Episode Transcript: #1500 - Barbara Freese
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And we're rolling.
How are you, Barbara?
What's happening?
I'm good, Joe.
How are you?
Pleasure to meet you.
Pleasure to meet you.
How did you get started on this and how did you get interested in the subject?
I got interested in this subject through climate change, climate denial specifically.
I'm an environmental attorney and back in the 1990s I worked for the state of Minnesota
and we found ourselves very briefly sort of on the front lines of the scientific debate
over climate change and the way that happened was the state had passed a law saying that
utilities regulators should try to estimate the cost to the environment of generating electricity.
We get most of our power from coal or we did then.
And so we looked at coal emissions.
We looked at the traditional pollutants that we had regulated for a long time and my client
was the pollution control agency so I was familiar with those.
But we also looked at though and I wasn't familiar with was CO2 and its effect on climate
change because while that was a big issue globally, there was already a global treaty
signed to fight climate change.