BONUS - Metra Listener Mailbag 2 - How Did We Get Here?

Tom Molpe attempts to answer a big question.

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Books for Earline (and anyone else who may find them useful):

Climate Crisis - Overall
The New Climate War by Michael E. Mann
Falter by Bill McKibben
The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg
The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil Fuel Propaganda and How To Fight It by Genevieve Guenther

Climate Crisis and Extractive Capitalism
Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and The Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises by Marjorie Kelly.
Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It by Nancy Fraser

Myths About Energy Consumption and Our Relationship to the Environment
More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Christophe Bonneuil

The Koch Brothers and their Billionaire Army
Kochland by Christopher Leonard
Dark Money by Jane Meyer
 
…
 
Check out our website for ways to join the climate movement: metrathemusical.com/do-something
 
Support Metra at ko-fi.com/metrathemusical
 
 
Follow the show:
https://pod.link/1843713183
IG and Bluesky:  @metrathemusical
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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:30

Hi, Tom Mulpey here with your Metro Listener mailbag. Last week I answered the listener question of how the hell I, Tom Mulpey, from the year 2045 got here and now. This week I'm going to answer another popular listener question: How the hell did we all get here and now? Which is the question posed in an email from Erlen of Tulsa, Oklahoma, as read by Emily Hartford.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Dear Mr. Mulpey, my name is Erlen, but everybody just calls me Earl. I'm 16 years old. I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I love what I've heard from Metra so far and was hoping you could answer a question I have. If you really are from the future, maybe you have an answer. As you probably know, this past July, on July 4th to be exact, a bunch of girls died in Texas. They were attending a Christian summer camp. They drowned when the Guadalupe River flooded. One of the girls was from Tulsa. She came from a rich family. Maybe you can tell I'm not one of them. My mom and dad both work. My dad has two full-time jobs. My mom one full-time and one part-time job. But despite them working so much and so hard, they still worry all the time about money. So I guess it's obvious to say I didn't know the rich girl who drowned in Texas. But I still think it's horrible. She must have been so scared. I was in school a couple weeks ago when someone in science class brought up the Texas flood and the local girl who drowned in it. The boy asked if that kind of flood could happen in Tulsa. Ms. Anderton, my science teacher, she kind of stammered. Well, that that that's hard to say. And suddenly, without even knowing what I was doing, I found myself standing up and saying, Ms. Anderton, with every 1.5 degrees of global warming, the atmosphere holds 7% more moisture. That's a huge amount. We've blown past 1.5 degrees warming and are well on our way to four or even five degrees warming. So when it rains, it can rain so much harder and faster than it used to. And and just five years from now, it's gonna be so much worse. You don't have to live near a river anymore to drown in a flood. Nowhere is safe anymore because And that's when Angelina stood up and she said, Ms. Anderton, make Earl stop with her lesbian woke stuff, or I will tell my father. At which point I told Angelina what she could do with her stupid opinions. At which point Angelina told me I was gonna burn in hell and that she would laugh at me from up in heaven. At which point, Ms. Anderton made us all shut up. Then Ms. Anderton sighed and said, Floods are caused by weather, and it's hard to predict the weather. And there are many opinions on all sides, and we have to be respectful of each other's opinions. At which point I said, Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is not an opinion or a religious belief. It is scientific fact, and this is a goddamn science class. At which point, Ms. Anderton sent me to the principal's office where I was given a two-day suspension. This is the second time I have recently been suspended. The other time was in history class when I asked a question about the Greenwood massacre that happened here in Tulsa in 1920, when racist white people murdered a whole town of black people for simply working hard and committing the crime of making more money than the white people did. At which point Angelina stood up and said that I was being racist by asking the question because by calling it a massacre, I was saying white people are evil. At which point I said that she was a racist and an idiot. At which point she called me a woke lesbian. At which point the history teacher, Mr. Gomm, made us both shut up. Then Mr. Gomm sighed and said, Now, there are many opinions about that aspect of our history, and we need to be respectful of all opinions. At which point I said the Greenwood Massacre and its causes are not opinions. They are historical fact. And this is supposed to be a goddamn history class. That, Mr. Mulpey, was my first suspension. Angelina is stupid and mean, but her parents are really stupid and mean. So I feel kinda sorry for her. Angelina's family all go to Sheridan Church. Their pastor ran for U.S. House of Representatives, but he lost, thank God. Sheridan is a very political church, a very crazy church. Maybe the craziest of the crazies. They often have people from the Trump administration speak at their church. Here in Oklahoma, we have a law that states that teachers can't teach things about race or sexuality that make students feel uncomfortable. The Republicans tried to pass another law that would make it illegal for teachers to talk about climate change. That bill lost, but it was so close that teachers are all still scared they'll lose their jobs. Teachers like Ms. Anderton. Angelina's father is on the school board. He helped organize phone campaigns to legislators to try and get both those laws passed. He's batting 500, which is a pretty good batting average. So anyway, I know Ms. Anderton and Mr. Gomm and all my teachers are really scared about losing their jobs if Angelina complains about what they're teaching. This makes Angelina feel very powerful, which has made her even more mean. And has seemed to make her even more deliberately stupid. Everything she says now sounds like, look at me, I can be so stupid and I can force everyone to be just as stupid as I am. Woo-hoo. Between cleaning the house, keeping my brother and parents fed, and getting good grades, which may not matter now that I have two suspensions, I don't have a lot of time to try and figure out how the world has gotten so fucked up. Mr. Mulpey, I understand you are from the future. Maybe you have a better perspective to explain how we got here. And by here, I mean a world where my parents both work two jobs but barely get by. A world where it looks like climate change is going to destroy everything and no one seems to care. A world where talking about racism makes you a racist, talking about scientific fact, makes you a woke liberal and talking about the way God made you is an insult to God. I I I have a feeling that all these bad things aren't random. I have the feeling that all these bad things are connected. Mr. Mulby, am I right? If so, what can we do? What can I do? Thanks for the podcast. I listened to it on the bus to and from school. Sincerely, Earl.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Okay, Earl, those are really good questions. And I'm sorry you're dealing with all that at school and that Angelina's giving you such a hard time. I'm glad you're there telling the truth, though. I bet it's helpful to more people than you know. Okay. I'm going to try not to go too deep in the weeds on this because the answer is pretty complex. But the short answer to your question is yes. All of those bad things are absolutely connected. Other people have done a really good job of writing very deeply about all this stuff that I'm going to talk about. So if you want to learn more, I'll post some recommended reading in the show notes. If the books aren't in your local library in Oklahoma, which they very well might not be, let me know with an email and I'll see what I can do to help you. So, preface completed, let's begin. I can start the story of how we got here at any number of historically relevant moments, but I choose to start the story around 1980 at a very purposeful get-together of billionaires that took place in Colorado. The meeting was convened by two oil billionaire brothers by the name of Charles and David Koch. David was a playboy dedicated to having sex with models, but his brother Charles was a workaholic dedicated to making money, no matter whom he destroyed along the way. Both inherited their wealth from their father, Fred, an engineer who had invented a way to separate refined oil from crude oil. Fred was a good engineer, but batshit crazy otherwise, and his craziness led him to help found the John Birch Society, an organization that claimed all sorts of batshit things, like, for example, blacks and women were inferior and shouldn't be allowed to vote, and environmentalists were evil, gays were satanic, and anyone who disagreed with any of the John Birch Society's crazy fucking bullshit was a communist. David and Charles Koch inherited both their father's company and his batshit, crazy worldview. Now, to understand how we got here in 2025, you have to understand Charles Koch. Earl, let me tell you, Charles Koch is peerless in the field of amoral profiteering. There may be no single person alive today who is better at figuring out how to turn a profit than Charles Koch. Unfortunately, Charles Koch is also totally unconcerned about how many people are harmed or killed in the making of that profit. Fred Koch may have started Coke Industries, but Charles made it into a monster of profitability. Charles kept the company private so that no shareholders or board could tell him what to do, and Charles expanded Coke Industries from oil and coal into other industries that rely heavily on fossil fuels, industries like paper, chemicals, and plastics, this umbrella of Coke Industries businesses all brilliantly complemented and help sustain each other. In business, this is called Synergy. Charles Coke is a big believer in synergy and in long-term planning. And through these skills, Charles Coke made Coke Industries into the second largest privately held company in the United States and made himself into one of the richest men in the world, which brings us to that meeting of billionaires in Colorado in 1980 that was convened by Charles and David Koch. You see, the Koch brothers, being oil billionaires, knew, just as the whole energy industry knew, that burning fossil fuels was going to destroy the atmosphere, burn up the planet, a process they knew had already begun and would soon be evident to everyone, unless. At that meeting in Colorado, Charles and David told their fellow billionaires that to protect their investments in oil, gas, and coal, they had to start a massive effort to lie to the world about climate change so that they could keep making money, even if it meant destroying the planet. All the billionaires loved this idea. And then Charles said, and if we're gonna do that, why don't we pool our resources to make all our dreams come true? Charles said that with their combined resources and a coordinated long-term effort, the billionaires might not only deceive the world about climate change, but hey, why not? They could also, while they were at it, destroy labor unions, destroy workers' rights and protections, destroy government regulations that protect the environment and ensure food and product safety, destroy affordable health care, take away women's bodily autonomy, eliminate Social Security, eliminate the minimum wage, eliminate gun control, eliminate public education, and eliminate the taxes on the wealthy and their corporations, and so much more. Oh, the billionaires all really love this idea. So, implementing his gift for synergy and long-term planning, Charles Koch brought aboard billionaires from other fields who might share their common goals of enslaving humanity and destroying the world, especially billionaires from the financial world, like Bruce Covder, Paul Singer, and Ken Griffin, who all loved being just as evil as Charles Koch. So if the financial billionaires would help the oil billionaires keep making money from fossil fuels, the oil billionaires would help the financial billionaires deregulate the financial industry. They have been very successful. And now the financial industry is a deregulated house of cards full of monopolies, predatory practices, and high-risk skill legal schemes that sometimes fall apart and lead to economic disasters like the mortgage crisis of 2008. And when those schemes collapse, the government steps in and uses your parents' taxpayer dollars to cover the bills. It's win-win for the 1%. Today, the financial industry operates virtually without restriction, as regulations and regulatory agencies have been gutted by the efforts of the infrastructure created by Charles Koch. Worker productivity in America is the highest it's ever been, but people just keep falling further and further behind. Well, that's because all these same billionaires pool their riches into private equity companies so they can buy up hospitals, housing, grocery stores, senior living centers, child care, vet clinics, and more, all to create monopolies that force your parents to pay more money for shittier basic goods and services. So, just like the way these billionaires make money by bleeding the planet dry, these billionaires make money by bleeding hardworking people like your parents dry, bleed them till there's no blood left. So, Earl, yes, you were right. The climate crisis is related to how your parents have to work two jobs. All this pain and misery is connected because Charles Koch is so good at bringing together billionaires to work together to enslave humanity, eliminate democracy, and destroy the world. So, how did Charles Koch achieve his goals? He directed his armies of bootlifters to make the obvious first points of attack: bribing and buying politicians and judges. And let me tell you, Earl, Supreme Court justices Thomas Alito and Kavanaugh are fucking vacuum cleaners when it comes to sucking up bribes from billionaires. And in return, those bribe-sucking justices give decisions like Citizens United, which allows billionaires to now spend as much as they want to control elections. Then the billionaires paid off Christian ministers to spread hatred and division. In fact, a few of the billionaires, folks like Tim Dunn and Dan and Ferris Wilkes, started their own churches so they could be preachers too, because they believed people should worship them just as much as God. And while these billionaires were bribing the politicians, judges, and preachers, these same billionaires created a huge network of phony foundations, think tanks, and political front groups as a way to secretly funnel billions of dollars towards the goal of convincing people to act and vote in ways that would cause them great harm. What these billionaires were trying to do was called moving the Overton window. That's an expression that means convincing people to change their minds about commonly accepted opinions. The Overton Window is named after Joseph Overton, who actually worked for Charles Koch. As one of Koch's bootlickers, Joseph Overton's job was to convince people that they didn't really want the things they wanted back in 1980. They liked clean air back then. They liked clean water, fair wages, antitrust laws, taxes on the ultra-wealthy, so many things that they liked, and it was Joseph Overton's job to convince them they didn't want those things. Convinced them that anything that got in the way of Charles Cook and his rich friends making money was a bad thing. So to achieve this seemingly impossible task, Joseph Overton said it would be necessary to tell people a massive amount of lies. And these lies had to be told over and over and over until the people finally believed the lies. Truth had to be debased, and truth-tellers threatened, or, if necessary, destroyed. So, Earl, how do you destroy the truth? Well, one way is to add media billionaires to your team of fascist bizarro avengers. Billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and David Smith, who use their money to buy up newspapers, cable news networks, radio stations, and later the social media and streaming platforms. So, working together, this even bigger group of billionaires could now tell their lies over and over and over in a very coordinated way to a huge number of people. They could now even use this giant propaganda machine to make people hate each other, divide people so that everyone would be so busy fighting each other the billionaires could steal and steal and steal, and no one would even notice. So, in summary, Charles Koch built an army of billionaires, and Charles Koch and his army of billionaires declared war on humanity and the planet. And Earl, I hate to tell you this, as someone from the future I can tell you, he and all of his greedy, power-hungry, fascist billionaire friends, they won. They got everything they wanted. In the next 10 to 15 years, on my original timeline that I've lived through, these billionaires, utilizing the most powerful propaganda machine and surveillance state in human history at their command, these billionaires will achieve limitless wealth and total power, everything they dreamed of, with all of humanity as their slaves. They become the rulers of the world with nothing to stop them. Nothing except the very thing they caused. Climate change. These billionaires were such arrogant pieces of shit, they never thought climate change would affect them. They never expected the world would collapse as quickly as it did, as severely as it did, or that with their riches and power, that it might affect them at all, which was how all the billionaires eventually ended up in the bubbles in 2045, along with me. Just nodding and smiling, going with the flow like I always did. Yep. Until the day I got kidnapped by revolutionaries and decided to join the revolution, decided to change my life, which brought me to the day I was singing with a tree nymph, and our harmonies vibrated in just the right way, and those vibrations created an opening in the space-time continuum, which all brought me to the day I ended up on the Brooklyn Bridge at 3 a.m., Tuesday, February 28th, 2023. And now, suddenly, from that day on, there is a brand new timeline. Suddenly, there is the possibility for things to be different. And I know it doesn't seem like much, but that's why I'm making this podcast. Because you see, with this little podcast, I'm trying to help move that Overton window. But instead of using lies like Charles Koch does, we are going to tell the truth. And we need to tell the truth over and over and over to as many people as possible. That's the way we move that Overton window back. So, Earl, you said you were enjoying the podcast. I'm glad. I hope you'll try and get other people to listen, as many people as possible. Because, truth is, the task ahead is so much bigger and harder than most climate advocates will tell you. Because the climate experts are afraid that if you know the magnitude of the work ahead about how all the climate tipping points we are now crossing are gonna cascade into each other, making everything get exponentially worse, exponentially faster. Well, they think if you know all this, that you're gonna give into despair and give up fighting for change. But I believe people need the unvarnished truth because they need to know what we have to do and how we need to do it. It's gonna involve a huge transition accomplished incredibly quickly, with some sacrifice, because we haven't yet figured out how to make cement, steel, chemicals, plastic, whatever, without fossil fuels. It's gonna take nationalizing the energy industry because the oil, gas, and coal companies are gonna fight this transition tooth and nail. It will take a coordinated national effort because leaving it up to the market just assures our destruction. And it's not gonna be cheap. So to pay for it all, we need to take all the money that was made by the oil, gas, and coal billionaires and CEOs and all their bootlickers, all the profit they made by participating in the greatest criminal conspiracy in human history, the covering up of climate change caused by fossil fuels. Take the money they made off their crimes and make a better world. Because yes, if we can make these huge changes, our world will be immeasurably better in so many ways. It will lead not only to a world not burning up, but a world where 1% of the population doesn't control us, where the 1% don't bleed us dry and then use us for kindling on the altar of their immense greed and arrogance. But if we don't succeed at convincing people in time to make the necessary changes and sacrifices, then at least maybe we can get people to know who is to blame. Climate ruin won't be the fault of the immigrants that Fox News will be screaming about. Climate ruin won't be God's punishment for allowing trans people to exist as the right wing ministers will be screaming. Our destruction as a result of global warming won't be the fault of ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world. It's the fault of ninety-nine percent of the billionaires and all the bootlickers who work for them. Now that's still a whole lot of people, a huge network of deceit and corruption. So let's give the whole big cesspool a nickname to make it easy. And what better nickname than the name of the OG climate criminal, Charles Coke. So, using our metaphorical nickname, if we get to that point in my timeline, well, as the world around you burns, as you hold your dying children in your arms, you need to know that there is someone who is responsible for all your incredible loss and suffering. You need to know this. Charles Coke, who murdered everything and everyone you love. But it does not have to be this way. Let's take back the money he stole from us and our children's future. Change the myth. Change the world. Fuck Charles Coke. Starring Iron, Sheri J. Davis, Corina Schoenberg, and Fred English. Featuring Alina Mutt, Christina Abarto Sanchez, and Steven Ryan. This episode of Metrolistener Mailbag features Tom Mulpey as Tom Mulby. Tom Mulpey takes sole responsibility for the views expressed in this episode. The views expressed in this episode do not necessarily reflect the views of any of the production cast or creatives. My name is Tom Mulpey, and I endorse this episode. Dialogue directed by Emily Hartford. Singing sessions directed by Tom Mulpee. Songs written by Aglofonos, Corey, Sam, and yours truly, Tom Mulpey. Music and vocal arrangements as well as sound editing and sound design by Tom Mulpe. All audio produced and recorded and mixed by Tom Mulpee at Mythmakers Media Studios. Principal casting by McCorko Casting. Additional casting by Mythmakers Media. Public relations and media outreach by Tink Media. Visit our website, Metrothemusical.com for a detailed list of credits and thanks. Follow us on Instagram and Blue Sky at Metra the Musical, all one word. Metra, a climate revolution with songs, is a production of Mythmakers Media. Copyright Ned and Emily Hartford, all rights reserved. Remember, change the myth, change the world. You great A plus, wondrous, motherfucking fabulous climate revolutionaries. So now you've heard the episode where that reference comes from, so should all make sense. See you on the streets.