Episode 742: The Conservative Environmentalist

Published Aug 21, 2024, 3:24 AM

Many have led us to believe that there are only two approaches to climate change: doomerism or denial. In his new book, “The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future,” Benji Backer offers a fresh approach needed to ensure a sustainable future, and particularly one that works for America. Newt’s guest is Benji Backer. He is the President and Founder of the American Conservation Coalition, the largest right-of-center environmental organization in the country.

On this episode of news World. Many have led us to believe that there are only two approaches to climate change, domerism or denial. In his new book, The Conservative Environmentalists, author Benjie Backer offers a fresh, audacious approach needed to ensure a sustainable future, and particularly one that works for America. Drawing on cutting edge science, a deep understanding of local community needs, and his experience rallying politicians on both sides of the aisle to take action, Backer offers hope for everyone who cares about the state of the great outdoors. Here to discuss his new book, I'm really pleased to welcome my guests, benjie Backer. He is the president and founder of the American Conservation Coalition, the largest right of center environmental organization in the country. Benji, welcome and thank you for joining me on newts World.

It's a pleasure to be here, especially with your conservation and environmental legacy. It's going to be a really fun conversation. I really appreciate it.

Well, it was great meeting you in person at the Republican National Convention in July, so this is kind of perfect.

Timing, really perfect timing.

But before we dive into the book, tell us a little bit more about your organization, American Conservation Coalition.

Well, before I get into that, a little bit of background and of how I get into this. I'm twenty six years old and I grew up in the northeastern part of Wisconsin, which if you think about my age twenty six years old, growing up there, there was a lot happening in politics. Scott Walker was getting recalled during my eighth grade year of middle school.

Obviously lived through.

The twenty twelve and twenty sixteen presidential elections in a battleground state as well as two thousand and eight, and it actually started in two thousand and eight.

For me.

I became really inspired by the way that politics was operating at that point, you know, John McCain and Barack Obama.

I watched their debates on TV.

My parents were independent, undecided voters, not politically active, and they were watching the debate and I just felt super inspired about the conservative vision for America and something that you really helped lay the foundation for. And I also watched you, you know, debate in those elections, and so it's just a really amazing opportunity as a kid to kind of feel connected to politics.

In a weird way.

So I started campaigning for different candidates locally, and I spoke at CEPAC freshman year of high school. So things happened pretty quickly in my political career because of my youth activism. But I was really inspired by conservative beliefs. But I also cared deeply about the environment. My parents have a cabin in the north Woods of Wisconsin that has been in our family for generations, and my favorite memories are all outdoors, really, and so when I started to kind of grapple with the reality that environmental issues were partisan in a way that they weren't in previous decades throughout history, including the time when you were so influential, like that really frustrated me. And I decided to start the American Conservation Coalition in college as a freshman because I wanted to get conservatives back to the table on these issues. There's the Sierra Club, There's the League of Conservation Voters. There's all these groups on the left of center, and some of them are well intentioned, some of them have different intensions than I do in terms of our political beliefs, and some of them are flat out partisan. But there was nothing as a conservative to join, and so ACC was meant to do that. We started out on college campuses. Now we have fifty four thousand members across the country in two hundred different chapters, and we're basically building the Conservative Environmental Movement a to represent conservative values, but be ultimately to make it nonpartisan again.

Well, I think that's really important. Originally taught environmental studies and the nineteen seventies. In fact, I taught in the Second Earth Day. Back then it really was truly bipartisan, and gradually the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club and others became more and more liberal, and it didn't really matter what your record was on the environment, they weren't going to endorse you. So I think having re establishing a balance in getting people to understand that preserving nature, preserving wildlife, being aware of whether it's clean air and water or its climate, all these things legitimately transcend normal partisanship. So I'm very impressed with the size of the organization you've already grown. He wrote a book entitled The Conservative Environmentalist Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future. What prompted you to write the book?

Well, I actually sharing this story recently, I was sitting on top of a mountain in Norway in the Arctic Circle. Like I said, my favorite memories are outdoors, My favorite moments are outdoors. And I was taking my first vacation like six or seven years after starting this organization, and my publisher Penguin had reached out asking me to write this book because there's really no other conservative voice on this issue that's prominent in today's politics, and with like the age, you know, having a youthful kind of view of how we can build the future. So they had asked me to write this book. But I've never dreamt of writing a book. It's not something that I've really thought about doing, and so I kind of delayed it, delayed responding, and I was sitting on top of this mountain and I was thinking, like, I've built this organization, We have amazing members, amazing advocacy allies in Congress, the parties starting to shift. What do I point people to as a resource to give a sense of what we stand for? Obviously I can't do it all in one book, and it's always going to change in terms of the policies that we need and the different science that is unveiled, but there's really no book. And I looked at the thousands of books that you know, people like Greta and AOC and those sorts of people have written, and I had never been able to find something to point people to. So that's really what drew me, is like my love of the environment being on top of that mountain, being super clear headed, realizing that I needed to do this, but also filling that gap because for so many conservatives, this issue is really frustrating. I mean, you're talking about when this issue used to be bipartisan, over ninety percent of Americans identified as environmentalists during that time.

That number is about forty percent today.

People didn't just stop hating the people didn't just start hating the environment, They started hating the political side of it and the radical dialogue that really became toxic from largely the left. But then the right didn't propose its own solutions, and people are really frustrated by that. And so my goal with the book was to kind of give a hopefully breath of fresh air for people who want to engage in environment mental dialogues, maybe feel like they haven't been able to, or they want some sort of alternative solution and really a solution that puts America first, that puts our economic interests first, that puts people first, and puts the environment first. You can do that, and I know that. I say first, right first means one thing. You can share all those values at the same time as you well know, you can promote all of those values. And I think that's what the left has been missing, and that's where the right can really step in. And that's what I tried to capture in the book as much as I could in two hundred pages.

I mean, you make a point also which I think many conservatives don't realize that conservatism has a very long track record of doing pro environment things and of being very very aware of conservation. Can you talk a little bit about people like Theodore Roosevelt and the scale of the change that they represented.

To be honest, it's similar to slavery and the equal rights movement, where one side seems to dominate the narrative now, but it was the other side who created the solutions in the past, and we really should be recognized for that and re up our interest in those issues on the environment, because Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, These were all the biggest environmental leaders in American history. They created the National Park System, They created the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act. They helped solve the ozone issue that we had in the seventies and eighties. They signed the first ever climate assessment. These are Republican presidents that did all of these things between the early nineteen hundreds and the early twenty first century, and that's forgotten in American politics now. I'm not going to sit here and say Republicans only did that, as you know, like democrats worked alongside them, but it was Republicans who led those efforts and they found sensible solutions. And I think the average person would say, well, what happened? Why did that change? And how did this become now a left leaning issue where they are dominating the dialogue and like you said, endorsing people not based on the environment. What happened, Well, people realized on the left that you could win elections based off of this issue, largely because people in my age demographic care so much about it and instead of it being just like a given right, you know, you didn't even really need to campaign on the environment. It was a given you were going to lead on it. Now it's a number two or three talking point in every Democrat candidate's platform, and they're kind of needing to outradicalize each other to come up with solutions so that they can stand out from one another. So it became a campaign issue and a political issue, and then everyone forgot that it was Republicans that had led on this in the past. So I think, you know, we need to understand that legacy, look back at history and see what worked, and return this issue to sensibility, because our environment deserves it, but so do our people, and right now we're having radicalism versus radicalism and it's not working.

The key central issues over the last ten or fifteen years has been this whole question about whether or not the climate is changing, whether global warming is real. You've done a lot of research on this.

What is your take, if I'm being honest. I started out as a climate skeptic, climate denier. I was speaking at, like I said, seapack and tea party rallies and really active in that in the conservative wing in early high school. And during that time. The reason I bring that up is because during that time I was very skeptical of climate change, largely for the same reasons why conservatives are skeptical. It seems like a excuse to have more government takeover. It seems like fear mongering to get us to do things that they want us to do. Totally agreed with that, and still do. But then I started to look into it for myself and started to look at kind of the consensus. And I'm not going to say one hundred percent consensus, because that's never true in science, but the growing consensus that humans have a role in the changing climate, that yes, the climate change is naturally, but humans are accelerating that change and are playing a big role. And I do believe that humans are contributing to climate change. I believe that putting carbon emissions in the atmosphere, putting more pollution in the atmosphere at its core, is not a good thing. We've seen that be true with other pollutants in the past. That's true on this but I also think that it's not the doomsday scenario that the left of center trize to paint it as, and the science backs both of those beliefs up. I've actually spent a lot of time with some of the most prominent climate scientists, people that you would think are super liberal, but they actually don't really have a political agenda. They are more frustrated with AOC and those sorts of people misattributing the science, making it see worse than it is, and fear monitoring people. They're more frustrated with that than the people who don't believe it's real. And the reason is because the people who are misattributing the science are causing the people who don't believe it's it's real to think that because it's all their predictions don't come true, and the fear mongering falls on deaf ears. So what I believe is that we are contributing that the global temperature is slowly increasing due to our impact. It's never going to cause some big doomsday scenario, but that we should be looking to do our best to rain in pollution and reduce our emissions, but we should not do it at the cost of our economy, our national security, and our people. There needs to be a balance between all those things, and I think that that is a message that not only works with young people who care a lot about this issue, but of course we want an optimistic future. They don't want to believe that their future is just gone. But it's also a message that works for people who feel like they've been left behind and that it's the fear mongering isn't going to work. So that's a long way of saying I believe it's real humans are contributing, but that we should be using sensible steps to reduce a steady change that we're contributing to, not some sort of drastic change it's going to kill.

Would your advice to the next administration be to command with a clear, steady program of improvement or are there specific things you would recommend.

Yeah, Look, I mean I think we all know that the energy demand in this world is going up. It's not going to change anytime soon, let alone in developing countries, but even here in the United States, and we need more energy. So my plan for the next administration that I've been trying to work with the form of Trump administration, but also even some folks in the Harris Waltz world, because we need sensible leadership regardless of who wins, really badly on this issue. We need more nuclear in this country. That's just point blank We need a lot more nuclear energy in this country. We need to produce more natural gas, at least temporarily, because the world's demanding it. And we create natural gas in America cleaner than anywhere else in the world. It's sixty percent cleaner than coal, and of course it's incredibly cost effective. And I think we need to be producing more renewables in this country. The demand for those are going up all around the world, and China is dominating that marketplace super significantly, So that would be kind of step one, more American energy on a whole host of sources and getting government out of the way. The second would be I think we need to spend way more time supporting nature itself. And what I mean by that is we need to restore ecosystems that we love to use for public lands use or even private lands.

We need to manage our forests better.

We need to help equip farmers with more incentives and efficiency standards to help them make more money but also protect their land. At the same time, America is still largely an open landscape of beautiful countryside, and those sorts of places reduce carbon emissions. They suck up carbon emissions, but they also provide us a place to live and recreate and get the resources we need. And I think providing more support for ecosystem protection for farmers who are doing great, efficient work in this country to feed us and feed our families and managing our forests. Those are the sorts of sensible measures that I think we could take, and they would not bankrupt our economy.

In fact, it would help it.

Where do you come down on things like the California program to ban the sale of all gas powered vehicles? But explain why so?

In the book, I delve into the fact that actually California's push to mandate electric vehicles and solar panels and wind turbines ends up hurting the environment more than it helps, and it comes at obviously an enormous price tag.

I was touring a coal facility in.

Utah a couple of years ago, and it was right around the time that Newsome basically banned nuclear, natural gas and coal in his state, and they were shipping and they still are eighty percent of their power to California at night because the solar panels.

Weren't working and the wind turbines weren't blowing.

So you're actually importing fossil fuels from further away from dirtier sources than you would have used originally. Also, you can feel good about saying that you don't have it in your state. That is the most backwards gas lighting statement that in policy that a governor could make, and I think governor knew some is the exact example of what people should not do. The exact problem with this conversation. The same thing is true on evs. You're forcing choices or a lack thereof, down people's throats in the name of the environment, without reliable energy for them to charge that expensive choice that you're down their throats for them, and you're getting those materials from China. You're getting those materials from coal mining in Africa and in China with slave labor to create the batteries and the materials. And then you're also hooking up this immense power need to the grid overnight that again is going to be met with dirtier energy sources.

I believe that we need.

More fuel efficient internal combustion engine vehicles, more hybrids, and more evs, all in combination with each other, and let people decide what they want to drive. Technology will take care of the rest. And when you're rushing evs down people's throats, you're only harming people, but you're also harming the environment at a time when we don't have the capacity to mine or power these electric vehicles at the capacity that they're trying to do.

How much do you think the more extreme ideas come in part because the part of the mental movement has been places like San Francisco. How much do you think that geographic location and academic location have moved the environmental solutions so they've become more and more big government and less and less acceptable to the average American.

I think it's a huge reality. That is something I talk a lot about in the book. And the reason why I think I'm really poised well to talk about it is that I grew up in Wisconsin. My high school was across the street from a bunch of dairy farms. I did wear cheese on my head every time I went to a football game, but I actually had cheese dairy farms across the street from where I grew up. So I grew up around rural America, and I understand the realities and the hardships that rural communities face, and just the logistical differences, but I also lived in Seattle for six years and went to college at the University of Washington. Seattle, San Francisco, and New York they're kind of in the same. In fact, I think Seattle might be worse than New York in a lot of ways in terms of and I saw the disdain for rural America in Seattle, and it really frustrated me. Like when I told people it's from Wisconsin, a lot of people didn't even know where it was. They couldn't point it out on a map, and they thought it was just this flat, boring farmland state with nothing going on. And they basically were like, I can't believe you even lived there for eighteen years before coming here. I mean, that offended me because I love Wisconsin and that's beautiful there, and I'm really proud of where.

I grew up.

So I could see why this issue has transcended into such a tribal issue, because it really isn't partisan as much as it is urban versus rural. And you have San Francisco, Seattle, and New York type people. I mean, you think about the biggest leaders on this issue, it's AOC and John Kerry and al gore. Where are these people from or where do they live?

Now?

It's not in real America, It's in these cities. And should those cities be represented in this dialogue, Yes, but should they control the dialogue?

No?

And our rece and our nature and all the things that we're talking about when it comes to this issue are not in the places that they live. And yet they're making policies that are supposed to work for San Francisco and rural Wisconsin, which is just not the same. They have a complete misunderstanding of how most Americans are living their lives. And I thought it was just a talking point that people used it on the campaign trail until I moved out to Seattle and saw it firsthand. It's not and it really has infiltrated this issue. And I wouldn't say it's like they have some crazy agenda to take over the world with their own strategy. I think it's more they are so ignorant to the realities that most people face that they can't get out of their own way and making a sensible strategy. And that's why Americans who don't subscribe to that need to lean into this issue, not run away, because the lack of voice from real Americans in the environmental dialogue has allowed them to control the narrative.

In a sense, People who have thought of themselves as the most sophisticated and urbane PhDs, et cetera, actually may be more out of touch with reality than virtually everybody else because they're totally unaware of their own.

Ignorance exactly, and they only know their own bubble, and their bubble is actually very small. And it's sad because we live in a world that could be as interwoven and connected as we could dream of. Right, obviously, algorithms kind of prevent that, but like we literally have everything at our fingertips.

You could hypothetically.

Understand where people are coming from. You don't even need to just watch a video or find something. You could literally talk to somebody in these different areas. But they're not even doing that. And like you know, I've been to Midland, Texas and the oil fields. I've been to coal plants in Utah. I've been to the solar and wind facilities in Wyoming. Like every time I go to one of these places. A dairy farm in Wisconsin that produces food for a significant chunk of people, like no environmental activist or leader has ever been to those places? You know, my question for the aocs or the John Carreyes of the world is if you are qualified to make environmental decisions which happen to also make a difference in people's energy choices and our national security and a whole host of things. If you're going to make decisions for their lives, how are you qualified to do that? If you've never actually visited these communities. How are you going to understand where they're coming from? If you have zero idea where they're coming from? And are you actually doing a bigger disservice to your own cause by putting together policies that the vast majority of Americans can't implement, let alone the rest of the world. And that's again why the narrative needs to shift very quickly from one of urban dominance to one of rural influence. And rural America has the solutions on a lot of these things.

How do you find solutions? Me? What is your process too reach out and find things that you think will work.

I will go anywhere and everywhere to see things on the gun I find that seeing is believing for me. And I visited almost every state in this country, probably about five or six times at least each to understand how to deal with these situations because they're different for each geography. Right Like in Seattle, hydropower was awesome because we had so much water, a little bit too much water for me. It made me a little bit sad to live there because it was raining all the time. But there's tons of water. I live in Arizona. Now, hydropower probably is not a great idea for Arizona. And the same can be true on farming or transportation. I mean, each geography and each population center and rural area, they all have different realities. And so for me, it's traveling the country, but it's also you know, not everyone is able to do that, obviously, and I feel really grateful that I've been able to see these things firsthand. But I think for people on the left, it's thinking through, Okay, here are the solutions that I've been presented. Who does this help? Okay, who's left out? What sort of solutions do those who are left out need? Because when you reach the Green New Deal, there's nothing about farmers, there's nothing about foresters, there's nothing about ranchers or anybody in rural America. So what I would ask liberals to do is say, do some research on what you think is missing from those things. The same thing is true on the right, like what are you missing from having your voice at the dialogue? What could help your local farmer become more efficient in their practices to make more money for themselves but also protect the environment. What sorts of initiatives could help power a more reliable grid In northern Alabama, there's an abandoned nuclear plant that never got opened.

It's almost open. Could we start that backup?

Let's think creatively around us about what's missing and get out of our bubbles to get there. But you know, I think there's different solutions everywhere, small, large, and in the middle, and the free market and innovation and local community know how is going to solve it, not the federal government. And that's just the thing I've seen throughout all my travels.

In your book, you note that we should start an individual on local level. First. Do you have chapters that are self organizing?

We do, and they're mostly young professionals in college students because that's where we've targeted our outreach. But we have those fifty four thousand members who are in local communities across the country, and our chapters plant trees, they clean up beaches, they tour different energy facilities in their communities. They really are partaking in local action. And you know, a lot of like environmental people will be like, oh, that's so cute you do a cleanup, Like that doesn't actually help the problem. And it's like people's local connection to their environment is what drives them to be part of this dialogue. Like, yes, everyone wants to save polar bears or you know the gaps like in theory, but that's not affecting their day to day lives. What's affecting their day to day lives is the local environment around them the connection to that, and our community chapters do such a good job of this is what instills the desire. And that's why I would love to see a world where environmentalism is nonpartisan again and the urban rural divide gets fixed. But the only way that's going to happen is if we make the environment and environmentalism about the environment again, about local communities, again, about people's love of their local environment, because that's what people are proud of, that's what people want to protect and that's what people know how to protect. A farmer in Wisconsin doesn't know how to protect a forest in Washington, or vice versa. But let's use their knowledge to do that. And that's what our local communities, our chapters and local communities are doing.

From that standpoint, doesn't your approach to the environment almost certainly require a lot more decentralization from Washington, a lot more local flexibility and local common sense.

It sure does.

And actually a perfect example of that is something that I write about in the book, which is the government's permitting and regulatory structure has made it impossible for people to work.

On pro environmental projects.

Whether that's cleaning up a river system or fighting a forest fire or building a clean energy facility, it's almost impossible to do it because the government standing in the way. There's always approvals and hoops, and it can take decades to get things approved. I was just touring your uranium mine in northern Arizona, where it took thirty five years just to get through the permitting process to get this underway, and all these legal fights and so on. So you know, I think getting government out of the way in certain areas is really smart. But I also think it really means that the state and local governments need to do more to collaborate with the leaders on the ground. And there's a couple of states that I think have done a really good job of that. Georgia and Wyoming both have Republican governors. Both are at the top of the list in terms of investment coming into their state on clean energy, but they also are continuing to do fossil fuel production. They have huge manufacturing, evy, nuclear, natural gas facilities coming into their states, a very diverse group of things going on, and it's because they're doing what works for their state. They want economic growth, but they also want environmental protection. A state can make better decisions on that, or even better a county or city than the federal government can, and if the government has to be involved, the federal government should be the last resort. I'm not saying that the federal government doesn't have a role. I love the National Park system. I think our Department of Energy does a lot of great work, and we have a national security imperative to keep those things going. But the local know how means decentralization in a lot of ways, and that's something that environmentalists really struggle to grapple with and something that I think they need to come to an awareness of otherwise their very objectives are not really easily met because it's just not possible.

One of the areas I noticed that you talk about that I think is really underappreciated and deserves a lot more attension is the whole question of geothermal energy. The way you describe it, it could be one of the really great sources of how we get breakout and having enough electricity and having enough energy available.

Yeah, geothermal is incredible, and I'm just learning a lot about it, you know, over the last couple of years for the first time, because it's one of those new things, kind of like hydrogen or some of the other technologies that are coming online right now worth looking into. And the reason why geothermal is so fascinating is that it uses the same process of oil and gas drilling, where you're going into the earth with the same exact materials and structure and logistical things, and you're not losing any jobs. It's a one for one job transfer, but you're getting a fuel and an energy source that is basically renewable or zero emissions. And it's something we have basically untapped potential to use, kind of like oil and gas. There's been so much of it used over the last century, and there's still more to come. There's that sort of capacity on geothermal, and it's something that is incredibly safe, and the only thing that really has held it back from scaling even faster than it has over the last couple of decades is that it is still somewhat expensive. And that's where technology and innovation entrepreneurship are going to come in. We've seen that it can power large scales of people very reliably. It's doing that in Iceland and in some other places around the world. It could do the same thing here, and it's up to technology and innovation to figure out whether or not we can get those costs down. But it's one of those things where it's really exciting. But if a couple of decades pass and we've invested all this money into it and the cost doesn't come down, then you know that's not worth pursuing. You know, we need solutions that are cost effective and environmentally sustainable. I do believe geothermal could be a big part of that, and I think we're probably get there with technology pretty soon.

Along that line. I've had a chance to visit Iceland and look at their geothermal facilities, which are really pretty remarkable, and I do think that's one of the areas that probably we need to figure out how to have more innovation and see whether or not we could have a real breakthrough, because artificial intelligence is going to take so much computational power that we're going to have a real electricity problem in the next twenty to thirty years.

A really good example of this is if I went on Twitter right now and said, Twitter, AI, make me a picture of Newt Gingrich on the Time magazine cover with a cheesehead on his head in twenty twenty four, and it would generate some funky looking image of you nut that would take ten times the amount of energy as it does to search something on Google, and searching with Google's AI tool, which often pops up when you search on Google, also takes about ten times as much energy. We have already surpassed with AI the amount of power generation that our entire fleet of aviation uses for commercial aviation. And it's just coming online right now. I mean, most people don't even know how to use it yet, so this is going to be a really really major concern, not only with our growing energy demand without AI, with EVS and just the growing population, but also with AI, and so I think geothermal, nuclear, natural gas, these reliable energy sources are critical to meeting that demand.

On the other hand, well, geothermal could be one of the great breakthroughs. You're pretty skeptical about solar and wind power as primary solutions to where we're going.

Yeah, I mean I've evolved a lot on this issue, and from being climate skeptic to thinking that solar and wind with this panacea, because that's kind of what I was taught, and the reality is not that solar and wind can power our grid. Technology improvements can help. We can get battery storage figured out, or we could increase the capacity for solar and wind. But you know, as any common sense person knows, the sun isn't shining and wind isn't blowing all the time, and it will always be a secondary energy source. Now, I do think that it is always going to be a strong secondary energy source. We're recording this podcast. I'm in Arizona right now. It's incredibly sunny. I know that the solar panels are working hard. My parents have it on their roof here and they can see the excess power that's generated. That's great, especially rooftop solar. I think that we could use more of that in sunny areas. But to pretend that it's going to be this like one hundred percent energy source is really just a complete lie. It's either ignorant or a lie. And I fear that because so many people have oversimplified this, that our policies have reflected that lie or ignorance. You look at the mandates that are being set in different states. You look at New York, which is basically shut down every nuclear plant because they plan on going one hundred percent wind in solar each seeing that in California too, it's backfiring significantly and it's hurting people. I mean, they're banning nuclear and natural gas, and it's raising people's energy prices, and it's also raising emissions in the end. And I think as sensible Americans, we can say, Okay, there are benefits to wind and solar. We're not going to get rid of them. We need to have them as part of our energy portfolio. But we also can't have policies that reflect a lie that it's going to be one hundred percent of our energy source.

I want to thank you. I think what you're doing. I hope you'll continue to go down this road, continue to organize, and continue to write more books. But your new book, The Conservative Environmentalist Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future is really a useful book for every conservative to understand that we can in fact be more than competitive with the left, offering better ideas and better solutions. And your book is available on Amazon and then bookstows everywhere. I also want to let our listeners know they can find out more about your organization, American Conservation Coalition by visiting your website at ACC dot eco. I really appreciate Benji you're being part of this and helping educate us well.

Your leadership on this issue has been incredible and it's just an honor to be able to get to know you. Hopefully you can grow the friendship here, and I think we've really got an obligation to the land that we love and also to the country that we love to have better leadership on this and having me on today is a great example of what that can look like. So thank you so much for your doing for this world, what you've done for decades You've been inspiring me since I got active in this space, and to share a podcast with you is definitely a dream come true.

So thanks for having me.

Thank you to my guest Benji Becker. You can get a link to buy his new book, The Conservative Monalists on our show page at newtsworld dot com. New World is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Ginglish street sixty. If you've been enjoying Newsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newsworld consign up for my three freeweekly columns at ginglishtree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.

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