And welcome back.
It is the WXCO Morning Report here on 98.9 WXCO.
I am Chad Holmes with Ian Walsh.
Again, Ian, good morning to you.
Good morning, Chad.
And we have a terrific guest joining us here this morning, Dean Mulder.
He is the President of the Wisconsin for Environmental Justice.
And Dean, first of all, thank you for coming on.
Great to meet you.
Well, thank you for
having me on.
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this.
That's for sure.
Absolutely.
This time it is really a vital time to talk about the environmental issues that you are focusing on in your life.
Before we talk about some specific issues and maybe just the perspective that the organization has in terms of how to solve some of the issues, let's talk a little bit about what Wisconsin for environmental justice is.
Well, I guess one of the things we certainly emphasize right out of the box is the inline plan here is to get more money to flow to city and
county governments and certainly we know that they desperately need it and we know that the environmental costs that are being created by some of the just the events that we've had this this past summer and we've had Canadian smoke.
We've had excessive heat.
Now we have the flooding and so forth and all that's going to cost municipalities and counties a significant amount of money.
And what we're trying to do is to get that revenue to flow to them through another source other than us as taxpayers.
I think that elected officials we hope respond favorably to that.
message.
And of course, the method we're going to use to do that is basically accountability.
We need to shift the cost that we're already sustaining from these types of events from us paying the total of it all as taxpayers and shift it more to the entity that has caused all this.
And one of the things that we really work on is an educational aspect to this whole thing.
In other words, yes, we've had flooding.
It's a recent example, excessive flooding.
What caused that?
Well, climate change is the
the factor that causes that.
All right, then sometimes the narrative or the conversation stops there.
And so there's another chapter of this book, what caused the climate change?
And that leads us to our use of fossil fuel, the amount of CO2 we're putting into the environment.
Then we need to approach the fossil fuel industry about them paying for some portion of this cost.
And of course, we could ask them politely.
I don't think they're going to respond.
given the fact that you know we pay them I think in the last the number I saw was three quarters of a trillion dollars in subsidies as taxpayers that's every year.
So, and they've never backed off on relinquishing that.
So we're ultimately going to have to pursue this through the courts.
And that's the justice part of this equation is litigation against the fossil fuel industry.
So yeah, that's the two elevator ride explanation of what we're about.
A couple of the points there are major points, I guess we're gonna jump right into.
Let's
start with the idea of actually having the folks who cause these issues.
pay a fair share in terms of the cost instead of asking the folks that are within our communities to pay the lion's share of the cost.
the way that you put it, and you gave me some really good information to take a peek at in preparing for our discussion, it seems like such a common sense, it would be ultimately an incredibly popular way of going about things.
Because I think in terms of common senses, the idea is, the old idea, if you break it, you pay for it.
And then you add it to that, the idea of the subsidies that are involved, that they're already ahead of the curve when it comes to...
the the support that they get within our government and yet we have so many folks within the government that will
move heaven and earth to make sure nothing ever changes in that respect as well.
That's true and that's the uniqueness of this strategy in my mind because we're pursuing this in the courts and the court litigation we're talking about I think is a really quite unique strategy.
We're pursuing this as a tort claim.
Now tort claims are handled in state court.
I'm not an attorney.
But my point is that a tort claim is basically monetary damages.
In other words, like a consumer, in other words, if I ran over somebody today and harmed them and they're paralyzed from the waist down, well, that individual would have a right to sue me to make them whole.
Monetary compensations would be the way that they would try to accomplish that, paying for lost wages.
rehab the house, training for a new career because they can't walk anymore, those sorts of things.
So this would be the same type of thing, the damage that has been caused by their product.
in the marketplace has caused these events to occur.
The science proves that.
And some people might say, well, scientists, well, you know, the scientists I really believe are the scientists within the fossil fuel industry.
Because back in the 70s, Exxon hired a scientific team that did research on this.
And they concluded with great accuracy what was going to happen today.
In other words, they did forecasting and modeling.
And so those are the scientists, I believe, their own, OK, their own.
So the point is that this litigation
belongs in state courts.
The fossil fuel industry would like this litigation to be in federal courts because that muddies the water a whole lot more and they have been petitioning the US Supreme Court to remand it or move it to federal courts.
On each occasion, the US Supreme Court has remanded it back to state courts because that is where tort claims are litigated.
Now a tort claim then would ultimately be appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court here in Wisconsin.
So in other words, what we're striving for is nothing more than a day in court where the jury of our peers, people like you and me.
sit in a jury and determine guilt or innocence.
And then also they would determine the amount of the monetary damages that would be paid.
And of course the monetary bad damages in this case certainly would be significant if one could say huge.
Now we've already had tobacco litigation which we're familiar with.
We've had opioid litigation.
This would probably be
far greater than that in terms of the monetary settlement if we were successful in court.
And the other thing I would add too is it's always good to go into the courtroom and use the person you're going after using their own evidence against them, which is there's plenty of it to indicate that they knew what they were doing and they have gone to great lengths to conceal that and put out deception in the marketplace, which kind of leads to another big.
challenge that we face here is basically enabling all of us, all of us, to connect the dots in terms of how all these things are connected in terms of the climate events, climate change, and fossil fuel.
That's a challenging and daunting task, that's for sure.
And we will have more with Dean Muller.
Again, very interesting conversation as he is the president.
of Wisconsin for environmental justice.
So we'll have more coming up at 7.52 during our next local segment, our WXCO morning report.
Coming up, it is the farm report here on this Monday morning.
And then back to Pack Right Low, more of mornings with Pack Right Low here on 98.9 WXCO.
WXCO morning report during mornings with pack right low on 98.9 WXCO again, we're talking to a Dean Walther president, Wisconsin for environmental justice You mentioned the the science is there Unfortunately, there's still a lot of I think misinformation going out there But the science is there and one term that we heard in the past week with all the flooding especially in southeastern Wisconsin once in a century event We're hearing that term more and more often, aren't we?
Yes, we are.
People would say, well, we've always had floods, major floods.
Yes, we have.
The point is in terms of major climate events, they will be more intense and they will be more frequent.
That's the difference that's occurring here.
That's the key difference that people need to keep in mind.
And of course, will we have another event like this?
I don't think it's probably going to be a thousand years down the road or anything of that sort.
It's going to be a more frequent event.
And of course, what that.
all like flooding.
Let's just talk about flooding here.
That puts an enormous strange on our infrastructure of our cities and of our counties, the roads, the bridges, the sewer systems.
storm sewer systems, et cetera, et cetera.
And again, those costs fall, again, back on taxpayers losing the flood as an example.
Yes, we're going to have money coming from FEMA, hopefully, which is our money.
That's taxpayer money, money from the counties from the state and insurance companies and volunteer agencies will come in Red Cross and so forth.
That's our money that's doing that.
We have no participation in terms of the culprit here, which is the fossil fuel industry.
Not to cast them as bad guys.
Corporations have been defined as people
in the marketplace, right?
And they need to be good citizens is what we're trying to accomplish here.
Something that, and again, maybe you have a different perspective on it, but something that when you talk about organizations such as the fossil fuel industry, but you can talk about a lot of other, I would say corporate entities, we are in an era, it appears to me at least, where these corporate entities are protected against their losses, but they get all the profits.
It just feels as though, and that goes
to a
bigger point as well.
Dad,
that was a very wise observation, yes.
But it just seems like that in this era, but that brings to another point, part of your writings that I was looking at, the term efficient government fair funding.
Because you're not here to say, we're just gonna spend, spend, spend.
You talk about efficiency, about our money going further.
Could you maybe expand a little bit on that as well?
We put out a in terms of the cost that was we commissioned a study for the state of Wisconsin which said that remediation cost for the state of Wisconsin would be $16 billion over the next 16 years and remediation is not building solar panels and windmills or.
anything of that sort is basically dealing with what's happening is having more cooling centers, air conditioning of more buildings that need to be air conditioned because they will need to be improving storm drainage, rural flooding, roads and bridges in terms of those types of costs.
Since we have a lot of lakes and rivers and so forth, coastal flooding is certainly a factor too in terms of keeping ahead of all of that.
So all of that results in a whole lot of costs.
And the other thing is really
amazing about this study that we commissioned and the results that we got is it basically broke it down by individual cities and counties.
So like for the city of Warsaw, for example, the annual budget for the city of Warsaw is $37 million.
Now, this remediation cost for the city of Warsaw is $27 million.
So it's significant.
I had a number of people look at our cost study and determines whether they felt it was accurate.
And they basically, their quote to me was, Dean, there's nothing in there to
that people can quibble about.
It is very accurate.
It's certainly a low ball, a very conservative estimate in terms of what the cost will be.
There's like 66 different categories that could be included.
We only picked the top 13.
So there's many more categories.
One of the categories that came to mind that's not included in here is down power lines.
Okay, we have big storms, power lines go down, utilities need to go out and put them back up again.
And who pays for that?
we do as right payer.
It's just another example of the burden that it places on city and county governments.
I took a look at Marathon County and we see similar types of numbers.
Actually, Marathon County is even starker because it's almost two to one in terms of these remediation costs relative to their current budgets.
So that's the thing that really needs to be addressed.
I've heard a number of people talking about this, that these floods here in our area of Wisconsin, because I'm in Milwaukee is a wake up.
call?
Yes.
We need to be woken up to the cost of all these things.
And we need to make some responses to it because we do have a lot of aging infrastructure in this in this state.
Making responses and something that when I look at this country's DNA, it appears so often and it's not just a recent phenomenon.
I mean, you can go back centuries in the history as we come up on 250 years next July 4th that this country just does not respond in a forward thinking way that we kind of wait until you have to act.
And that is always the worst way, whether it's trying to fix your own personal vehicle or trying to fix major issues within our society and government and country.
And I want to kind of make this a two pronged question for you because if we don't
change the way we're thinking about funding local government.
Use a term here that I think is spot on.
Taxpayers are tapped out.
We can't keep going to the taxpayers for some of these issues that we have to think differently.
It
certainly does.
I think your first point is really very accurate.
I mean, the numbers for rural poverty are significant.
Taxpayers are tapped.
There's no question about that.
And local governments are tapped too.
They struggle to balance their budgets.
So we have a common problem that taxpayers and as elected officials that if we could come together on this, I think we could accomplish something that would be very significant in terms of an alternative source of revenue.
And of course, these settlements are usually settled.
Tobacco was 25 year payout.
Well, I should qualify that because the state of Wisconsin, it was $4 billion and they agreed to a one time settlement of $1 billion.
and forgo 25 years of payments.
We'd still be receiving payments to this day because it started in the year 2000.
Sad, but true.
Even opioid, I think, is a quarter of a billion dollars is paid out over 13 or 14 years.
So these revenues strange will continue to come in.
And of course, that's a classic example because there was good participation in the opioid litigation because the 71 of the 72 counties participated and that money's going to some very worthwhile things that needed to be addressed.
because all counties had a problem with opioids.
One of the things we're asking a lot of people is, well, what would you like government to do if they had money to do it?
We're just basically tabulating what people think and what would be possible.
And we all know that things get deferred and put down the road and so forth.
And it's kind of like this whole thing with climate Chad seems like this is slow moving train wreck, isn't it?
And if you came across a train wreck, who wouldn't step up, call 911 at least, render aid, whatever.
But this is such a.
It's easy to say tomorrow.
We'll have a few more moments with Dean Muller coming up at 822 here on 98.9 WXCO.
More packed right low after.
And welcome back, it is the WXCO Morning Report on 98.9 WXCO, online at wxco.fm, mobile devices and Alexa by searching WXCO and on the Civic Media app.
This morning, very interesting discussion.
I had late last week recorded with Dean Mulder.
He is the President of Wisconsin for Environmental Justice, talking about a number of different issues, and you'll be able to catch the entirety of our conversation on YouTube.
We posted it on our YouTube channel, our WXO YouTube, and also be part of the podcast, which will be posted at the end of this program.
Talked about generally how folks...
Don't get proactive with a lot of the problems.
Sometimes have to wait until it gets so serious.
You have to do something.
It's human nature.
I can't be critical of people.
I guess it puts the burden on our organization to help educate and get the word out about this, about this connection.
It's just not often discussed in as much detail as we are here today.
And I certainly appreciate the opportunity to do that.
That's for sure.
It
brings up another thought that comes into my mind when you mentioned this.
Basically, even the tobacco settlement is that we hear a lot of politicians talking about how they are standing up for the taxpayers.
But
one huge
way of standing up for the taxpayers is to be forward thinking, is to not to take the one time.
big lump in and use it back in the year 2000 or whatever it may be.
And then all of a sudden, you know, they think they're helping the taxpayers at that point, but they're not truly thinking of standing with the taxpayers.
And in another point that you made in one of your writings was the idea of standing with taxpayers and pursuing justice.
And they do
go together, don't they?
Yes, absolutely.
There's no question about that and on your first point that you mentioned there in terms of they actually the cost study actually put together some numbers on that in terms of like roads and bridges if Again if communities cities counties stepped up and did that remediation now rather than wait until after it after the accident so to speak I would cost them far less and I guess I realized that's hard thing for
city and county governments to do because they don't have the money to do it now.
So, I mean, it's really certainly a challenging situation.
But yes, I mean, it's something that it's been a project that our organization has been working on for almost four years.
We formerly organized as an organization nonprofit a little over two years ago.
So it's certainly gaining more and more momentum across the state as we get the word out.
through opportunities like this one.
It's a growing movement and people are becoming more aware of this as an opportunity that they might be able to explore.
Again, it's so difficult for people to think about dealing with climate change as a city or as a village or as a township.
And of course, the thing that you typically need to keep in mind here is if a city decides to pursue litigation,
there will not be any upfront legal costs because they will retain a law firm on a contingency basis that will not get paid unless they prevail or win in court is the fee arrangement.
And then secondly, an important point is particular city files, the money would go directly to that particular city or county that filed.
So that's the important thing.
We removed any type of
filtering process that might occur at the state level, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's another key factor for elected officials to keep in mind here.
I was going to say, I have one more question.
Now I have two more questions because when you say that, but your explanation for what the cities can do, why don't they?
of the
No question about that.
If we can all go back, we all encountered a bully on the playground at some point in our lives, right?
It's pretty challenging, onerous, scary type of proposition.
And of course, standing up to the bully is a challenging thing.
And I think that most elected officials, excuse me, let me rephrase that, all elected officials are looking for support from their constituents, from their citizens.
And that's the challenge of getting this word out to a larger group of people across the state that, hey,
elected official, I want you to look at this.
I want you to do this.
I think it makes sense for you to do this.
I got your back and that can happen.
People can make a difference and that's the only way change happens because you alluded to that before in terms of, yes, we can often get stuck in the status quo and fail to look at new ideas and new, in this case, revenue streams for local governments.
And that's what we're trying to do.
And my final question is,
How do people who would like what they've heard here, maybe they want to be involved in some way with Wisconsin for environmental justice?
Is it something they can do?
Yes,
we would certainly welcome their participation.
I think if they Google Wisconsin for environmental justice, we will probably be the first hit that comes up.
The specific website address is w4ej.org.
W4EJ.org or Wisconsin for Environmental Justice, yes.
But both ways, they'll probably find us.
And there's a petition there to sign, which will plug into our network of people across the state that we're hoping to mobilize with these conversations with elected officials.
So yeah, that would be a great help, that's for sure.
That's how it happens.
We will
definitely put that information on our show notes, so folks who go back and...
Get the link to our YouTube conversation and then our link to our podcast as well.
As part of our show notes, we'll put the address for Wisconsin for environmental justice as well.
There's probably so much more.
I mean, it's really, again, I love actually delving into a lot of this because I do think that you've hit on some very important points when it comes to number one, where true change and true.
good government can start, which is at the local level.
And then there's so
many
other layers to it as well.
But I would love to have you back on sometime in the very near future, talk more about this and learn even more about the steps that we can take in so many different ways to make our communities, our state and our country so much better.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it, Chad.
Absolutely.
Dean Boulder
again.
We have a good rest of the
day.
Absolutely.
President Wisconsin for environmental justice.
Coming up, it's an information update and then more with Pat Critello.
Mornings with Pat Critello, 98.9 WXCO.
And welcome
back, it is the WXCO morning report.
Part of warnings with packed right low on 98.9 WXCO, online at WXCO.fm, mobile devices and Alexa by searching WXCO and on the Civic Media app.
The time is 8.53, overcast guys here in downtown Wausau at our studios at the corner of Washington Street and North Third Street.
Temperature stands at 62 degrees.
It could be a rather wet Monday.
Moderate temperatures around 72 and then things will start to dry out tomorrow and then pretty much a dry week the rest of the week with some very summer like temperatures I am Chad Holmes along with Ian Welsh Ian.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Well, did you get through the weekend with your performances with River and Woods Theater?
We
did
Shakespeare in the Park performances were a big success over the weekend.
We did have a little bit of a
light rain on a Friday night as we were getting towards the end of the show.
But thankfully it held off for the most part, as we could get the truck loaded for the Saturday show.
Unfortunately for Saturday, the rain was pretty heavy, so we had to move it to the First Presbyterian Church in Warsaw.
But we still had a fantastic show.
Everybody helped out with the...
and we got it done in good time, and then we got to celebrate afters.
So overall, it was a very fun weekend, and we all had a great time with Shakespeare.
Terrific.
So what are that, 75
productions for you?
That was my 75th show.
25 more, and then I hit the 100.
That's my
ultimate goal.
I plan to do 100 shows.
before I turn 40.
Well, I think you're off to a very good start.
They keep coming very, very quickly.
Do you have any idea when the next one will be?
Well,
I'm actually going to be involved in the center stage band and show choir and their annual performance at the end of September.
And this year's theme is hits from across the Atlantic.
So what of...
You know, different music from different parts of the world.
So it should be quite a variety.
And those shows will be at the Grand Theater.
Let me just make sure I get the dates right here.
Yep, that is the 25th, 26th, and 27th of September at the Grand Theater.
Shows will be at seven.
And the important thing to remember is that the center stage shows are absolutely free.
Terrific.
We look forward to talking about that as it gets closer.
Also getting very close this week is the start of our high school sports coverage again
here on
98.9 WXCO.
We will have the first edition of this season's big high school sports show coming up on Wednesday from six till eight.
In fact, we're actually pre-recording it on Tuesday because on Wednesday, the Wausau West football team has their Meet the Warriors event and I am the public address.
for that event, the MC, so we're gonna pre-record our Big High School Sports Show, but you can actually watch us do the show live on Tuesday from six till eight on YouTube.
That's right.
Because this year we are going to be putting the Big High School Sports Show both on...
the radio online and on YouTube.
So the show itself will air here on 98.9 WXCO WXCO FM mobile devices and Alexa on Wednesday from six till eight.
But this week only
On Tuesday from six to eight.
You can watch it live on youtube.com and the ninety eight point nine WXTO channel We will have Wisconsin Rapids head football coach Mike Krenz as one of our guests and also DC Everest the senior Xavier Edwards as our student athlete guest for this week So that's coming up this week and then also this week.
We will have high school football and that this week
We're gonna have three games because we're doing a little special thing because Tuesday we have our two teams that we cover on a regular basis.
New Macathic and Wausel West.
Wausel West will take on Superior, 635 airtime, live on 98.9 WXEO, WXEO.fm, mobile devices and Alexa by searching WXEO and on the Civic Media app.
And live on the Sports2 stream on Thursday at 635, New Macathic at Florence.
That game.
Sports to stream of wxco.fm and the civic media app in oil air on tape delay following our wasa west game But then on Friday since we don't have a game Friday.
We're gonna add a game We're gonna bring you that the wasa east lumberjacks against west speed on Friday night First time that we're bringing you wasa east high school football.
We're gonna have a
If if we can get the sponsorship five wassa East games this year But we'll have the first game of wassa East for sure against Westby Friday night starting with the pregame show at 635 as well That's live on 98.9 WXCO WXCO FM mobile devices and Alexa by 13 WXCO and on the civic media app
Let's jump right in because we're getting late here.
Yeah time for the number for the day quiz That's right.
We give Ian three choices one of which is correct 33 percent or better is a passing grade three out of five Correct is a winning week four out of five is an A grade and five out of five is a gold star perfect week Yes, it is Milwaukee brothers saw their win streak and at 14 yesterday The number for the day is what is the longest win streak in Major League Baseball history?
Okay,
is the correct answer 22 wins
26 wins or 30 wins 22
wins 26 wins or 30
longest win streak in major league of baseball history
Okay, I'm gonna say Okay final answer I'm gonna
say
26 wins.
I'm gonna say 26 is my final answer.
The longest win streak in Major League Baseball history achieved by the 1916 New York Giants 26 games.
Nice.
So you won for one this week.
Great way to start off a Monday.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be joined by Kurt Richard.
He is the new principal of Wausau West High School.
He'll be joining us at 7.22 AM.
And we'll talk about some more issues involving Mayor Doug Denny grievances filed.
So we'll talk about that coming up tomorrow as well.
So Ian, have a good rest of your Monday.
You too, Chad.
Happy Monday, everybody.
Matinair on air.
Lieutenant Governor Sarah Rodriguez right at the top of the show.
Next on WXCO.
