The Comedy of Climate Anxiety With Ethan Brown, Real Finds Podcast #27 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, a podcast series where we interview key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping real estate and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Ethan Brown. Ethan is the founder and host of The Sweaty Penguin podcast, a contributor for Young Voices, and a production assistant at PBS. On the podcast, we discuss positive ways to view the climate crisis and gain a stronger perspective on how Generation Z views climate change and the discussions around it. Ethan, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
Ethan Brown: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Gordon Lamphere: You’re a growing figure in the younger, climate-focused demographic, but some of our investors and real estate professionals might not know you. Could you introduce yourself?
Ethan Brown: Of course. I’m the founder and host of The Sweaty Penguin, a comedy climate program presented by PBS’s national climate initiative, Peril and Promise. Our goal is to make climate change less overwhelming, less politicized, and more fun. We’ve done almost two hundred episodes, interviewed experts from fifteen countries and six continents, and won some awards, so it’s been a fantastic journey. I also write a lot of op-eds. I’ve been in Newsweek, The Hill, and the Orange County Register, and I’m just trying to grow my voice in the climate conversation.
Making Climate Change Funny
Gordon Lamphere: Before we get into the topic itself, how do you make a topic some see as an existential crisis funny? A lot of folks see it as fear based, or as something they don’t want to talk about.
Ethan Brown: Hurricanes and heat waves on their own are funny enough for us. That’s actually an interesting discussion among people trying to get into climate comedy. When I see a lot of comedians come into climate, they go at it from “we’re all going to die, ha ha,” and I don’t see what’s funny about that. For me, we find humor in a lot of the ways we’re optimistic about climate and climate solutions. We’ve put together a program inspired by late-night shows like John Oliver and Hasan Minhaj, but even more optimistic and more youthful. We incorporate a lot of puns and pop culture references. We notice when an anecdote from a climate story is silly or weird, and behavioral economics leads to some of the weirdest things. There are a number of angles in a given episode, but there’s plenty of material, and we use it to generate hope and optimism rather than fear.
How Gen Z Sees Climate Change
Gordon Lamphere: I’m always a little afraid of this topic, generational differences. I hate stereotyping, but there’s definitely a difference in how Gen Z, and soon Gen Alpha, perceive climate change versus boomers, the Silent Generation, and even Xers. A Pew poll from 2022 or early 2023 found 76% of millennials, and particularly Gen Z, view climate change as one of the top three crises in their lives, and 46% of Gen Z view it as the biggest crisis. What do you see in how the younger generation perceives climate change as a threat?
Ethan Brown: One big difference is that the younger you go, the more climate anxious people are. Sixty-nine percent of Gen Z reported feeling anxious after viewing climate content on social media. I believe that number was around fifty-nine for millennials, and it trickles down as you get older. That concerns me, because studies show that feelings of anxiety, fear, and guilt can lead someone to disengage with an issue if they feel it too strongly. Every generation has reason to care. Climate change is here right now. Heat waves are the leading cause of death among weather events, and they disproportionately affect older people who might be prone to strokes or other illnesses, or might not have the same support system at home. So older people have reasons to be concerned too. But the difference for us is that we’ve experienced this our whole lives and will continue to. There’s been a lot of progress, but there are ways we don’t know what the future looks like, and that can be scary. So what I try to do is look at that climate anxiety, especially among Gen Z, and figure out how to make it less overwhelming and more digestible, so we can start the conversation and see where there’s room for improvement, common ground, and optimism.
Stilt Houses and Resilient Real Estate on the Gulf Coast
Gordon Lamphere: You did a very interesting piece on resilient real estate in the Gulf Coast, particularly around rising seas. Can you talk about that? It’s a great starting point for climate-forward real estate.
Ethan Brown: That piece came out about a month ago. We partnered with the Gulf Climate Listening Project, which works with artists and voices in the Gulf region, where a lot of issues intersect: fossil fuel development, petrochemical infrastructure, and climate change, particularly hurricanes, all fitting together in a strange way. We were identifying topics for those episodes, and one of our team members is from Miami. I asked her whether there were topics related to climate resilience where we could do a more solutions-focused episode, and she started telling me about stilt houses. She grew up going to stilt houses in the Florida Keys; I believe there’s a park there with them. I found an expert who could speak to it, and what we learned is that stilt houses are exactly what they sound like: houses elevated on platforms. In a flood, water passes under the house instead of flooding it. They’re also used in the far north to prevent permafrost thaw, since elevating the house keeps heat from going into the ground. But we also found issues. Severe hurricane winds can damage the underside of the house, and they’re vulnerable to earthquakes. So it was interesting to explore the potential of stilt houses, where the challenges are, and how the idea could improve to be as resilient as possible.
Gordon Lamphere: It’s fascinating that you bring up the Gulf Coast, because I have a lot of friends from Tulane Law, where I went, and a lot of real estate professionals I work with there. There’s a strong push toward climate-resilient policy, but at the same time the region is predominantly funded by oil and natural gas. How did that play out when you went down there? You’re an interesting voice because you’re trying to combine comedy with tough issues.
Ethan Brown: Speaking of Tulane Law, we also interviewed Kimberly Terrell of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, and she was excellent. We talked about chloroprene in Cancer Alley, another big issue in Louisiana, where predominantly Black and low-income communities are disproportionately exposed to chemical infrastructure. The only chloroprene plant in the country is the Denka plant in Louisiana, and it was recently sued by the Department of Justice for the impacts it’s caused. Chloroprene is what’s used to create neoprene beer koozies and wetsuits. On fossil fuels, a week or two ago we had our episode on the Eagle Ford Shale, a large oil and gas formation on the Gulf Coast of Texas. I believe it was number seven in the United States for carbon emissions, but uniquely high in methane. There were issues with water availability and contamination, and real economic issues. I looked at the five oil and gas companies ranked as most involved in the Eagle Ford Shale. A couple of the bigger ones were doing fine, but two were bankrupt and one was very questionable, and that was a pattern down the list. So as much as it feels like environment versus economy down there, very often I find that environment, economy, health, and justice end up in line. The environment fuels our economy. We need to be healthy to go to work. We need resources to sustain ourselves. It’s been a very interesting series of episodes.
Gordon Lamphere: Why were those companies going bankrupt? I have an idea based on oil and gas work I did in law, but I’m curious.
Ethan Brown: There are a few reasons, and I don’t claim to know exactly why each company went bankrupt. But generally, the Eagle Ford Shale is really just one layer of oil and gas underground. In West Texas, the Permian Basin has many layers, which they call pay zones, so you can reach all those layers and pull it all up, which is much more economically efficient than one layer. Fracking changed that; you drill down, turn horizontally, and extract that way. But it’s still less efficient than the Permian. The other issue is leasing in the region, and I hope we got this right, because I always worry this is punching above my twenty-three-year-old class. As I understand it, when companies get a lease there, they have a limited time to find and obtain oil, or they lose the lease. And going forward, if they’re not continuing to find and drill profitably, they lose the lease. So rather than saying this isn’t economically viable, companies don’t want to lose their land, so they take money from investors and try to drill every hole they can, and it ends up a lose-lose. Those were two of the main reasons we identified, though there are specifics for different companies.
Sustainable Development and the Economy
Gordon Lamphere: I talk with a lot of folks about sustainable development on the podcast, mainly from the investor side, and they’re typically in their forties, with a very different feel for future generational shifts. From your research, how do Gen Z, and even Gen Alpha, see sustainable development and the way people live and interact with real estate?
Ethan Brown: Sustainable development has a number of definitions. You can look at balancing environmental and economic gains where they’re substitutable, or say you need to preserve everything pristine. I lean toward the former, but there’s opportunity to do both. With Gen Z in particular, one aspect that’s received a lot of attention is climate justice and environmental justice: marginalized and low-income communities disproportionately facing environmental burdens, and the connection that if we help the environment we help those communities, or vice versa. What Gen Z as a whole might not know is that this applies to the economy too. If we’re more efficient, if we transition to clean energy, and at this point solar and wind are competitive and often cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel alternatives. Housing is a great example, because we waste a lot of energy in our homes, through HVAC, water use in toilets and washing machines, and so on. There’s a lot of room to improve efficiency, which saves everyone money on their bill and helps the climate. So I hope people see that it’s all connected. It’s encouraging that Gen Z has taken to the idea that environment and justice are connected, and I think we can go one step further.
Gordon Lamphere: A follow-up on renewables being cheaper than fossil fuels. I’ve seen that for nuclear. When you say renewables are commensurate or cheaper, is that after subsidy, or before?
Ethan Brown: It depends on where you are, but I think it’s the raw cost. And here, as I understand it, fossil fuel subsidies actually outweigh clean energy subsidies, though we hear more about the clean energy ones. The International Renewable Energy Agency found, I believe within the last five years, that about sixty-two percent of new solar and wind infrastructure was cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel alternative. In the US, with coal now notoriously the expensive energy source, it would be cheaper to build a new solar or wind farm than to operate the existing coal plant for all but one of the four hundred-some coal plants in the country. There’s one in West Virginia that’s still cheaper than replacing it. In the last decade, the cost of solar dropped eighty-five percent, wind by fifty-five, EV batteries by eighty-five. It’s coming down, and that gets me excited, because now I don’t have to argue which is better. Environment and economy are in line, and if we make this transition, we help everything.
What Environmental Justice Means
Gordon Lamphere: For a listener who isn’t super informed on environmental justice, what are we talking about? It’s a phrase with a lot of implications. How are you using it?
Ethan Brown: It’s a big buzzword, and because of that, I try to explain the concepts and avoid the word. The general idea, which you can see in nearly every issue we cover, is that low-income and minority communities bear the brunt of a lot of environmental issues, very often issues that community did little or nothing to cause. Climate justice is maybe the simplest example. The United States has historically been the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, and a lot of northern hemisphere countries followed. But many of the most serious climate impacts have been in the southern hemisphere: extreme sea level rise, heat waves, wildfires, droughts. It’s happening everywhere, but more intensely in some low-income countries that did not emit the carbon we did. That leads to a lot of conversations on the global stage, where some African countries are passionately working on climate and others say, you got to make money off coal, why can’t we? Difficult conversations. Locally, we see natural gas compressor stations located near low-income or minority communities. We see chemical infrastructure like the Denka plant in a predominantly Black community. Regardless of intent, and I don’t want to speculate on that, a marginalized community has less political power and less of a voice in fighting a company to stay away or go elsewhere. Sometimes it’s just the company seeing a shortcut where they won’t have a fight. There are local dimensions and global dimensions, and it’s important.
Balancing Affordable Housing and Sustainability
Gordon Lamphere: That’s a topic near and dear to me. I don’t take a team red or team blue approach on this podcast; I’m trying to find solutions, and I think most of our audience is too. One of the biggest concerns folks have is that the people most economically hurt are often the same people most environmentally hurt, and big changes tend to economically disenfranchise those populations at the same time. We’ve had a lot of folks on talking about affordable housing and economic justice, and one of the biggest ways to promote economically viable housing is development, because more homes means more families can be housed, which helps people on the lowest end of the spectrum. Do you see a way to balance a more equitable housing supply with environmental sustainability? That’s where the rubber meets the road.
Ethan Brown: I do. First, and this isn’t a criticism, one thing I’d love to see folks think about more within environmental justice is communities like farmers, who’ve struggled so much economically and are facing droughts and wildfires. I don’t want to single anyone out, but there’s opportunity to extend the idea to more places than it currently reaches. As for where to go from here, there are so many ways to do sustainable housing. I’m not an expert, but I fully agree with the idea of more housing. I don’t see any way around it. But when we think about what we build, we can do it sustainably. We can think about materials, make homes efficient, use electric heat pumps instead of gas furnaces. These are technologies that may not have been viable twenty years ago but have come a long way. The challenge is that some take an upfront cost but save a lot down the road. If your home is insulated properly, you’re not leaking heat or AC outside. Heat pumps are more expensive up front but save money over time. I hope we can find ways to make that investment to get those savings, and I think it would benefit low-income communities. Similarly, with renters, there need to be incentives for landlords to make these decisions, because renters like me don’t have the power. It comes back to how we plan and strategize, because doing things sustainably creates so much opportunity to save money, but we have to be strategic about how we get there.
Gordon Lamphere: You talked about opportunities for renters. How would you see that work from a legal or economic perspective?
Ethan Brown: It would have to come from landlords, communities, or governments. What renters can do, myself included, is voice what’s going on and offer suggestions, but we don’t own our property. My building does some wacky stuff, and I take it, and I don’t know how long I’ll stay, but that’s how it goes. So the incentives need to be right for landlords or cities to make the right decisions. I don’t know if that’s subsidizing better technologies, investing in them to make them cheaper down the road, taxes, regulations, or building codes. There are so many policy avenues, and you can also look outside policy at education and voluntary measures. But as a renter, I know how little power I have over what happens in my own home, so I hope the incentives can be right for those who own the land.
Gordon Lamphere: From the commercial perspective, at least in Illinois, commercial tenants have a lot of decisions they can make, using credits from ComEd or environmentally friendly programs to revamp their spaces and get economic credits on the back end, which often ends up net zero or even makes money. Do you foresee that as a possibility for residential renters, an economic credit system to improve and redevelop properties?
Ethan Brown: I think that’s a great option. I tend to present what a problem is, the nuances, and a variety of solutions, and if everyone seems to like one, I’m on board. I try not to pick which solutions I like best. But something like that sounds great. Though again, I think it’s more on the landlords and whoever’s building the buildings than on renters, because we have very little power to institute changes.
Gordon Lamphere: Last question before the Final Four. One of the biggest things being discussed in the economy is the glut of office space. Have you seen anything from an environmental or justice perspective, in conversations among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, about that as an option?
Ethan Brown: Are you referring to working from home versus the office?
Gordon Lamphere: I’m referring to potentially redeveloping office space for affordable housing, though work from home is something we can discuss too.
Ethan Brown: That makes sense. I hadn’t heard about that topic in particular, but I’m familiar with how things have shifted. I pulled some numbers from our housing episode this morning: from April to July of 2020, Americans spent about six billion dollars more on home energy costs compared to pre-pandemic, which gives a sense of how much we were staying home. But at the same time, we were driving a lot less, which lowers emissions. There have been conversations about how incentivizing work from home and creating more broadband availability can lower emissions in the long run by reducing transportation. That plays into what you’re talking about, because for office space to be cleared out, people have to be working somewhere. If that space exists, converting it into something useful sounds like a great idea. I don’t know a ton more about it, but it’s certainly something to look into.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: Now we want to learn more about you and how you see the future. We’d love to have you on again to talk about more topics from the Gen Z and Gen Alpha perspective. First, looking forward: what do you see happening in real estate from an environmental perspective over the next ten years?
Ethan Brown: Good question. For one, a lot of coastal communities are having issues with insurance, or simply with where people want to live, as hurricanes and sea level rise worsen. I can see that creating problems where people want to leave but nobody wants to buy their home. I don’t know exactly how that plays out. Similarly, before moving to California, I was in school in Boston with no air conditioning in my apartment, which was normal there. My last summer, we had a heat wave that hit a hundred degrees, and I literally could not be in my home from eight a.m. to eight p.m., because the fan blew air hotter than my body temperature at me. So there are issues around making homes more resilient and adapting to climate. We’ve seen similar things in the Pacific Northwest with more heat waves. Climate change is having a big effect on how and where we live, and my hope is that we create plans to address it, because there are ways to make our homes more resilient as well as more sustainable.
Gordon Lamphere: The biggest debate I see, not at the extremes but among the center-right and center-left economically, is climate resiliency versus prevention. Is that what you’re seeing in the younger generation, or is there a different debate going on?
Ethan Brown: I see it a little, but in my work I find they tend to be in line. For example, during Hurricane Ian last year, there was a community in Florida that’s entirely powered by a solar farm, and it didn’t lose power. Everyone else did. Solar is actually a lot more resilient to a hurricane than our fossil fuel infrastructure, because it can be built that way. I’ve heard wind not only can be resilient but can capture extra energy from hurricane-force winds, if you set up ways to store it. So I understand why there’s a discussion of one versus the other, and maybe that discussion in people’s heads is just about where to focus their energy. But in practice, the two are very connected, and you can do both at the same time.
Gordon Lamphere: I certainly hope we can walk and chew gum at the same time as a society. Now let’s go back in time. For you, it’s not as far as most, but if you could give your high school self one bit of advice, what would it be?
Ethan Brown: Remembering back to high school, a big part of why I am where I am is that I found climate change so overwhelming and scary that I thought, this is important, I need to find a way to talk about this, but it just wasn’t interesting. It took until college to find it interesting, in economics classes, where I started to see how environmental solutions can also help the economy and vice versa. So my advice would be to suck it up and start learning, not from the doom-and-gloom headlines I was reading, but by actually paying attention in the senior economics elective I did terribly in. I don’t regret that it took until college, but for my own sanity back then, it would have been nice to have some of that doom and gloom countered.
Gordon Lamphere: I always recommend against doom and gloom. I’m certainly not a doomer on this podcast. To expand our minds, one of my favorite things is books. Is there a book, or more than one, that’s expanded your worldview?
Ethan Brown: The one that jumped out as I looked at my bookshelf was The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. I read it back in high school, so I apologize that I don’t remember it vividly, but it introduced me to his work, and a big thing I took away is how important it is to analyze data, incorporate it, and think critically. There’s not a lot of coverage where you read it and feel it was thought out meticulously with no hidden agenda. FiveThirtyEight does a pretty good job of that; nobody’s perfect, but it’s one of the only politics podcasts I listen to. I remember the book was a lot about forecasting and prediction and how data informs that process. It’s informed the way I approach issues today from a critical perspective, making sure any data we include is thought out with its nuances understood. In climate, we talk a lot about predictions, forecasts, and models, so understanding what goes into that is important, and I think I took that from the book originally.
Gordon Lamphere: One final question of the Final Four, and the whole reason for the podcast: our goal is to get diverse perspectives from folks shaping the way we interact with real estate. Who should we reach out to next?
Ethan Brown: I’ll use it to plug some of the experts from our housing episodes. Our expert in our housing episode was Andréanne Doyon from Simon Fraser University in Canada, and we talked with her about sustainable housing efforts in Australia. That was very interesting. The recent one on stilt houses was with Thang Dao from the University of Alabama. His research is on housing resilience, including how hurricane wind loads can damage a stilt house. He’s done research on mobile homes and is looking at building materials that can make homes more earthquake resilient. We did an episode on ventilation with Michael Gevelber from Boston University. And the last one that comes to mind is Malo Hutson at the University of Virginia, who we talked to about gentrification and its links to climate change. That was a memorable interview.
Gordon Lamphere: That’s a long list, and thank God we have it recorded. I’m particularly interested in the stilt design and the affordable housing angles, because we’re always looking for more affordable housing voices on the podcast. Before we go, one final question: what’s the best way to reach you and learn more about The Sweaty Penguin?
Ethan Brown: That’s my favorite question. You can find me on Twitter at @ethanbrown5151. The Sweaty Penguin is on all podcast platforms, and we’re at pbs.org/perilandpromise. We’re on all social media. If you want to support the show further, go to our Patreon at patreon.com/thesweatypenguin, where you can get merch, bonus content, and more. We also do an episode called Tip of the Iceberg, every other week for now and back to weekly soon, where in the second segment I answer a question from an audience member. So if you have questions about climate, sustainable housing, or anything we discussed today, send them in via email, social media, the website, or Patreon, and we’ll get you featured on the show.
Gordon Lamphere: Ethan, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.
Ethan Brown: I’d love to do it again. Thanks for having me.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Ethan. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to provide quality guests. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
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