responsibility in that.
So our world is set up so that corporations can extract as much money as they can from finite resources.
So the levers, the groups I work with are trying to pull now are more at the level of stopping that, those levers, like what, where, where are the places we can have the most impact fast, right?
And I encourage people to look for those things, you know, when we're thinking about these big moving parts.
So like lawsuits, you're suddenly seeing all these lawsuits, even going up to the Supreme Court against these companies that have known for 40 years, their science is new.
Their scientists, Chevron, Exxon, their scientists did some of the first work on carbon emissions.
They've known they are so like lawsuits, you know, just taking these people to task, attacking the banks, the insurers, laws, like trying to get like, you know, executive declarations, like emergency declarations, and let the president use his full power as president with these emergency declarations, like the Defense Production Act, and then like voting in climate candidates.
You know, laws, we need we need more climate candidates who get this.
So I mean, I'm not I'm kind of talking around your question, because it's like, I think it just takes like a refined eye to really spot this.
But what I'm talking to is it's happening constantly, because the whole system is set up to benefit from it.
And you're also bringing into the fact that something we deal with often on the podcast, which is institutional distrust.
And how do you tease apart all of these many complex and interwoven layers?
So, yes, the pharmaceutical industry is completely fucked up and healthcare in America is broken beyond belief.
But that doesn't mean vaccines don't work.
And that doesn't mean there aren't candidates out there who are trying to reform that system that we should be listening to.
And I would extrapolate from that and apply it to climate change as well.
And my hope is just more people can actually support those candidates.
And more of those candidates could come to the front because we have a bad habit of CrossFit gym owners yelling at the camera and then people listen to them.
And how do you work around that?
Which brings us to the noise within all the signal that you're trying to put forward,
which is Fox News and all of the other conservatives.
So, there have been some wild theories about COP28 that have come out in the recent weeks.
Fox's Jesse Watters repeated an old sentiment that cold kills way more than heat,
so a warm planet could be a good thing.
The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh, he made a similar claim.
Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro also said that.
Alex Epstein told Charlie Kirk that fossil fuels are pro-human.
Climate skeptic Bjorn Lundberg, who I'm sure you've come across because he seems to be everywhere, he's been on a bunch of these shows, and he just says people just need more air conditioning.
Calm down, we'll be fine.
I mean, are these men really that dumb, or is there some sort of concerted effort over here going on?
I think there is, I believe in cognitive dissonance.
I think if you say something for long enough and you're in an echo chamber of a bunch of other people that are like reinforcing your beliefs, I think you do start to believe it, you know?
So I think there is an element of that, but I also think that a lot, I think they have strategies to distract from the science, you know?
Because the science is completely against all of their talking points, which I don't even need to go into because they're so stupid.
Um, so, so yeah, I mean it's like...
What you were saying before about like giving journalists giving full credence of this work, like it's side by side with the science that that that's more my concern, because I feel like the people that are watching Fox News, Fox News, are seeing like, Oh, yeah, well, maybe this is just like another, you know, another earth cycle where, you know, it's just a natural cooling, you know, because somebody said that, and then, you know, we felt like we should put that side by side with, oh, I don't know, an actual, Yeah, yeah.
You know, one thing that is pretty obvious, especially in America more than anywhere else, I think, although I mean, I think it is a global issue, but is financial incentives.
People are going to go where the money is.
And do you think What financial incentives for actually doing something on climate change will ever be there?
Will it scale to the point where Jamie Dimon will be like, yeah, fuck oil.
We're all into solar now because it is going to, from my perspective, with a lot of them, I think there is dissonance, but it just comes down to where their bank account is and whatever's pouring money into that.
Exactly.
And their kids' bank accounts.
Actually, 100% I do.
I do actually believe this because we are seeing a sea change in how cheap renewables have become.
And how fast we can get them out.
There have been article after article this year about that very topic.
We need to electrify everything everywhere all at once, is basically the consensus of most people.
And we need to make that energy source renewable at the top.
So we need it to come from solar, wind, hydroelectricity, biomass.
And it's never been cheaper or more reliable Than now.
It's cheaper than fossil fuels, and it will only keep getting cheaper and it's getting better and faster because we are doing it more often.
So just like anything humans get are really adaptable, humans are getting better at making these processes.
So, you know, so the last I read 62% of global energy investment is slated to go to renewables this year.
A good source for this is the International Energy Agency, who is like, you know, talking to countries about their energy use.
So there's a clean energy revolution happening.
The problem I'm confronting, because we are working with the White House right now to get out like the news to different states about Biden's climate plan that he passed that nobody knows about, the Inflation Reduction Act, you know, like the problem is, you know, He passed the biggest climate legislation and nobody knows about it.
And there are all these tax rebates and credits going to individuals and companies.
So it spurred this clean energy boom that's happening.
There are all sorts of new battery plants, everything, all sorts of things happening.
So the economics is totally on our side, Derek.
I think all we have to do is get the old climate criminal guard, the old guard of climate criminals out of the way.
And that part is key.
Yeah.
Well, maybe if you would have saved the plan on Hunter's laptop, some more people would have found out about it.
Yeah.
So, so are there any companies in this space that you really appreciate that you think are doing good work?
Rewiring America is kind of a genius company that are advising governments how we can electrify really quickly.
I love them.
Environmental Voter Project, when we were talking about voting, they always need volunteers to help.
And I volunteer with them pretty much every election cycle.
And they basically like figure out what environmentalists and climate folks are not voting.
And then we just get them out to the polls.
So they're already aligned with climate issues and climate candidates.
They're great.
There are a lot of great B-Cores.
I mean, even companies like L'Oreal have some really, really great track records with making their companies carbon neutral and their products carbon neutral.
Those are the three I think off the top of my head, but there are like so many more.
I can add more to my little climate list for you.
Cool.
Yes.
In the list, if you click on the show notes, it is an evolving list.
So you might want to check back as well.
But there's plenty there to start with.
I will say that.
I look forward to diving in.
So thank you for explaining all this, Maya.
What are you working on right now in your world?
So with the years project, we just did a film, a documentary about the train derailment in East Palestine, which was where a train carrying vinyl chloride, which goes to make plastics derailed.
And they basically, instead of doing what they should have done, which is like tent the materials and then carry them out via the EPA.
They blew up the vinyl chloride over the town.
So we used that video that I made.
I went and did two shoots on the ground.
I had to wear a gas mask most of the time.
We used that film and gifted it to the groups on the ground and they used it.
So Beyond Plastics is one of the groups and they used it to target the EPA to ban vinyl chloride, which is a known carcinogen.
And it causes infertility in women.
It's just been, it's a nightmare forever.
So, and then the EPA is now, because of our film and that targeting, they're now, they put it on the list of chemicals to consider banning.
And that's the goal of my work is I want the work to, you know, follow documentary standards and principles, but help groups on the ground that don't have access to Hollywood level storytelling.
So the next piece I'm working on is Your favorite place, Derek?
Texas.
I have to go to Texas because I'm telling the story of outdoor workers and heat.
And so all of these young workers who are dying, farm workers, construction workers, delivery people who are dying because of heat and no protection.
So like not being able to take rest breaks, water breaks, By law.
