Volts

States don’t (yet) have the administrative capacity to smoothly implement the ambitious policies in the IRA; in this episode, policy strategist Sam Ricketts of Evergreen Action discusses how federal programs can help them get there.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsStates are central to climate and energy policy. After the failure of the Waxman-Markey climate bill in 2010, states carried the torch of climate policy during the long decade that Democrats were locked out of majority power in Washington, DC. Now that Dems have actually passed some federal policy — and they are unlikely to pass any more anytime soon — states are once again in the spotlight, tasked with implementing that legislation to maximize its effect.This raises the obvious question of whether states have the administrative capacity — the people, institutions, time, and money — necessary to implement ambitious federal legislation competently.They do not, says Sam Ricketts, but they could, and there are federal programs that can help them get there.Nobody is better positioned than Ricketts to address the issue of state readiness. He played a key role in Jay Inslee's pathbreaking presidential campaign, which was built off of successful policies in Washington and other states. Then, as senior strategist for Evergreen Action, a nonprofit he founded with other Inslee veterans, he helped shape the ambitious trio of bills the Democrats have passed in the last year and a half: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (or as advocates fondly refer to them, Uncles Bill, Chip, and Ira). Now he’s working with Evergreen and the Center for American Progress to educate and prepare state and local lawmakers for the post-IRA world.I've known Ricketts for years, and there's nobody who better balances detailed knowledge of policy with a practical head for advocacy and activism. I'm excited to talk to him about the crucial role states will play in coming years, the kind of administrative capacity they will need, and the types of federal programs that can fund their capacity building.So, enough of that. With no further ado, Sam Ricketts, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Sam RickettsThanks for having me, David. Pleasure to be with you.David RobertsI'm so excited to talk about administrative capacity, the sexiest of all podcast topics loyal listeners know this is an ongoing obsession of mine.Sam RickettsThey've come for the good stuff.David RobertsYes, exactly. So get ready to jump in. So I want to talk about state and local governments and whether they're up for this. But first, let's just briefly talk a little bit about just how central states and local governments have already been in climate policy in the US. So after you and I, well remember all too well the humiliating defeat of the Waxman-Markey Bill back in 2009, 2010. And after that, the sort of national scene was dead for ten years and everyone was off in the wilderness. And the only thing that was going on was states passing good legislation.So maybe let's start by just talking about those states being kind of the laboratories for democracy as it were and how the states sort of pioneered stuff and learned stuff that then went into informing the federal legislation that was just passed.Sam RickettsIndeed. So the first thing to your point, you mentioned that states and local governments have long been sort of the nation's leaders in developing and implementing climate and clean energy policy. And we're going to talk about what they need to do next in terms of implementation. But an important point, as you allude to here, is the progress that's just been given to us from Washington DC. The passage of Uncle Bill, Uncle Ira, Uncle Chip, the three climate uncles, so to speak. And the other initiatives that the Biden administration is advancing are really drawn from, inspired by, informed by the progress that states and local governments have made throughout the country.And this progress, as you mentioned, really jump started over the course of the last decade and sort of in the interregnum period between the last attempt at climate legislation and this ultimately very successful one. But it goes back further, right. States began passing clean energy laws decades ago. Years ago. I mean, the first renewable portfolio standard to require utilities to start utilizing clean renewable electricity was actually passed in Iowa 40 years ago. That activity last went through states red, blue and purple alike through the 1990s. In the early 2000s, you really saw an uptick in states beginning to target greenhouse gas climate pollution directly with laws that like Massachusetts' Global Warming Solutions Act, notably, of course, the AB 32 law passed in California in 2006, sort of set economy-wide programs and sectoral programs advancing climate action.And then in the 2000s, after the last failed attempt at federal climate legislatio

In this episode, Jessica Wilkinson and Nels Johnson of The Nature Conservancy discuss the pathway they see for a rapid, low-cost clean energy transition that minimizes impact on environmentally sensitive land.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsA great deal of confused and misleading information is circulating about the land-use requirements of the energy transition. Everyone agrees that building the amount of clean energy necessary to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 will require an enormous amount of land.But is there enough land? Will the transition require industrializing green fields and virgin forests and other environmentally or culturally sensitive lands? Can the energy transition be done big enough and fast enough while still remaining respectful of natural resources and other species? What mix of technologies will go most lightly on the environment?To provide a definitive answer to these questions, The Nature Conservancy launched its Power of Place project — first in California, then for the greater American West, and now, this week, for the entire nation.Using various metrics related to wildlife, ecosystems, cultural resources, and protected natural areas, the Power of Place project attempts to comprehensively map out sensitive land areas. It then tallies up the amount of clean energy required to reach net zero by 2050 and tries to match those needs to the available lands, to see if there is a pathway to net zero that protects them.The good news is that, with some wise planning, the amount of environmentally sensitive land impacted by a business-as-usual clean-energy transition can be substantially reduced at relatively low cost. To discuss this and other findings of the report, I contacted Jessica Wilkinson (Power of Place project manager) and Nels Johnson (the project’s science and technology lead) of The Nature Conservancy. We discussed the technology shifts that will enable a lighter footprint, the policies that could help encourage them, and the best ways to avoid community resistance.Alright, then. Jessica Wilkinson and Nells Johnson. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Jessica WilkinsonThank you for having us.Nels JohnsonYeah, thanks for having us, David.David RobertsJessica, let's start with you. The subject of land-use and renewable energy, there's a lot of weird information and misinformation floating around about this, a lot of weird myths, a lot of sort of people with strong opinions who don't know what they're talking about. So what inspired this series of reports, the Power of Place reports? What inspired you to start undertaking this project?Jessica WilkinsonYeah, this is precisely one of the reasons that we were inspired to do this project under sighting, as usual. Like the way that we're proceeding now with a renewable energy build-out, we are seeing an increase in local opposition, and we are seeing concerns about land-use issues. And land-use and environmental issues are indeed kind of one of the obstacles that's popping up in the way of us being able to meet our clean energy goals and meet our clean energy goals rapidly. So we really started this work in California, which was the first time we kind of developed this Power of Place methodology and that refurbished report came out in 2019.We refined it and then released Power of Place West in 2022. And this is kind of the next iteration where we further refined it. And each time we've kind of added new kind of levels of detail and asked some slightly different questions. But the land-use issue is exactly one of the reasons we've done this. So really what we're trying to do is question the premise of whether or not we really need to make these huge trade offs between conservation and climate.David RobertsI think the conventional wisdom is that if we switch from fossil fuels to renewables there are a lot of advantages. But one of the disadvantages is you need a bunch of land and you're going to end up consuming a bunch of crop land or environmentally sensitive land or land that the locals don't want you on. All this kind of stuff. And so your take is that that stuff is exaggerated. So what is the power of place? What is it meant to convey?Jessica WilkinsonYeah, it's not to say that it's exaggerated, it's real, it's happening. The question is how much of it is avoidable?David RobertsRight.Jessica WilkinsonSo what we are seeking to do is ask that question do we need to make all these huge trade offs for nature and for people on the path to decarbonization? So we've asked in Power of Place, it's a modeling exercise and you can ask the model, okay, go achieve net zero emissions by 2050, economy-wide. And model please kind of exclude these environmental data layers and let's see if that changes, whether we can get there, the pace at which we get to that goal and what the cost differential is.David RobertsRight before we jump into what you found, how would you describe the status quo of land

In this episode, Washington State House Rep. Jessica Bateman talks about championing an ambitious and successful bill that aims to increase housing density in Washington, and the politics of housing in general.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsAfter decades of effort by urbanists, which often felt like the work of Sisyphus, housing has arrived as a political issue. Big environmental groups have come around to the idea that dense housing is a crucial climate strategy, support is growing from unions worried that their members can’t afford to live where they work, and polls show that the public is increasingly convinced that there is a housing crisis. Over the last five years, a wave of good housing legislation has been building on the West Coast, spreading from California to Oregon and now to Washington state. In this last legislative session, some 50 housing bills were put forward in the Washington legislature and more than a half dozen passed, any one of which would have been historic.One of the most significant bills that passed this session — and one of the biggest surprises — was House Bill 1110, which legalized so-called “missing middle” housing statewide. Every lot in the state will now be permitted to build at least two units of housing, four units when located near transit, and up to six units if some portion are set aside for low-income homeowners.And that's just one bill. Other bills would legalize accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on all lots in the state, require municipalities to integrate climate change into their growth plans, sharply restrict local design review, and ease permitting of multi-unit residential housing. It's a feast.The lead sponsor of HB 1110 is Rep. Jessica Bateman, who represents the capital city of Olympia. She was elected in 2021 and quickly established herself as a champion of equitable housing and a tireless organizer. Through sheer force of will, she brought together a broad coalition that was able to push the bill over the finish line, defying predictions.Like Washington state Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, who I interviewed for Volts back in 2021, Bateman is widely seen as a rising star in the legislature. I was excited to talk to her about her bill, the wave of other housing bills this session, and the broader politics of housing at the state level.Alright, then. Representative Jessica Bateman. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Jessica BatemanThank you so much for having me.David RobertsI'm so excited to talk to you. I've got so much I've got so much I want to ask you about. But let's just briefly start before we get into the nuts and bolts of the bills, et cetera, maybe just tell us a little bit about you're new to the Washington legislature as of 2021. So maybe just tell us a little bit about your history and how you came to the legislature and how you picked up an interest in housing along the way.Jessica BatemanWell, I am new to the legislature, but I'm not new to legislative politics. I was a legislative assistant for three and a half years to former State Representative Chris Reykdal. He's now the Superintendent of Public Instruction. And before that, I came to Olympia to go to Evergreen. That's how I got involved in politics in my first campaign for I-1163. That's how I got started working as a legislative assistant, and then I became a planning commissioner for the City of Olympia working on comprehensive planning, and then I ran for City Council, was there for five years.On city council. We dealt significantly with a growing unhoused population in Olympia and how we were going to manage and deal with that, which led me to working on permanent supportive housing and also more broadly, housing policy and how we create and build housing in Washington and the systemic barriers to doing that. We also worked on passing middle housing legislation while I was there. And when I came to the legislature, my goal was to legalize middle housing statewide. I didn't know I was going to do that in my second year as a legislator.David RobertsDon't get used to this heady success. I don't think it's typical.Jessica BatemanIt was just by happenstance representative Nicole Macri had sponsored a middle housing bill for a couple of years, and she had other work that she was doing. So last year in 2022, I sponsored House Bill 1782, and then this year it was House Bill 1110.David RobertsWell, we're going to get into that in just a minute. So you've had your hands on housing policy directly at a municipal level, and this is kind of where the rubber hits the road with all this stuff. A slightly more general question, it seems like I and a bunch of other people I mean, not really me. I'm peripherally interested. But I know a bunch of people who have been banging their head on this wall for years. Decades of just urbanism housing in general, the dominance of cars, the lack of housing, et cetera. All this. And it seems like in the last, I don't know, call it

In this episode, Vero Bourg-Meyer of the Clean Energy States Alliance discusses the barriers that keep lower- and medium-income customers from installing rooftop solar, the types of efforts most likely to overcome these barriers, and how to keep momentum moving forward.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsFor all its explosive growth in recent years, rooftop solar is far less frequently installed by low- and middle-income households than by wealthy ones. Though that disparity is diminishing somewhat over time, it remains large.The barriers keeping lower-income consumers from solar go well beyond the financial (though financial barriers are substantial), ranging from credit histories to low-quality and poorly insulated buildings to lack of supportive policy.State policymakers, foundations, and non-profit groups have been trying for years to overcome this problem. Finally, the pieces are beginning to fall in place and it is becoming clearer which kinds of interventions work and which kinds don’t.No one knows more about the history, design, and successes of these programs than Vero Bourg-Meyer of the Clean Energy States Alliance. She has been analyzing and advocating for these policies for years (she just came out with a report on how foundations can help), so I was eager to talk to her about the rationale for low-income solar programs, the features that make them work, what's in the Inflation Reduction Act that can help, and what further policies are needed.Okay, then, with no further ado, Vero Bourg-Meyer, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Vero Bourg-MeyerWell, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.David RobertsCool, so there's a lot to talk about here with this topic, which I've had sort of, like, in the corner of my eye for years and years now, these programs for low-income and mid-income solar, getting solar to low-income, mid-income people, I sort of had it on my periphery forever. And so I'm happy to jump in directly. My sense of the sort of state of play among the wonks is the best way to help poor people is to give them money. And if you have money to help them and you want to do something other than just give it to them, you need to sort of justify, like, why is this better than just giving them money?Vero Bourg-MeyerYeah.David RobertsSo I guess to start with, my first question is just why should we care about specifically getting solar on these households versus just helping them with money? So what is the sort of justification for this kind of whole area? Why do we want to get solar on low- and middle-income households?Vero Bourg-MeyerWell, so there are two questions in there, right? So one question is that there's a climate question. Obviously, we want solar not because we think it's great for savings and all that, but also because we have a climate crisis that's ongoing and we need to do something about this. So that's the reason why we want solar. But why LMI communities and I'll use LMI in a kind of loose way. LMI stands for low- and moderate-income. LMI sometimes is just low-income and that generally means kind of in this area, generally it means below 80% area median income.Some people also define it as below 120%, but without going too much in the details, that's generally what it means. So the reason why you want to make sure people have access one of the reason you want to make sure those people have access to solar is they spend a much higher percentage of their income on their utility bills as the rest of us. About almost four times as much as you or me. And I'm lumping us in the same income brackets. I don't know if that's correct. So they spend a lot of money on their utility bills.And so obviously when you're giving them away month after month after month to reduce those utility bills, that can have a really outsized effect on them. Right? So it's not just the cost of purchasing the solar to begin with, it's the continuing saving over the lifetime of the asset that you'd have to kind of look at.David RobertsIt's kind of like giving them money every month.Vero Bourg-MeyerYeah, essentially. Yeah. Assuming there is a saving, which it has to be structured that way. It doesn't just happen like that. And then there is the resilience benefit that you can get when paired with batteries. And I was saying earlier, I'm going to use low-income communities as kind of LMI communities, very generally speaking. But we're also talking here about communities of color in communities that generally, because of redlining, have older housing stock houses that are not well insulated. When you start with that and you add storage, you get a really huge resilience benefit for them.LMI also means higher rate of chronic diseases, right. So you need your dialysis machine to work all the time, not just some of the time. So that's another really big reason. But I'd say your question though, about why not just give them money? If you kind of put aside, is i

The Inflation Reduction Act is ambitious climate policy, but history shows that ambitious policy is not always followed by ambitious implementation. In this episode, Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins University and David Beckman of the Pisces Foundation talk about Mosaic, a grant-making coalition that aims to help build a robust movement infrastructure to ensure that vulnerable and underserved groups can take full advantage of the significant funding offered by the IRA.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsFor all that has been written about the Inflation Reduction Act, the most salient fact about it remains widely underappreciated. What is significant about the bill is not just that it sends an enormous amount of money toward climate solutions, but that the money is almost entirely uncapped.The total amount of federal money that will be spent on climate solutions via the IRA will be determined not by any preset limit, but by demand for the tax credits. The more qualified applicants that seek them, the more will be spent. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill’s spending at $391 billion, but a report last year from Credit Suisse put the number at $800 billion and a more recent Goldman Sachs report put it closer to $1.2 trillion.Big companies will have teams of lawyers to tell them when they qualify for the tax credits, but there are also billions of dollars in the IRA that are meant to be spent on vulnerable and underserved communities. Those communities do not typically have teams of lawyers.Who will work to enable them to take full advantage available of the money? Getting that done will require campaigns, relationships, and grassroots mobilization. It will require movement infrastructure.A relatively new grant-making coalition called Mosaic is attempting to help build that infrastructure by dispersing money to the frontline organizations that comprise it. Mosaic is a cooperative effort among large national environmental groups like NRDC, big foundations, and various smaller regional, often BIPOC-led groups.It has pooled philanthropic money and thus far given almost $11 million of it to dozens of relatively small groups and campaigns — 85 percent of them BIPOC-led, 87 percent of them female-led — selected by a governing committee from well over a thousand applicants. The governing committee contains a super-majority of representatives from frontline communities; the foundations have a super-minority.To discuss the need for movement infrastructure, the Mosaic effort, and the possibilities IRA offers for frontline communities, I contacted Dr. Hahrie Han, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, and David Beckman, one of the founders of Mosaic and the current president of the Pisces Foundation. We talked about what movement infrastructure is, the failure of the climate movement to build enough of it, and Mosaic’s theory of change.So, without any further ado, Hahrie Han and David Beckman. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Hahrie HanThanks so much for having us.David BeckmanYes, thanks David.David RobertsI want to start with you, Hahrie. You have written in the past, and one of the themes of your work is that social welfare legislation or policy can often fail to reach, let's say, its full potential if there isn't the sort of civic and movement infrastructure around it to help it succeed. So maybe you can just talk for a little bit about what do we mean by infrastructure here? What does infrastructure mean? And maybe also what I think would be helpful is maybe you could cite some examples of times you think legislation or reforms fell short of what they could have done because of a lack of infrastructure.And then maybe some examples of when there was infrastructure and that was helpful.Hahrie HanYeah, I think that's a great question. There are so many instances when in trying to tackle some of our stickiest social problems, we put an enormous amount of attention and effort into trying to build the coalitions that we need to pass the policies that we want. If we think about any of the landmark legislation that we've had in recent decades, from the Affordable Care Act to the IRA to any other of these big kind of efforts, they've taken years or decades even to pass because of all the work that it takes to get them through. But then what so much research and so much history has taught us is that if there isn't the same kind of effort that goes into the implementation, that the gains that we made with policy alone are really fragile.There's one famous book that looks at some of these gains, these policy wins, and calls them a "hollow hope" if they're not accompanied by the kind of infrastructure that you're talking about. And we just have a lot of those kind of examples throughout history. So to give a couple of them. For example, this book, "The Hollow Hope," starts with landmarks court legislation like Brown v. Board of Education, where, if you act

In this episode, Sabeel Rahman, former acting administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, discusses updates to regulatory policy that reflect a positive new approach to how climate (and other) regulations will be assessed and crafted.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsWhen President Biden first took office, his administration released a series of "Day One executive actions." Among them was reforming the way federal regulations are developed and evaluated. This is not exactly something the public was clamoring for, or even aware of, but it is foundational to the administration's ability to achieve its other goals.The agency in charge of reviewing proposed federal regulations is called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA, which sits inside the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It is a fairly obscure corner of the federal bureaucracy that doesn't come in for much public scrutiny, but as the gateway through which all federal regulations must pass, it is immensely powerful in shaping the space of possibilities for any administration.A few weeks ago, OIRA answered Biden's call by issuing updated versions of two crucial documents: circular A4 and circular A94. The former contains guidance for agencies on how OIRA will evaluate regulations; the latter contains guidance for how it will evaluate public investments.These guidance documents have not been updated in more than 20 years, so this development is long overdue. The new circulars contain some fairly technical updates to the way OIRA does cost-benefit analysis — and the goals toward which it deploys cost-benefit analysis — but they are incredibly important, evidence of a generational philosophical shift.To unpack these changes, I talked with Sabeel Rahman of Brooklyn Law School, who served as acting administrator of OIRA last year while its current leader was being confirmed by the Senate. Rahman was intimately involved in designing the updated guidance, so I was eager to talk to him about the new approach, how it was developed, how it reflects Biden's priorities, and what it means for the future of climate and other regulations.I know this sounds wonky, but it is worth your time. I promise you will come out of it excited about cost-benefit analysis.With no further ado, Sabeel Rahman, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Sabeel RahmanThanks so much for having me.David RobertsThis is awesome. I'm so excited to talk about this.Sabeel RahmanIt is wonky, but it is awesome ...David RobertsWonky and awesome. I've had sort of a side obsession with these issues for a long, long time, and this is really a perfect opportunity to jump into them. But before we jump into too many wonky details, I want to do some scene setting just so people know, kind of have a sense of what we're talking about in general. So when Biden came in, he issued this sort of list of "Day One," what they call "Day One priorities." And one of those was to update regulatory policy, basically how regulations get assessed and crafted. This is not something I think the public is beating down the door demanding this.This is something that has a behind the scenes air about it, but it's also clearly a political priority. So maybe just to start with, let's just talk about what is the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, what is OIRA, which is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs?Sabeel RahmanYes, absolutely.David RobertsFirst try.Sabeel RahmanThere we go.David RobertsWhat, OIRA is within it, and why what they do seems to have such political presence in the administration that it made its way to the top of this Day One priority list just to sort of set the scene.Sabeel RahmanYeah, absolutely. That's great. And thanks so much, David. And you're exactly right. This is very much kind of behind the scenes type of sets of issues, but really, really important for all the day-to-day stuff that government needs to do, and especially in this moment when we're thinking about the climate crisis or we're thinking about trying to address systemic inequality. So the fact that this was part of the Day One suite of actions from the present is, I think, pretty indicative. So there was the headline stuff, the new climate regulations, the Equity Executive Order, responding to COVID right there's, all of that headline stuff.And then this regulatory review piece was also there because that's actually part of the back-end to make all those other policies work. So we're used to thinking about the President comes in, president can make all kinds of sweeping policy decisions or kind of really important policy decisions. The day to day of how that happens involves the federal agencies. And the agencies, they can make enforcement actions, they can spend money or they can write rules. And it's that rule writing part that goes through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. And so this office that you talked about, OMB

In this episode, Jennifer Garson of the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office discusses the state of hydropower in the US and where the industry is headed.(a)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsFor decades, hydropower has been most common source of renewable electricity in the world. (In the US, it was passed by wind a few years ago.) Pumped hydro — large hydropower facilities in which water is pumped up and run down hill to store energy — remains the most common form of energy storage, both in the US and in the world.Even as the vast majority of media attention in the clean-energy world goes to wind and solar power, hydropower continues churning away in the background, generating and storing vast amounts of renewable energy.Hydro has a long and storied past, but does it have a future? What's going on with hydropower these days? Is there any prospect of building new dams or of finding more power in existing dams? What's going on with small hydropower, on rivers, streams, and reservoirs? And is ocean energy ever going to be a real thing?I've taken hydropower for granted for a long time, so I decided it was finally time to dig into these questions. To do so, I contacted Jennifer Garson, head of the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO). The WPTO oversees a sprawling network of prizes and grants meant to encourage hydro and marine energy projects. I talked with Garson about the future of large dams in the US, the promise of small-scale hydro for local communities, and the uncertain future of marine energy.Alright, with no further ado, Jennifer Garson, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Jennifer GarsonThank you so much for having me.David RobertsAlright, so we normally normally here on Volts, we do the sort of deep dive into one thing. But this here we're going to attempt something slightly different, which is a broad overview of a fairly large category, larger than I think I appreciated before I started digging around and just try to get a sort of global sense of where it's at. Because I know that from my experience in clean energy, I've sort of, like, had hydro in the back of my head as kind of this steady presence, a little bit like nuclear, like a steady presence in the background, but not something where anything kind of dynamic or new is happening. And I think you probably disagree with that.So let's get into it. So just to start with, what are the technologies encompassed by the terms "hydro" and "marine energy" that your office covers? What is the remit?Jennifer GarsonYeah, so glad you asked that. And it is, sort of, just by nature of our office as we're structured that, we have two very interesting, but two very different types of water power technologies. So the first that you mentioned is hydropower. Hydropower really has been delivering power for the last 100 plus years. It's both the conventional hydropower, so very large behind the reservoir, big dams that people usually envision when they're thinking about hydro. We also have smaller non-powered dams that we power with hydropower. We also have run-of-river systems that actually have diversions in addition to dams, where you actually have water flowing to the side of the river. And then we also are thinking about hydropower. Even in conduits and canals, how do you use existing water infrastructure to provide power, whether it's for water treatment or irrigation, a whole number of different ways that you could use existing infrastructure for water power.Jennifer GarsonOn the other side of the portfolio, we have marine renewable energy. So while hydropower is probably the oldest form of renewable power — although potentially, arguably wind is too — marine renewable energy is the most nascent form of renewable energy. And that's really looking out to the power of the ocean. Everything from how do we kinetically capture power, how do we use gradients to capture power. So everything from tidal power, wave power, ocean thermal energy conversion, even salinity gradients and even pressure gradients, really looking at a multitude of ways of when you look out at the ocean and see all the power that's contained in it, how do we use different power capture systems to harness multitude of ways that the ocean generates power?David RobertsGot it. So water on land and water at sea ...Jennifer GarsonWater everywhere.David RobertsWater everywhere. So let's start then with big dams, because I think this is when you say hydropower, this is what springs to people's minds as sort of the conventional form. I think conventional wisdom is that we've got a lot of big dams in the US creating a lot of power and it's steady and it's good, but that's more or less it. And so this is my first question. It's just do you think we're going to build any more large dams in the US or large, dam-wise, are we basically tapped out?Jennifer GarsonSo that's a really excellent question. I think there's a general agreement that

Various options are at play in the EPA’s planned greenhouse gas standards for new and existing power plants. In this episode, Lissa Lynch of NRDC discusses the implications.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsA couple of weeks ago, the policy analysts at the Rhodium Group put out a new report showing that the Biden administration's legislative achievements are not quite enough to get it to its Paris climate goals. But those goals could be reached if the legislation is supplemented with smart executive action.Some of the most important upcoming executive actions are EPA's greenhouse gas standards for new and existing power plants. The Supreme Court famously struck down Obama's Clean Power Plan — his attempt to address existing power plants — judging it impermissibly expansive. So now EPA has to figure out what to ask of individual plants.The agency's decisions will help shape the future of the US power sector and determine whether the Biden administration gets on track for its climate goals. To talk through those decisions in more detail, I contacted Lissa Lynch, who runs the Federal Legal Group at the NRDC’s Climate & Clean Energy Program. We discussed the options before the EPA, the viability of carbon capture and hydrogen as systems of pollution reduction, and whether Biden will have time to complete all the regulatory work that remains.Alright. With no further ado, Lissa Lynch from NRDC. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Lissa LynchThank you for having me.David RobertsThis is a subject that I used to spend a lot of time thinking about back in the day, and it's sort of receded for a while, and now it's back. So it's very exciting for a nerd like me. So I want to just quickly walk through some history with this and then sort of hand it off to you so you can tell us where things stand now, because I don't want to assume that listeners have been obsessively following this now nearly two decade long saga. So let me just run through some history really briefly. So listeners will recall in 2007, there's a big Supreme Court case, Massachusetts vs. EPA, in which the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 is eligible to be listed as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act if EPA determines it is a threat to human health.And then shortly thereafter, Obama's EPA officially determined that it is a threat to human health via the endangerment finding. So this is one thing I'm not sure everybody understands, and I just want to get it on the table up front. So for context, the combination of those two things, Mass vs. EPA, plus the endangerment finding, means that EPA is lawfully obliged to regulate greenhouse gases. This is not a choice. This is not something it can do or not do, depending on how it feels or who's president. They have to do it. So then that triggers the obligation, three separate obligations.You have to regulate mobile sources, which Obama did with his new fuel economy regulations, which are still in place, as far as I know. Then you have to regulate new stationary sources of greenhouse gases, which Obama did. And as far as I know, we can come back to this in a second, but as far as I know, those new power plant regulations that Obama passed are still in effect. And then thirdly, you have to regulate existing stationary sources of greenhouse gases, which mainly means power plants. And so Obama's effort to regulate existing power plants is called the Clean Power Plan.People may remember the fuss and ado about the Clean Power Plan as it was under development. Lawsuits were immediately launched. Of course, the Supreme Court took the extremely unusual step of putting the law on hold, basically not letting it go into implementation until it had heard this case. And then it heard the case, rejected the Clean Power Plan on the basis of the newly dreamed up, rectally, extracted Major Questions Doctrine. So that's where we stand now is we've got the mobile regs in place, although Biden is updating those too. I think we've got the new power plant regs in place, although Biden is also updating those.But as for existing power plant regulations, there are basically none. It's been a legal mire and so Biden's got to do those too. So let's talk about what Supreme Court said about the Clean Power Plan in their ruling and how that constrains the sort of solution space that we're looking at now.Lissa LynchSo in West Virginia vs. EPA, that was the Supreme Court decision from last summer. The Supreme Court held that this section of the Clean Air Act that we're talking about here, section 111, does not clearly provide authority for the approach that EPA took in the Clean Power Plan. And what they did there we sort of refer to as generation shifting. In the Clean Power Plan, EPA looked at the power sector as a whole and they concluded that the best system for reducing fossil-fuel-fired power plant emissions was a combination of measures including shifting generation away from dirtier fossil power t

A few years ago, Melissa and Chris Bruntlett and their two children moved from Vancouver, Canada, to Delft, a small city in the Netherlands where 80% of journeys are taken by foot, bicycle, or public transit. Their new book, Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, is about what it's like to live in a truly low-car city, and how other cities can capture some of the same benefits.Reading the book was a joy for me -- it reinforced so many of my priors! -- so I was excited to talk to Melissa and Chris about how to design streets for people, the connection between urban infrastructure and social trust, the flourishing that Dutch children enjoy, and the myriad evils of cars. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, Dan Lashof of the World Resources Institute discusses the trajectory of biofuels since the early 2000s and the implications of new biofuel standards recently proposed by the US EPA.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsMy fellow olds will recall that, back in the 2000s, biofuels were an extremely big deal in the clean-energy world, one of a tiny handful of decarbonization solutions that seemed viable. Biofuels — and the many advanced versions thereof allegedly on the horizon — dominated discussions of climate change policy.Much has changed since then. Principally, it has become clear that electrification is the cheapest path to decarbonization for most sectors, including the transportation sector. The Biden administration has explicitly put electrification at the center of its transportation decarbonization strategy.Biofuels, in the meantime, have gone exactly nowhere. Advanced biofuels remain almost entirely notional, old-fashioned corn ethanol remains as wasteful as ever, and new scientific evidence suggests that the carbon costs of biofuels are much larger than previously appreciated.It's not clear if anyone has told the EPA. For the first time in 15 years, the agency is on the verge of updating biofuels production mandates first established by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, and its proposed standards do not appear cognizant of these recent developments, or of the administration's larger transportation strategy.To discuss the latest developments in biofuels and the EPA's puzzling blind spot, I talked to Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute. We discussed how biofuels have developed since the early 2000s, the lack of progress in advanced biofuels, and the stakes of EPA's coming decisions.Alright then. Dan Lashof. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Dan LashofReally happy to be here.David RobertsI've been wanting to do an episode on biofuels forever because I often just pause to think, whatever happened to biofuels? Because old people like you and I will recall way back in the day, in the early times, biofuels used to be a very big deal. They used to be the top line item, the sort of the hot subject of conversation, and it's really flipped since then. So maybe just to start, let's use our little time machine squiggly squiggly fingers, time machine, go back to say 2005 to 2010, the early 2000s, and just sort of tell us what was the state of the decarbonization conversation then and what role did biofuels play in it?Dan LashofRight, well, back then, Tesla hadn't built its first car. Photovoltaics cost ten times or more what they do today. And the big fight was to prevent hundreds of new coal plants from being built. So the idea that we would replace gasoline with electricity seemed far-fetched at best. And a lot of environmental advocates were focused on fighting coal. There was some discussion of alternative fuels, but when you looked at the transportation sector, biofuels seemed like one of the best options out there. And then there was this idea, there was a debate about corn ethanol from the beginning, right?David RobertsCorn ethanol goes back. I mean, I kind of want to distinguish between corn ethanol and kind of biofuels. The larger category, like corn ethanol, goes back farther than the rest of this stuff. Right?Dan LashofRight, but back then we weren't making much of it, right? So in 2007, there was about 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol being produced, which is about 4% of gasoline consumption back then. And there was a debate about it. A lot of that debate was like about net energy balance. Remember that one?Does it take more energy and fertilizer and tractor fuel and trucking than is in the fuel? I think that debate sort of missed the point, and it was gradually shifting to, well, we don't really care about BTUs, we care about carbon and what's its net carbon impact.David RobertsAnd I feel like the limitations of corn ethanol were around even then, which is why I remember so much buzz around cellulosic biofuels.Dan LashofYeah, right. At that time, there was new research that seemed very exciting. I was convinced that that was the future of biofuels. Right. We were going to make ethanol not from grain, not from the corn kernels, but from corn stalks, maybe from some perennial grasses like ...David RobertsSwitchgrass.Dan LashofYeah, right. And that was going to be awesome because you wouldn't be competing with food as much, and it was supposed to be cheaper because you weren't ... as waste material or the yields were higher. So that was going to take over.David RobertsYeah. Wow. We were so young then. And so then this is the sort of political atmosphere in which came the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which, among its other sort of puzzling features in retrospect, was a big bipartisan energy bill passed in part to address emissions and I guess just wasn't the poison that it is now, I guess. But s

In this episode, Project InnerSpace founder and executive director Jamie Beard, who has been instrumental in influencing oil and gas personnel to move into the geothermal industry, discusses exciting recent developments in geothermal and the opportunities ahead.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsThings are starting to come together for geothermal. Political awareness has seen an uptick. Investment is flowing in. Startups, many staffed by veterans of the oil and gas industry, are swarming to take advantage of existing geothermal opportunities and expand those opportunities. New technologies and techniques are reaching the demonstration phase.It’s an exciting time. At the center of it all is Jamie Beard, who for more than a decade now has served as a kind of pied piper luring people out of oil and gas and into geothermal. (Here’s her 2021 TED Talk.) A one-time energy and regulatory lawyer, Beard founded the Geothermal Entrepreneurship Organization, dedicated to educating and training oil and gas personnel to move into geothermal. (GEO recently helped launch the Texas Geothermal Institute to expand that work.) She is also the founder and executive director of Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the geothermal industry. It recently launched an initiative to build a Global Heat Flow Database, which would help map subsurface resources across the globe. It also plans to invest in new geothermal technology companies that are ready to launch first-of-a-kind demonstration projects.Beard has been my go-to resource on geothermal for years, so I was thrilled to bring her on the pod to discuss the current state of the industry, the migration of personnel and expertise from oil and gas to geothermal, and the path to global scale for the industry.All right then. Jamie Beard of Project InnerSpace. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Jamie BeardOh, my gosh. David Roberts. Hello. It's nice to see you again.David RobertsYeah, it's been a while since we talked. You know, when I was working on a piece on geothermal for Vox a few years ago, I don't know how many years ago, my family makes fun of me because everything pre pandemic is about five years ago. Yeah, I guess it was 2020. And my sense then around geothermal was that there was this sort of kind of a surge of interest, call it ten to 15 years ago, and a surge of investment. And then that kind of tailed off, kind of the air went out of that balloon a little bit lost steam.There you go. That's the pun I was looking for. And then my sense was that as we were talking back in 2020, a bunch of strands trends were just starting to come together for a new big resurgence, a renaissance of geothermal. I want to talk about the future of geothermal, the immediate future, the near term future, the midterm future. But first, I would like to just start with a snapshot of, like, what is happening in the industry now? Is it still the case that only conventional geothermal wells are actually being dug and operating? What's the kind of snapshot of the industry?Jamie BeardWell, no, it's no longer just the case that conventional is being dug, which is really cool. And that's actually a difference between now and 2020. So when we talked back in the day, you're right to use renaissance, we were just about at the beginning of one, right? So it was like there's all this stuff that was very buzzy, but there wasn't really a whole lot in the ground. There were some teams that were kind of thinking about it, but nobody was really doing it yet. So there are some teams that have gotten out and done stuff in the last couple of years, and that means demonstrations, and that means that wells have been drilled, and that means that demonstrations and pilots have been done.And that's also meant that the oil and gas industry has gotten increasingly excited and started investing. So the landscape has changed quite a bit in the last three years in terms of momentum and also investment dollars, which is really cool, I guess, to start with.David RobertsI should have done this at the very beginning, but I shouldn't assume that listeners read that piece on geothermal.Jamie BeardWell, everybody in the world has.David RobertsI would like to think so, but just in case there's a few out there who have it, I just want to make a very basic distinction. Geothermal to date, mostly, almost exclusively has been what's called hydrothermal, which is you go find places where there are natural riffs and reservoirs of thermal activity, and then you go down there and exploit that heat. So that's what geothermal has been from like the dawn of time up until about five minutes ago. You go find these areas where the heat already exists, that's conventional geothermal, and you stick a straw down and get the steam up and make electricity.Then there is coming what's called advanced geothermal, whereas you go make your own reservoir, you dig down and you crack the rock to create ba

The exact definition of “clean” hydrogen, interconnected with the definition of “clean” electricity, has enormous implications for the distribution of federal tax credits to boost the industry. In this episode, hydrogen expert Rachel Fakhry of the Natural Resources Defense Council discusses what’s at stake.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsVolts subscribers understand that a decarbonized energy system will require lots and lots of hydrogen, to store energy and to serve as a fuel in applications that are otherwise difficult to decarbonize. They also understand that while 95 percent of the world's hydrogen is currently produced using fossil fuels, there is a carbon-free way to produce hydrogen.It involves running electrical current through an electrolyzer, which splits hydrogen out of water. (Volts listeners heard all about electrolyzers a few episodes ago.) But the resulting hydrogen is clean only if the electricity that is run through the electrolyzer is clean. That's the recipe for clean hydrogen: clean electricity plus electrolyzers.Democrats also understand the need for clean hydrogen to scale up quickly, and they included tax credits for clean hydrogen production in the Inflation Reduction Act. And therein lies the rub. The IRS is currently in the process of determining exactly how those tax credits will be structured and to whom they will be available. At issue is a question that sounds simple but turns out to be devilishly complex: what exactly counts as clean hydrogen? More specifically, what exactly counts as clean electricity?The details matter enormously — up to $100 billion worth of subsidies are on the line. Big companies from BP to NextEra are lining up to try to make the standards as lax as possible, to maximize their short-term profits. But lax standards could perversely end up increasing greenhouse gas emissions, as electrolyzers come online, gobble up the available clean energy, and push grid managers to start up fossil fuel plants. (For more, read Canary Media’s deep-dive series on the hydrogen tax-credit battle.)To get to the bottom of all this, I’m excited to talk with Rachel Fakhry, who runs the hydrogen and energy innovation portfolio at the Natural Resources Defense Council, about the technical details of this fight, the ability of the industry to meet higher standards, and the enormous stakes involved, for the industry and the larger project of decarbonization, in getting it right.So with no further ado, Rachel Fakhry. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Rachel FakhryThanks so much for having me Dave.David RobertsYou're brave to come on and address this subject. It is big and complex and hairy. There's a lot of ins and outs, "a lot of strands in the Duder's head." So let's start. So we get we need a bunch of hydrogen. We get we need it to be clean. We get basically what clean hydrogen is, sort of. So let's just start first by talking about what are these tax credits? What does the Inflation Reduction Act contain for clean hydrogen?Rachel FakhrySo the IRA offers one of the largest subsidies for clean hydrogen in the world. It is a production tax credit which ranges between $0.6 to up to $3 per kilogram of each hydrogen produced. And the three kilogram, as I'm sure we'll talk, is kind of the big prize that all the projects are gunning for. It is a technology-neutral credit. So there's no colors green, blue, pink, any of that. It all depends and is tied to the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of hydrogen. That top prize of $3 can only be eligible for clean hydrogen that achieves zero point 45 kilogram of carbon per kilogram of hydrogen relative to today's status quo hydrogen that's gas derived uncontrolled, which is roughly around ten.So to get that top rise, you have to reduce emissions from status quo by 95%, which is a lot.David RobertsRight.Rachel FakhryYou have to be very clean to get that. And it's a very long list credit. It lasts for ten years for each project that gets it, and projects that commence construction as late as early 2033 would still be eligible. So what this means is that by 2045, you could still have hydrogen projects that are getting taxpayers dollars. Even if we think the technology is going to improve and drop in price and so on, there are going to be projects still heavily subsidized.David RobertsYeah, it's a lot of money. One thing I would add, just in case listeners are not familiar ... listeners have probably heard production tax credit and investment tax credit, PTC and ITC, tossed around just for anybody who doesn't know a production credit, you get a certain amount of money per quantity of the subsidized thing produced. So, in other words, this is you get the subsidy per ton or per kilogram of hydrogen produced versus the investment tax credit, which subsidizes capital costs of building the thing in the first place. And these have somewhat different dynamics, which I think we can return to later.But this is spe

What do the US 2022 midterm elections mean for climate and energy policy? To help go through the results, I contacted Whitney Stanco, a senior analyst at Washington Analysis LLC, an independent research firm out of Washington, DC. She has been tracking energy policy for decades and in particular has kept a close watch on the states. With Whitney's help, I walk through the election results, first at the Congressional level and then in the states, and contemplate their implications for energy policy. We pay special attention to the four states where Democrats have new trifectas and the power see their policy preferences made into law. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

A full quarter of global energy use goes toward heat that powers industrial processes. To provide clean industrial heat but avoid the variability often associated with renewable energy, a company called Rondo makes a thermal battery, storing renewable-energy heat in bricks. In this episode, Rondo CEO John O’Donnell talks about this breakthrough technology and the opportunities that thermal storage promises to open.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsElectricity gets the bulk of the attention in clean-energy discourse (this newsletter is, after all, called Volts) but half of global final energy consumption comes in the form not of electricity, but of heat. When it comes to reaching net zero emissions, heat is half the problem.Roughly half of heat is used for space and water heating, which I have covered on other pods. The other half — a quarter of all energy humans use — is found in high-temperature industrial processes, everything from manufacturing dog food to making steel or cement. The vast bulk of industrial heat today is provided by fossil fuels, usually natural gas or specialized forms of coal. Conventional wisdom has had it that these sectors are “difficult to decarbonize” because alternatives are either more expensive or nowhere to be found. Indeed, when I covered an exhaustive report on industrial heat back in 2019, the conclusion was that the cheapest decarbonization option was probably CCS, capturing carbon post-combustion and burying it.A lot has changed in the last few years. Most notably, renewable energy has gotten extremely cheap, which makes it an attractive source of heat. However, it is variable, while industrial processes cannot afford to start and stop. Enter the thermal battery, a way to store clean electricity as heat until it is needed.A new class of battery — “rocks in a box” — stores renewable energy as heat in a variety of different materials from sand to graphite, delivering a steady supply to various end uses. One of the more promising companies in this area is Rondo, which makes a battery that stores heat in bricks.I talked with Rondo CEO John O'Donnell about the importance of heat in the clean-energy discussion, the technological changes that have made thermal storage viable, and the enormous future opportunities for clean heat and a renewables-based grid to grow together.All right, John O'Donnell of Rondo. Welcome to Volts. Thank you for coming.John O'DonnellThank you. It's a great pleasure.David RobertsI am so excited to talk to you. I've been geeking out about thermal storage for over a year now, just wanting to do something on it, and there's so much there. And I find that unlike a lot of electricity topics which I cover, there's just not a lot of baseline familiarity out there among, let's say, normal people. So there's a ton to cover from the ground up. So I want to start at the highest possible level, which is to say, let's just talk about heat. Like in the clean energy world, electrical power gets a lot of attention, a lot of discussion, a lot of technological development.Everybody's got their favorites, everybody knows what's going on. But then there's also heat, which is the sort of weirdly ignored not so much anymore, but up till pretty recently ignored. So maybe just start with an explanation of why heat is important if you care about clean energy, why you should care about heat?John O'DonnellThank you. Sure. That's a great question. And that context you just provided is, of course, dead on. There's a really simple answer. Heat. Industrial heat is 26% of total world final energy consumption. Whether you are making baby food, or fuel, or cement, or steel, the manufacturing processes vastly predominantly use energy in the form of heat, not electricity. Globally, it's three quarters of all the energy used by industry is in the form of heat. Again, whether you're pasteurizing milk or melting steel. And the DOE has just created a new office focused on this topic. We're thrilled about it.Their assessment is that industrial heat is 11%, I think, of all total US CO2 I'm in California. Here in California, we burn more natural gas for industrial process heat than we do for electric power generation. And to a first approximation, as you just mentioned, no one knows that.David RobertsRight. So heat is a huge portion of final energy consumption. It's a huge portion of global CO2 emissions. So maybe give a sense of like, what percentage of total heat final consumption is industry, like how's the total heat-pie divided up.John O'DonnellSo when I said 26% of world — that's industrial heat, right. So that's not buildings, that's not other heating sources.David RobertsRight. Heat is a bigger category than that.John O'DonnellI mean, if you take actually heat for buildings and heat for industry, together they're like 60% of all the natural gas used in Europe. But within industrial heat, people sort it out by a couple of different things. One of them is the

BIPOC communities are most likely to bear the effects of climate change, but BIPOC-led environmental justice groups are severely underfunded in climate philanthropy. In this episode, Abdul Dosunmu of the Climate Funders Justice Pledge talks about his group’s aim to challenge big donors to give more equitably.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsWhether it’s suffering the effects of fossil fuel pollution or fighting back against it, black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are on the front lines of climate change. Yet they are starved for resources. More than a billion dollars a year goes toward climate philanthropy, but of that amount, little more than 1 percent goes to BIPOC-led environmental justice groups.The two-year-old Climate Funders Justice Pledge, run by the Donors of Color Network, is trying to change that. It challenges big donors to a) be more transparent about where their grants are going, and b) within two years of signing the pledge, raise the amount going to BIPOC-led groups to 30 percent.The pledge, featured in a just-released report from Morgan Stanley and the Aspen Institute on how to increase the impact of climate philanthropy, has already led to more than $100 million in annual commitments to BIPOC-led groups.I talked with Abdul Dosunmu, who runs the pledge campaign, about why BIPOC leadership is important to the climate fight, how transparency changes the behavior of foundations, and how to improve the relationship between environmental justice groups and big funders.Alright. Abdul Dosunmu. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Abdul DosunmuThank you so much for having me.David RobertsThis is an interesting topic to me with lots of ins and outs, but let's start with just, I'd like to get a sense of what is the pool of philanthropic money available to climate and environmental organizations? And then how much of that currently is going to EJ groups?Abdul DosunmuThe Morgan Stanley-Aspen report, that we were honored to be part of, and was just released really details a stark challenge in terms of what the author of the report, Randall Kempner, says is both the quantity of climate philanthropy and the quality of climate philanthropy. So, on the quantity side, according to the report, only about 2% of all global philanthropy is focused on climate.David RobertsThat's wild to begin with, honestly.Abdul DosunmuInsanely wild. And what's interesting about that, what's hard to square about that is the fact that if you ask philanthropists how urgent the crisis is, 85% of them say it's extremely urgent. So they're talking one game but walking another game.David RobertsRight.Abdul DosunmuSo, of all global philanthropy, only about 2% is focused on climate. And then of that 2%, only about 1.3% of it is focused on BIPOC-led environmental justice organizations. So if you think about the quantity versus quality framework that Randall has, the Morgan Stanley-Aspen report is really focused on the quantity side of it. The climate funders justice pledge, which I lead, is focused on the quality side of it.David RobertsRight. We'll get to that in just one second. I got a bunch of questions about that, but I just want to in terms of quantity, do we know that 2% that goes to climate related stuff. Do we know what that number is? I don't have any sense of scale at all.David RobertsIs that a billion dollars? A few million?Abdul DosunmuSo our data, and I'm not sure Randall goes into this in the report, but our data is really focused on about 1.3 billion or so of climate funding.David RobertsGot it.Abdul DosunmuSo we're looking at single digit billions. But we also know that in recent years, frankly in recent weeks, that number is steadily escalating as new Climate Funders come onto the scene with last names like Bezos, and Powell, Jobs, and others. And so we really don't have a solid sense of what that new number is.David RobertsRight.Abdul DosunmuBut in terms of the 1.3% number that we focus on at CFJP, we're looking at about 1.34 billion of that which was awarded to National Climate Funders. And of that, only about 1.3% is going to BIPOC-led environmental groups.David RobertsSo that's less than 20 million. Say something in that neighborhood, right?Abdul DosunmuAbsolutely.David RobertsOne other distinction on this is I know that there is giving that gets categorized under EJ activities, which is separate from money actually going to EJ led groups.Abdul DosunmuThat's right. So that's a critical distinction, and you've really just jumped in on the core part of the work that I do. We believe that it's important that EJ work is funded when it is BIPOC-led just as much as it's funded when it's not. And currently what we have is a system where EJ work led by communities of color, conceptualizing communities of color is not funded at the same scale that other work might be funded. And the reality of that is that there are deep consequences because as we often say, the communities

In this episode, Erik M. Conway discusses his new book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, coauthored with Naomi Oreskes.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn 2010, historians of technology Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes released Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, a book about weaponized misinformation that proved to be extraordinarily prescient and influential.Now Oreskes and Conway are back with a new book: The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. It's about the laissez-faire ideology of unfettered, unrestrained markets, which was invented and sold to the American people in the 20th century through waves of well-funded propaganda campaigns. The success of that propaganda has left the US ill-equipped to address its modern challenges.On March 8, I interviewed Conway at an event for Seattle's Town Hall, where we discussed the themes of the book, the hold free-market ideology still has over us, and the prospects for new thinking. The organizers were kind enough to allow me to share the recording with you as an episode of Volts. Enjoy!Megan CastilloGood evening, everybody. My name is Megan Castillo. I'm Town Hall's program manager. On behalf of the staff here at Town Hall Seattle and our friends at Finney books, it's my pleasure to welcome you to our presentation with Eric Conway and David Roberts. Conway's new book, "The Big Myth," is the subject of tonight's talk. Please join me in welcoming Eric Conway and David Roberts.David RobertsHey, everybody. Thanks. I'm just going to jump right in. Several things I'd like to get into, but just to start, one of the things that really the book really gets across well, I thought, which I don't know that I fully appreciated, is the extent to which this idea of unfettered, unregulated free capitalism is an invention of the 20th century. It's not what capitalism ... the founders and architects of capitalism, it very much goes against their larger philosophy and their larger kind of moral sentiments. And the way it does this is by elevating property rights, basically trying to they call it the "indivisibility thesis" that property rights and political freedom are one and the same.And any limitation on property rights is de facto a limitation on political freedom. That's new, that was not original to capitalism. So maybe talk a little bit about property rights and how they sort of what the pivot these groups did with that concept in the 20th century, in the early 20th century.Erik ConwayOkay, so that's a jump forward from a book that starts with child labor laws in the 19th century. What I think you're bringing up is the tripod of freedom that the National Association of Manufacturers concocts in the late 1930s as part of their effort to undo the New Deal of the Roosevelt administration. And the idea of the tripod of freedom was, if you think about a three-legged stool there's what they would call industrial freedom or business freedom, religious freedom, and political freedom are the three legs of the stool. So if you remove industrial freedom, businesses freedom to do what they want, then the stool falls.This is a slippery slope argument that equates business freedom with the other two first amendment freedoms. That's what they spent a decade and millions of dollars, 1930s dollars, promoting through billboard campaigns and materials made for schools and movies and so forth in order to try to convince the public that that's the American way, even though it is a pure invention. In the 19th century, of course, lots of business was regulated and the corporate form itself was primarily a tool used by states. States would create a corporation to accomplish a thing like the Erie Canal Corporation to build and run that canal system for the state.And roads were done this way and so forth. And through a whole complicated process, the corporation sort of slowly gets disentangled from the state in the 19th century so that by 1935, we can imagine corporations that are no longer state functions.David RobertsYeah, one of the wild things is learning that early corporations had to go to states and say, "Can we be a corporation?" And the states would be like justify why? Like tell us why. What public good are you serving? It's just a wild inversion of things. And also another piece of this is, and maybe this doesn't come into it as much until the Austrian economists that get brought over, and I guess this would be in the 60s, kind of 50s and 60s, Hayek and the other one whose name is not coming to my mind. Yeah, but this idea that not only is business freedom core to American freedom but the role of the business person, businessman, I guess they always said back then, is explicitly not to be decent, not to be good, solely to make money.So the idea is that if you have these l

Every year, the Business Council for Sustainable Energy partners with BloombergNEF to produce the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook, a compilation of charts, graphs, and statistics about the US clean-energy industry and where it's headed.The 2023 edition is out and it shows a record year for investment in clean energy and installations of renewables — alongside record demand for natural gas and record investment in gas infrastructure.To chat about some of the numbers, I contacted Lisa Jacobson, president of BCSE. We talked about the momentum behind clean energy, the enormous investments uncorked by the Inflation Reduction Act, the supply-chain difficulties that plagued the industry this year, the backlash to ESG investing, and the surge in energy storage. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Under a new partnership, Heirloom Carbon Technologies captures carbon dioxide from the air, then passes it to CarbonCure Technologies, which permanently sequesters it in concrete. In this episode, CEOs Shashank Samala of Heirloom and Robert Niven of CarbonCure give the lowdown on this pioneering carbon removal project. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsLast month saw the announcement of a pioneering project: a company called Heirloom Carbon Technologies will capture carbon dioxide from the ambient air and then hand it off to a company called CarbonCure Technologies, which will inject the CO2 into concrete made by a company called Central Concrete. It will mark the first time ever that carbon from the air is permanently sequestered in concrete.Heirloom, with runs the US’s only operating direct air capture (DAC) facility, does not use the familiar capture technique that involves giant fans. Instead, it binds carbon to exposed rock and then cooks it out using electric kilns — and then binds more carbon to the rock, in a circular process. It claims the capture is cheaper and more efficient than previous methods.CarbonCure injects the CO2 into a concrete mixer, where it mineralizes, becoming permanently captured even if the building using the concrete is demolished. In the process, it strengthens the mix, requiring less cement and cutting costs.Direct air capture (DAC) has faced a great deal of skepticism, and concrete has the reputation as one of the worst carbon offenders, so this project — one of the first that can fairly be called carbon removal — could go a long way toward convincing investors that the former can help the latter change its ways, with a technology that is, at least some day, commercializable.I talked with Heirloom CEO Shashank Samala and CarbonCure CEO Robert Niven about their respective processes, how they work together, and what the project says about the future of carbon removal.All right, Shashank Samala, CEO of Heirloom Carbon Technologies, and Robert Niven, CEO of CarbonCure. Welcome to Volts. Thank you guys for coming.Robert NivenThanks very much for having us.David RobertsThis is really a nifty project you guys are working on together. It's two separate pieces that normally I would probably do a pod on each. So we're going to have to, or at least I'm going to have to be less wordy than normal to squeeze it all in in 1 hour. I want to talk about both halves of it. So let's start with Shashank. The first half of this process is Heirloom’s process of removing carbon from the air. Can you just explain quickly how that process works, what it looks like?Shashank SamalaSure. So, Heirloom, if you're not aware of who we are, our goal is to basically remove a billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually by 2035. And our whole goal is to help reverse climate change. And the way we do that is through a process called limestone looping. Essentially what that means is we use a rock that is very abundant in nature, limestone, that has a natural propensity to pull carbon from the air. What we do is we basically give superpowers to limestone to pull a lot more carbon than it otherwise would naturally.So how it works is we start with limestone, we put that into a kiln, we heat it up, and we pull out the CO2 that's already sequestered in the limestone, which makes the leftover lime highly thirsty for CO2. So we take advantage of that natural property by laying it out on trays. Think about baking trays. I lay them out on trays, and then we vertically stack those trays, very tall, and the air brings in the CO2. And the the lime sitting on the tray acts as a sponge, pulls up the CO2 molecules. From there, it becomes limestone again after it pulls it up. And we do that in about three days.Naturally, it would take many months to pull carbon from the air. We did that in three days using our well treated algorithms and technology.David RobertsSo in three days means the lime is full, absorbed as much CO2 as it can.Shashank SamalaExactly. We don't go all the way up to 100%. We go up to about 85%, which is sort of the optimal point, we realized. And then, yeah, it becomes limestone again, which is great, because that's what you started with. So we can recycle limestone by putting it back into the kiln, pull out the CO2 we captured, and then store it underground or store it into concrete, which you're doing with Carbon here.David RobertsRight. So one of the questions I had is you crush up this lime and spread it out on, well, calcium carbonate is limestone. Calcium carbonate ...The chemical formula. Exactly right, the calcium carbonate.And then after you bake it, take CO2 out. Then what is the chemical remainder?Shashank SamalaCalcium oxide.David RobertsCalcium oxide. Right. So you have calcium oxide laid out on trays, becoming calcium carbonate. Then you take the calcium carbonate, cook it, get the CO2 out of it, and then do the whole thing over again.Shashank SamalaExactly. We

Even if greenhouse gas emissions halted entirely right now, we would continue to feel climate change effects for decades due to existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and warming could accelerate, as we reduce the aerosol pollution that happens to be acting as a partial shield. In this episode, Kelly Wanser of nonprofit SilverLining makes the pitch for solar radiation management, the practice of adding our own shielding particles to the atmosphere to buy us some time while we step up our greenhouse gas reductions.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOne of the more uncomfortable truths about climate change is that temperatures are going to rise for the next 30 to 40 years no matter what we do, just based on carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and the reduction of aerosol pollutants that are now shielding us from some of the worst of it. That's going to bring about potentially devastating changes that we do not yet well understand and are not prepared for.How can that short-term risk be mitigated? One proposal is to add particles to the atmosphere that would do on purpose what our aerosol pollution has been doing by accident: shield us from some of the rising heat. No one credible who advocates for solar radiation management (SRM) believes that it is a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, it would be a way to buy a little more time to reach zero carbon.My guest today, Kelly Wanser, is the head of a non-profit organization called SilverLining that advocates for research and policy around near-term climate risks and direct climate interventions like SRM that can address them.I've long been curious about — and wary of — solar radiation management, so I was eager to talk to Wanser about the case for SRM, what we know and don't know about it, and what we need to research.Okay then. Kelly Wanser of SilverLining, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Kelly WanserThank you very much, David. I am a fan and it's a pleasure to be here.David RobertsAwesome. Well, I have wanted to do a pod on this subject forever. I'm going to try to be focused, but I sort of have questions that are all over the place, so let's just jump right in. The way I'm approaching this is, I think, to average people off the street, and maybe I even include myself in this. The idea of reaching up into the atmosphere and fiddling with it directly, thinking that we can dial in the temperature we want, strikes me as crazy. And I think that's probably a lot of people's intuitive response. Obviously, you have thought your way past that, going so far as to found an organization designed to advocate for this stuff.So maybe just tell us a little, to begin with, your personal background and how you came to advocacy for geoengineering, which is not a super crowded field.Kelly WanserI'll say first that you're actually not in the business of advocacy for geoengineering and it will give you some context for how I came to be doing what I do.David RobertsSure.Kelly WanserReally it was about — I was working in the technology sector in an area called IT infrastructure, and that's the sort of plumbing of data in the Internet and was looking at problems like how you keep networks operating. And I started to read about climate change, and I was very curious about the symptoms that we were starting to see in the climate system and where the risk really was. And I started to get to know various senior climate scientists in the Bay Area and other places, and I asked them the question like you might ask, how would you characterize the risk of runaway climate change in our lifetime? And this is maybe twelve years ago.And they said, "Well, it's in the single digits, but not the low single digits."David RobertsNot super comforting.Kelly WanserYeah, I mean, my original degree was economics, so I thought, well, if you had those odds of winning the lottery, you'd be out buying tickets. If you had those odds of cancer, you'd be getting treatment. So that seemed like a really high risk to be exposed to. And then they told me about another feature of what was happening in that carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for a long time, keeping things warm. Comes out very slowly. So even if you stop emissions completely and there are other dynamics going on, the system will continue to warm for a while.And so you've got another few decades of warming. So wherever you are and whatever you see, you've got some additional warming that's going to happen, which means that whatever risk point you're at, you reach a higher risk point over that period of time. And so I became very interested in that problem, because there's a mismatch between the increased risk profile of really serious and catastrophic climate events and impacts and the kinds of responses that we had to reduce the risk. So really my organization is focused on what we call "near-term climate risk," which is the 30 to 40 year time horizon where the things we ne

In this episode, Brian Deese, outgoing director of the National Economic Council and an influential advisor to President Biden, discusses the opportunities and challenges in Democrats’ new focus on industrial policy.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBrian Deese has had a remarkable two years. As President Joe Biden’s top economic advisor and director the National Economic Council, he has played a key role in defining and implementing Biden's policy approach. In April of last year, he delivered some “remarks on a modern American industrial strategy” that laid out a vigorous approach to investing in economic sectors deemed important to national and economic security. And by all accounts Deese played a pivotal role in seeing the strategy into law, through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which together amount to the greatest reinvestment in US infrastructure and manufacturing — and, specifically, clean energy industries — in generations. The pivot to unapologetic industrial policy is a big change for Democrats. Deese has moved in those circles for a long time — ten years ago he was a young wunderkind advisor to Obama, making The New Republic’s list of “Washington's most powerful, least famous people” — so as he prepares to depart the administration, I was eager to talk with him about what the shift to industrial policy means, why the US needs to onshore key supply chains, and the work ahead for Democrats in implementing their new laws.All right, then. Brian Deese, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Brian DeeseOh, I'm really happy to be here.David RobertsI had, I'll say, a little banter, maybe a couple of jokes scheduled here for the front end of the pod. But then I looked at my list of questions for you, and we don't have time for any jokes, Brian. We don't have time for any banter.Brian DeeseVery serious, very quick.David RobertsWe got to get deadly serious right off the bat here. So let's start here in 2012. Ten years ago, you were the deputy director of the NEC under Obama. And in 2022, ten years later, you were the director of the NEC under Biden. And I'm just curious how things have changed, how America's sort of strategic economic outlook has changed in that ten years. And specifically, I'm curious whether the sort of vigorous investment in industrial policy that we're going to talk about here in a little bit, the kind of stuff that has been going on under Biden, whether you were recommending that to Obama at the time, or whether there's something importantly unique about this present moment.Brian DeeseWell, look, I think a lot of the world has changed since that period, both in policy and economic terms. If you think back to 2012, we were both right on the back end of a historic and transformational policy accomplishment in the enactment of the Affordable Care Acts, which changed the fabric of our economic and social safety net in important ways right on the front end of that implementation. And at the same time, in a period of very challenging and slow recovery from the Great Recession that was made worse by a failure of policy, a failure of the ability for Congress to overcome Republican opposition at the time, to invest more, to try to help to drive a stronger recovery. You look over those ten years, we live through a period that a number of people have characterized as secular stagnation where our output was constrained and that had a lot of impacts on quality, on labor markets.And then of course, we lived through this once in a century event of the global pandemic and in many ways historically unprecedented in modern human history. And I think that that helped to bring to the forefront a set of economic challenges that had persisted over that decade and much longer. But we're now really to the floor, particularly the vulnerability of supply chains and the weaknesses in our industrial capacity as a country. And so those things together helped to crystallize the economic strategy that Biden as a candidate put out in 2020 and really have been pursuing, that in some important ways have similarities to things we were promoting at the time.Significant investment in physical infrastructure is something that has been clearly necessary for a long time, but in some ways have important differences. I think we've got a different approach to clean energy and clean energy deployment at scale, which I'm sure we'll get into here, but also the prioritization of key geostrategic priorities like rebuilding semiconductor capacity here in the United States. So I think the landscape looks very different now economically both because of some of these significant economic changes but also policy changes as well.David RobertsWhat you're talking about and sort of what's come to the fore over the last ten years policy wise goes under the umbrella term of industrial policy. There's been a lot of kind of hype

The lowly circuit breaker was first patented by Thomas Edison and hasn’t been updated much since — until Atom Power CEO Ryan Kennedy came along and made a digital version. In this episode, he describes the basics of the digital circuit breaker, the ways it’s making a difference in the EV charging market, and its gamechanging potential. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsThere is perhaps no building block of the electricity grid more fundamental, ubiquitous, and overlooked than the humble circuit breaker. Every electronic device that is attached to the grid runs through a circuit breaker, a device that automatically shuts off current in the case of a fault or surge.Currently, though they have become extremely reliable, circuit breakers still rely on technology that was patented by Thomas Edison. They operate purely through electromechanical forces, with no digital control.My guest today, Ryan Kennedy, is the first person to develop, patent, pass UL testing with, and commercialize a digital circuit breaker. It is solid state — that is, it has no moving parts — and current is controlled entirely through semiconductors.In addition to being faster and safer than electromechanical equivalents, each digital circuit breaker contains within it its own firmware and software, which can be programmed to emulate, and thereby replace, any number of other software-driven devices like demand management systems, load controllers, meters, and surge protectors.Kennedy's company, Atom Power, is currently focused on the electric-vehicle charging market, offering smart load balancing and management from a centralized circuit board, replacing the need for complicated hardware and software in the EV chargers themselves.But the ultimate applications for a digital circuit breaker are endless. Everywhere they are attached, a grid becomes a smart grid and appliances become smart appliances. If even a substantial fraction of today's circuit breakers could be replaced with digital equivalents, it would bring unprecedented visibility and control to millions of distributed energy devices, enabling all sorts of sophisticated demand management.I was extremely geeked to talk to Kennedy about the basics of circuit breakers, their application to EV charging, and the many possibilities that lie beyond.Alright, then. Ryan Kennedy, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Ryan KennedyDavid, thank you for having me.David RobertsThis is awesome. I'm so interested in this widget and its possibilities, but I think to help people get their heads around it. Before we get too deep into anything, let's just start at the most basic level. For those of us who were humanities majors and never took any electrical engineering or anything, let's just talk about what is a circuit breaker. I know people are very vaguely aware of circuit breakers. They are in a circuit box in your garage. Occasionally, your power goes out, and you wander out to your garage and flip switches around and try to see what works.But, I think that's probably the extent of most people's knowledge. So let's just start there.Ryan KennedyCircuit breakers, electrically speaking, are one of the oldest products on the market. They first were invented, at least patented by Thomas Edison to show you how far back they go. But, they're effectively a method of interrupting the flow of electricity when things go wrong. Too much current, short circuits, things like that. The purpose of the circuit breaker is to simply open the circuit when those things happen and protect from fire, primarily.David RobertsAnd, presumably, protecting the appliances and the things on the other end of the wire, too right.Ryan KennedyGenerally, that's the assumption, though I don't know that it's necessarily the explicit purpose. I think the more explicit purpose is to prevent fire. That could mean your equipment may go bad, in the process, but generally speaking, to prevent fire and hazardous conditions from electricity.David RobertsAnd so, every appliance, or device, or anything that uses electricity from the grid is connected to the grid through a circuit breaker. Is that true? Is that a universal rule?Ryan KennedyThat's right. Actually, the easiest way to visualize that is to think about the home or apartment, where you have a panel with breakers in it that typically open the front door and you can see breakers in there, and you flip switches and things go wrong. So basically, you have a big power feed from the utility that comes into that home to that panel, and then out of that panel, power gets distributed through each one of those little circuit breakers out to individual loads in your home, such as hot water, HVAC, lights, receptacles. That scales out. Commercial buildings and industrial buildings and data centers are the exact same thing.I mean, there's more breakers, and they often get bigger, but it's the exact same architecture across the entire planet. Or the circuit breake

A newly signed state law sets Minnesota on course to use 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040. In this episode, Minnesota House Majority Leader Jamie Long describes the decisive legislating that took an ambitious climate bill from introduction to the governor’s desk in the space of one month. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBack in 2019, I wrote for Vox that there is one weird trick states can use to ensure good climate and energy policy. That trick is: giving Democrats full control of the government. It has worked in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii — the list goes on.As I covered in a pod a few months ago, the 2022 midterm elections brought Democrats full control — with trifectas of both houses of the legislature and the governor's office — in four new M states: Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota.Does the one weird trick still work? Well, you’ll never guess what happened in Minnesota last week. Gov. Tim Walz signed into law a historic piece of legislation that would set the state on a course to carbon-free electricity: 80 percent by 2030, 90 percent by 2035, and 100 percent by 2040.My guest today is the bill’s primary author and sponsor, Minnesota House Majority Leader Jamie Long. Long, formerly legislative director for then–U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), was elected to the Minnesota legislature in 2018 and became majority leader this year. He worked closely with Senate sponsor Nick Frentz to shepherd the bill quickly through the legislature, with no extended conference committee. It was an adept and decisive bit of legislating — not necessarily the norm for Democrats. I was excited to talk to Long about some of the ins and outs of the bill, the forces that supported and opposed it, and what's next for Minnesota energy policy. All right, then. Representative Jamie Long of Minnesota, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming. And I guess the first thing I should say is congratulations.Jamie LongThank you. It's a big month out here in Minnesota.David RobertsYeah, big news. I want to get into the actual bill and the actual targets and everything, but just let's do a brief bit of history to start with. You arrived in the Minnesota legislature in 2018. I'm curious when this bill was born, basically, how long has this been cooking?Jamie LongSure. Well, this was my top-priority bill from my very first day I ran for office wanting to work on climate change and clean energy, and knew that 100% clean energy was the big bill that I wanted to focus my efforts on. So, we introduced this pretty early in my very first year in office. So actually, when we had the bill signing, I was looking back, and it was about four years to the week from when we had a bill signing that I'd introduced it. So, that was the first time we'd had 100% clean energy proposal in Minnesota, but we certainly had a lot of other renewable energy standards that had been tried and had failed over the years. The last time we'd updated our renewable energy standard was 2007 in the state.David Roberts2007. And that was, I'm guessing, the last time you had Democratic control over both Houses?Jamie LongNo, in fact, it was broadly bipartisan. It was signed by Governor Tim Pawlenty, Republican governor, who later it became a political issue when he ran for President because the Republican primary voters were not that happy that he was a clean energy leader who took climate change seriously. But it got such broad bipartisan support, it was almost unanimous in the House and Senate at the time.David RobertsWild.Jamie LongAnd that was 25% renewable energy standard by 2025 was what was passed at that time. That seemed really ambitious, but we actually met that in 2017, so we met it eight years early.So, at the time it seemed like it was going to be a big deal.David RobertsIf only we would ever learn from experience.Jamie LongI know, right?David RobertsThat's the same story with every single one of these that's ever passed anywhere.Jamie LongThat's right. But we do have only the second trifecta in the last 30 years in the state. We did have one in 2013, 2014. We didn't update the renewable energy standard then, but we did do some other good climate policy. But yes, unfortunately, since 2007, climate and clean energy has taken a turn for partisanship in the state. And so it has taken until we got this trifecta, and we have it barely in the Senate. This will sound familiar to the congressional story, but we have a one vote margin in the Senate, and we have a two vote margin in the House.David RobertsCrazy. And this was pretty rapid and decisive. Like, you guys have not been in office for that for that long.Jamie LongYou got it. Signed within a month.David RobertsThat's unusual to see the Democratic Party acting with such alacrity and clarity of purpose. I don't know what's going on here.Jamie LongWell, we felt like we heard loud and clear from

In this episode, utility watchdog David Pomerantz discusses all the ways that utilities use ratepayer money to lobby against the clean-energy transition — and what regulators and policy makers can do to stop it.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsThere are many features of US public life that I believe, perhaps naively, would be the subject of a great deal more anger were they better understood. One of those is the role utilities play in climate policy.A rapid transition to a low-carbon energy system is necessary to avoid the worst of climate change. Happily, that transition is going to be an enormous net benefit to US public health and the US economy. It's good for quality of life, economic growth, international competitiveness, national security, and the long-term inhabitability of the planet.But it’s not necessarily good for the companies that actually sell energy to customers — power and gas utilities. In fact, utilities are using every tool at their disposal to slow the energy transition, from lobbying to PR campaigns to donations to, as the last few years have demonstrated, outright bribery.And here's the even more galling bit: they are fighting against the clean-energy transition using your money. They use ratepayer money — from captive customers over whom they are granted a monopoly — to fund their lobbying. They have effectively conscripted their customers, who have no choice where to get their power and gas, into an involuntary small-donor army working against the public interest.It’s outrageous. In a new report called “Getting Politics Out of Utility Bills,” the Energy and Policy Institute — one of the best utility watchdogs out there — details some of this utility corruption and offers recommendations for how to prevent it. These are not futile recommendations to Congress, but actions that fall within the current powers of state regulators and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.I have been ranting about utilities for years, and one of my most reliable sources on the subject has always been the report’s author, Energy and Policy Institute Executive Director David Pomerantz, so I was eager to talk to him to air some shared grievances, hear some enraging tales of utility shenanigans, and discuss what can be done to rein them in. All righty, then. David Pomeranz. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.David PomeranzThank you so much for having me.David RobertsI was thinking of you just earlier today as I saw a new story in the Washington Post about how the gas industry is under fire and it is now hiring Democratic politicians to shill for it. And I thought: "Golly, isn't that thematically on point?". So it seems like a perfect time to be covering this report. Before we get into specifics of who's done what and how to stop them from doing it, let's just start with power utilities are out there getting involved in politics. And let's just sort of discuss what is their net effect on politics. Like, what are they pushing for and against out there in the states and at the federal level?David PomeranzThat is a great question, and I think it will be important in context for your listeners who I am count myself as a loyal one, and I know many are thinking about climate change, and energy policy, and decarbonization, and the energy transition. And if they are concerned about those things then they should be concerned about utilities, political power and their political machines. So let's talk about what their political agenda is. And we're talking about both electric and gas utilities. Oftentimes the same companies, but sometimes, you know, there are utilities that sell gas only and electricity only. And they're all relevant to this conversation.So, since you mentioned, gas utilities pushing back against building electrification, and that has certainly been in the news quite a lot this month, so we can start there, because that's really simple. The gas utilities sector is, with almost no exceptions, united in its aggressive political effort to stave off building electrification. They basically see that as an existential threat to their existence. They have for some time.David RobertsAnd it is.David PomeranzYeah, we can be honest about that, I think.David RobertsYeah.David PomeranzWe'll talk about electric utilities, of course. You know, electric utilities have not only a role to play in decarbonized world and a transition from fossil fuels, but really like the very central role to play in it. And I wish they would, more of them would get religion on that. But gas utilities don't really. Their role is, they make money from putting methane gas in pipes and sending it to buildings and factories.David RobertsThese companies that are both, you can sort of see a root out of this for them. But an exclusively gas utility really is, you know, destined for the trash bin of history, and knows it and is fighting it tooth and nail. But some of the stuff electric utilities are fig

Will widespread electrification of the US personal-vehicle sector inevitably be accompanied by a huge rise in environmentally destructive lithium mining? Not necessarily, says a new report. In this episode, lead author Thea Riofrancos discusses options for reducing future lithium demand through density, infrastructure, and smart transportation choices.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsThe transportation sector is the leading carbon emitter in the US economy, and unlike some other sources, it is on the rise. Decarbonizing it is inevitably going to involve wholesale electrification of personal vehicles. We're going to need lots and lots of EVs. That’s going to mean more demand for minerals like lithium, which is mined in environmentally destructive ways and almost everywhere opposed by local and indigenous groups. But lithium can be mined in more or less harmful ways, depending on where and how it’s done and how well it’s governed. And the number of EVs needed in the future — and the consequent demand for lithium — is not fixed. The US transportation sector could decarbonize in more or less car-intensive ways. If US cities densified and built better public transportation and more walking and cycling infrastructure, fewer people would need cars and the cars could get by with smaller batteries. That would mean less demand for lithium, less mining, and less destruction.But how much less? That brings us to a new report: “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining,” from the Climate and Community Project and UC Davis. It models the lithium intensity of several different pathways to decarbonization for the US personal-vehicle market to determine how much lithium demand could be reduced in different zero-carbon scenarios.It’s a novel line of research (hopefully a sign of more to come) and an important step toward deepening and complicating the discussion of US transportation decarbonization. I was thrilled to talk to its lead author, Thea Riofrancos, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and associate professor of political science at Providence College, about the reality of lithium mining, the coming demand for more lithium, and the ways that demand can be reduced through smart transportation choices.Alright. Thea Riofrancos, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Thea RiofrancosThanks for inviting me.David RobertsI've been meeting to get you on forever and waiting for the right occasion, and this is just a humdinger of an occasion here, this report. It's right at the nexus of, like, a lot of things I cover a lot, and a lot of things I feel like I should cover more, bringing them together. So before we jump into the details, I just want to take a step back and summarize the report, the framing of the report as I see it, because I've seen and heard some media coverage of the report, and I'm always just a little frustrated by how other journalists cover things.Thea RiofrancosUnderstandably.David RobertsIt's just this weird oblique... they don't take the time to sort of say, "what is the main thing?" Before getting on into weird little side questions. So I'll just say, as I understand it, the premise of the report here is we need to decarbonize transportation, yes. And electrifying vehicles is a huge and unavoidable part of that and extracting a lot of lithium is an unavoidable part of that. However, and here I will quote the report, "The volume of extraction is not a given. Neither is it a given where that extraction takes place, under what circumstances, the degree of the environmental and social impacts, or how mining is governed."So the idea here is: yes, we have to decarbonize, we have to electrify, we have to electrify transportation. We need electric vehicles, but there are better and worse ways of doing that, more and less just ways of doing that, more and less lithium-intensive ways of doing that, and we should do it the best way we can. Is that fair?Thea RiofrancosThat is fair. And you've also quoted one of actually my personal favorite lines of the report, because I agree with you that it really gets at the heart of what our goals are, the kind of questions that we're asking, and also this desire to align goals that might seem in tension with one another, right? Which is rapid decarbonization on the one hand, and on the other hand, protecting biodiversity, Indigenous' rights, respecting other land uses, and those can feel—and to an extent, materially are—in tension with one another in specific instances. But our goal was to say, "Is there a way to have it all from a climate justice perspective?"What's the win win? Or what's the way to get away from at least a sort of zero-sum framing?David RobertsRight. Or just a north star, a way to look, a goal to pursue rather than just sort of this binary notion of we're going to electrify transportation or not. There's just a ton of room within that to do it in different ways. So that's the main thing here. We're thinking abou

How can electric school buses be made accessible and cost-effective? In this episode, Highland Electric Fleets CEO Duncan McIntyre makes the case for why school districts should overcome the challenges to bus electrification, and the ways his company’s subscription model helps them do so.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOne of my very favorite things in the world to talk about — second perhaps only to electric postal vehicles — is electric school buses. It's difficult to think of a more righteous cause than reducing air and noise pollution in direct proximity to the country's most sensitive lungs and ears.Currently, however, electric school buses still cost two to three times what their diesel competitors cost, which can be daunting for school districts with tight budgets. Electric buses pay themselves off over time through dramatically lower fuel and maintenance costs, but the upfront costs of the transition are steep enough to scare away many administrators.My guest today runs a company called Highland Electric Fleets that is attempting to overcome that challenge by offering a new business model. Rather than purchase and maintain the buses themselves, school districts pay Highland a subscription fee, locked in for a 15-year contract, which covers the buses, a depot, charging infrastructure, scheduling, training, and ongoing maintenance and replacement of buses when required.In addition to a saving most school districts money immediately, the subscription contract derisks the transition to electric buses. That is about the best thing I can think of that someone could be doing these days, so I was eager to talk to Highland CEO Duncan McIntyre about the advantages of electric buses, the challenges school districts face, and the problems solved by the subscription model.Alright, with no further ado, Duncan McIntyre, welcome to Volts. Thank you for coming.Duncan McIntyreDavid, thanks for having me.David RobertsThis is awesome. Volts listeners are so interested in electric school buses, so I just have a gazillion questions, so let's jump right into it. Tell us, what are the advantages or benefits of an electric school bus over the current line of school buses, which as I understand it, are mostly diesel?Duncan McIntyreThat's right, they're mostly diesel. A little over 80% today. But your question is about the advantages of electric. I think the list is long, but I would highlight a few of the big ones. There's a clear benefit in emissions profile just in the health of everyone who's operating or riding a bus. There's no tailpipe at all, and as a result, they're very clean. Another big advantage is they just operate much cheaper. The fuel is a lot less expensive, there are very few moving parts compared to a diesel bus, and as a result, there's no oil changes, there's no exhaust filters. There's lots of things that just aren't on electric buses, and so operating is much less expensive.David RobertsAnd I don't want to get caught up in the whole thing too early, but I'm trying to sort of conceive of the sort of magnitude of the pollution reductions here. Like, have there been measurements or studies about the difference when an electric school bus replaces a diesel bus? Or are we too early to know for sure about that kind of stuff?Duncan McIntyreI think there have been plenty of studies about the health impacts of a diesel bus. And the comparison is simply the health impacts of not having a diesel bus since the electric format has literally no tailpipe and no emissions profile at all. But the health studies have been done by groups like American Lung Association, groups like that, and there's quite a few data points that look at reduction in NOx and particulate matter, specifically on things like pediatric asthma. I would say that's one of the main studies that has taken place, but also tying the emissions associated with the diesel tailpipe to just other general health key indicators.David RobertsYeah, one thing I would toss out too, because people always forget about this, but is noise pollution, which is the research on noise pollution is wild. I don't think people appreciate the effect that has. And all these kids are effectively sitting right next to a jet engine, more or less. It's extremely loud. But the first question that comes up for everybody is they cost more. So what is the current cost differential between an electric school bus and a diesel school bus?Duncan McIntyreThe electric school bus ranges from $275,000 to $375,000, really, depending on the state you're in. And your question is about the differential. It's about $200,000 of differential on average. So it's a $200,000 premium to buy an electric.David RobertsThat's not small. That's two or three x the cost.Duncan McIntyreThat's exactly right. It's not small.David RobertsLet's also talk about some of the other barriers other than cost for a school district looking... if I'm in a school district, I have this wild id

In this episode, Raffi Garabedian, CEO of startup Electric Hydrogen, discusses all things electrolyzer, the current hydrogen market, and the future risks and opportunities for green hydrogen. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsVolts subscribers are likely well aware of the fact that a fully decarbonized energy system is going to require an enormous amount of hydrogen to fill in the gaps left by wind and solar. What's more, they are probably aware that hydrogen comes in a dazzling variety of colors, from blue to gray to brown, depending on the carbon intensity of the production.In the end, though, only one such color matters: green. That is to say, a fully decarbonized energy system is going to require lots and lots of hydrogen made with renewable energy, with no carbon emissions. The way to do that is to run water and electrical current through an electrolyzer, which splits the hydrogen off from the oxygen.Currently, about 95 percent of the world's hydrogen is made using fossil fuels. Green hydrogen — hydrogen made with renewable energy and electrolyzers — comprises only a sliver of the remaining 5 percent. Yet it’s going to have to scale up to 100 percent in the next several decades, even as demand for hydrogen rises.This is all a familiar story, at least to energy nerds. But if you're anything like me, the more you think about it, the more you realize that, despite the key role they play in that story, you don't actually know very much about electrolyzers themselves. What are they, exactly? What do they look like? How can they be improved? What policy is supporting them?To talk through these questions, I contacted Raffi Garabedian, the CEO of Electric Hydrogen, a startup that has set out to rapidly drive down the cost of green hydrogen. Garabedian, who was previously chief technology officer at First Solar, believes that the market for green hydrogen today is roughly where the solar market was in 2008, with all the attendant risks and opportunities.Garabedian (quite patiently) walked me through the basics of electrolyzers, the current state of the market and the technology, the kind of cost improvements he believes are possible within the next five years, the increasingly supportive policy environment, and the future of green hydrogen.With no further ado, Raffi Garabedian, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Raffi GarabedianIt's great to be here, David.David RobertsI'm excited to talk today about electrolyzers because I think I am, and I think probably most of my listeners are already convinced that hydrogen is going to play an important role in a decarbonized electricity system. I think we can just assume that. And I already think, and I think my listeners probably already know this too, that in a true decarbonized system, it's going to have to be so called "green hydrogen," hydrogen made without greenhouse gases. I know there are 50 other colors made from different other things with varying levels of greenhouse gas production. But, I think—and obviously you think, since you've predicated your business on it—that we got to make green hydrogen work.And green hydrogen is hydrogen made with renewable electricity and electrolyzers. So, we know all that. But I find that when I think about the technologies involved, I have a pretty good understanding of all the pieces of that puzzle, except for electrolyzers. They're just kind of this thing that plugs into a certain spot in the diagram. But I find that when I actually focus in on it and think about it, I turn out to know very little about electrolyzers. So I'm very excited to have you on the pod today because I suspect I'm not the only one who has that sort of gap in my knowledge. So maybe we can just start with: what is an electrolyzer?Raffi GarabedianYeah, let's start there. Let's first start by just exploring and defining the problem that we're trying to solve, right? So we're trying to make hydrogen, which is both a feedstock and a fuel, and we're trying to make it using renewable energy. So how does that work? Well, it all starts with the water molecule. So everybody knows water is... what's the chemical formula for water? It's H2O. So think of that as oxidized hydrogen. Hydrogen, the word, actually is derived from hydro: water, gen: produces. So when you burn hydrogen yeah, interesting, right? When you burn hydrogen, you get water as a result.So burning is oxidation. So what an electrolyzer does is the opposite of that. It's the reverse of oxidation, which is called reduction. But it does so electrochemically. Now, what does that mean? Electrochemistry is a whole field of science and technology that involves the interaction between chemical reactions and electricity. And generally the kinds of electrochemical systems that are used in industry involve things like membranes and electrodes. But the function of these devices is to drive some sort of a chemical reaction that requires energy towards a desired end state.

British researcher Erica Thompson’s recently published book is a thorough critique of the world of mathematical modeling. In this episode, she discusses the limitations of models, the role of human judgment, and how climate modeling could be improved.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsEveryone who's followed climate change for any length of time is familiar with the central role that complex mathematical models play in climate science and politics. Models give us predictions about how much the Earth's atmosphere will warm and how much it will cost to prevent or adapt to that warming.British researcher Erica Thompson has been thinking about the uses and misuse of mathematical modeling for years, and she has just come out with an absorbing and thought-provoking new book on the subject called Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It.More than anything, it is an extended plea for epistemological humility — a proper appreciation of the intrinsic limitations of modeling, the deep uncertainties that can never be eliminated, and the ineradicable role of human judgment in interpreting model results and applying them to the real world.As Volts listeners know, my favorite kind of book takes a set of my vague intuitions and theories and lays them out in a cogent, well-researched argument. One does love having one's priors confirmed! I wrote critiques of climate modeling at Vox and even way back at Grist — it's been a persistent interest of mine — but Thompson's book lays out a full, rich account of what models can and can't help us do, and how we can put them to better use.I was thrilled to talk with her about some of her critiques of models and how they apply to climate modeling, among many other things. This is a long one! But a good one, I think. Settle in.Alright, then, with no further ado, Erica Thompson, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Erica ThompsonHi. Great to be here.David RobertsI loved your book, and I'm so glad you wrote it. I just want to start there.Erica ThompsonThat's great. Thank you. Good to hear.David RobertsWay, way back in the Mesozoic era, when I was a young writer at a tiny little publication called Grist—this would have been like 2005, I think—one of the first things I wrote that really kind of blew up and became popular was, bizarrely, a long piece about discount rates and their role in climate models. And the whole point of that post was, this is clearly a dispute over values. This is an ethical dispute that is happening under cover of science. And if we're going to have these ethical judgments so influential in our world, we should drag them out into the light and have those disputes in public with some democratic input.And for whatever reason, people love that post. I still hear about that post to this day. So, all of which is just to say, I have a long-standing interest in this and models and how we use them, and I think there's more public interest in this than you might think. So, that's all preface. I'm not here to do a soliloquy about how much I loved your book. Let's start with just briefly about your background. Were you in another field and kept running across models and then started thinking about how they work? Or were you always intending to study models directly? How did you end up here?Erica ThompsonYeah, okay. So, I mean, my background is maths and physics. And after studying that at university, I went to do a PhD, and that was in climate change physics. So climate science about North Atlantic storms. And the first thing I did—as you do—was a literature review about what would happen to North Atlantic storms given climate change, more CO2 in the atmosphere. And so you look at models for that. And so, I started looking at the models, and I looked at them, and this was sort of 10-15 years ago now—and certainly there's more consensus now—but at that time, it was really the case that you could find models doing almost anything with North American storms.You could find one saying... the storm tracks would move north, they'd move south, they'd get stronger, they'd get weaker, they'd be more intense storms, less intense storms. And they didn't even agree within their own aerobars. And that was what really stuck out to me, was that, actually, because these distributions weren't even overlapping, it wasn't telling me very much at all about North Atlantic storms, but it was telling me a great deal about models and the way that we use models. And so I got really interested in how we make inferences from models. How do we construct ranges and uncertainty ranges from model output? What should we do with it? What does it even mean? And then I've kind of gone from there into looking at models in a series of other contexts. And the book sort of brings together those thoughts into what I hope is a more cohesive argument about the use of models.David RobertsYeah, it's a real rabbit hole. It goes dee

In this episode, climate communications expert Sage Welch gives scientific and social context to the politicized brouhaha around gas stoves.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsEarlier this month, gas stoves exploded into the news. Overnight, everyone had an opinion and Republican Congresspeople were threatening violence if jackbooted government thugs arrived to confiscate their stoves.A great deal of this gas stove discourse has been lamentably stupid, and some of it has been educational, but on all sides, there's just been a lot of it, so I thought it was worth doing a podcast trying to tease out the facts.To help with that I contacted the Sage Welch of Sunstone Strategies, a climate communications firm that's been supporting electrification policies since 2018. Welch has spent years tracking the science (which has been accumulating for decades), public opinion, and regulatory action on gas stoves. Together, we dig into how this controversy arose, the science informing it, how the politics are shaping up, and what it portends for the future of decarbonization.Alright, here we go. Without any further ado, Sage Welch, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Sage WelchThank you for having me.David RobertsSo we're going to do this, we're going to get into stoves. Those of us who have been following decarbonisation and electrification have known about this for a while and probably have been cooking with induction for a while, but Lordy, did it bust into the popular consciousness in the past week or two and just cause a frenzy of nonsense. So, we're going to try to walk through the whole thing here, the background, the science, what's ahead. We're going to try to get it all, God help us. Alright, so, Sage, first of all, why now? What happened? Why is everybody talking about gas stoves now?Sage WelchYeah. So the roots of the past couple weeks debate is the result of three different things that happened in December. So, in December, the Public Interest Research Group held a webinar. The webinar was to launch a report that they had done with the Sierra Club based on a ten state survey of what information, if any, gas stove shoppers were receiving at point of sale from the nation's three largest retailers of stoves about the health risks and how folks can protect themselves, et cetera. And the answer to that was like, not very much information at all.David RobertsYeah, I'm guessing none is approximately none.Sage WelchNone and a lot of disinformation. Don't worry about ventilation. And many folks just hadn't heard of it. And to be fair, the retailers haven't been able to train their sales associates and staff. This just hasn't been on the radar. But they thought it was important to take a look and just see does anyone even get any inkling of this information when they're shopping? And so Richard Trumka, Jr., who is a consumer product safety commissioner, joined that webinar and he used that time to announce that the CPSC would be opening an RFI, a request for information on gas stove pollution in 2023.And he used pretty strong language. He said we need to be talking about regulating gas stoves, whether that's drastically improving emissions or banning gas stoves entirely. And this is pretty surprising, even to health and consumer advocates who've been urging CPSC to investigate this in recent years, but also going back 40 years.David RobertsSounds like it was pretty surprising to his own agency and to his bosses. Sounds like it was pretty surprising to everyone.Sage WelchThe world was not ready for Trumka Jr. to make this statement.David RobertsDo you know why? I mean, is he just the kind of guy who gets excited and gets out over his skis? Do you hear any hint of deliberate twelve-dimensional chess here? Or is this just Trumka getting too excited?Sage WelchI mean, it was a PERG webinar, so I'm not sure that, like, there was a lot of chess playing going on.David RobertsThat's a lot of dimensions of chess if you're starting there.Sage WelchThe sense I get about his position on this, and again at the CPSC level and we'll get to this, this issue is like, not new. But the sense I get is that he just takes his role and the role of the commission quite seriously as far as duty to protect consumers. And this question about whether gas stoves are safe or can be made safe has been hanging around for a while. But when he says banning gas stoves, I think maybe what he is getting at is like, he made these follow up remarks to Bloomberg a month later on products that can't be made safe can be banned. And I think, again, what he's getting at is just like, there is a duty at the commission to ensure safety of products. And as we'll jump into, there is what EPA and many others deem a safe level of NO2 pollution. And jury's still out on whether gas stoves are safe in that regard.David RobertsOr can be made safe in that regard.Sage WelchAnd can be made safe, exactly.David RobertsOkay, so Trumka says

In this episode, as a guest on Canadian daily news podcast The Big Story, I discuss a momentous fusion breakthrough, just how close we actually are to a future of unlimited clean energy (hint: not very), and where we should be focusing instead.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsA few weeks ago, I was a guest on the Canadian daily news podcast The Big Story, chatting with host Jordan Heath-Rawlings about the big fusion news from December, the public’s hunger for energy breakthroughs, and the energy revolution that’s going on before our very eyes while we get lost in sci-fi fantasies. It was fun! The team was kind enough to allow me to share it as an episode of Volts, so please enjoy, and go ahead and subscribe to The Big Story wherever you get your podcasts.Frequency Podcast NetworkYou're listening to a Frequency podcast network production in association with City News.Jordan Heath-RawlingsIf you've listened to this show for any length of time, you will know that we think scientific breakthroughs are cool, especially when they show us a path to a theoretically unlimited source of clean energy. When you look at the trouble we're in, it's easy to understand why anyone could get caught up in that height.Media soundbiteThe power that powers the sun, an abundant source of clean energy to help the planet kick its carbon addiction.This is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.It's a star in a box. Putting it in a box on Earth and tapping that energy that goes forever. It's what Iron Man has in his chest.Jordan Heath-RawlingsNow, here is where I get to be a buzzkill. When a scientific breakthrough hits the mainstream media, it's important to look immediately to the people who have covered the sector before that breakthrough. They are the ones who can separate hype from hope. And while, as I said, the fusion breakthrough in December was legitimately cool, ask some of the people who have been covering clean energy and the climate crisis and they'll tell you a story of other technologies.The ones that we have right now, the ones that actually are changing the game we are currently playing and those people wonder why can't we focus on these things right now instead of waiting for a miracle? I'm Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is "The Big Story". David Roberts runs a newsletter and a podcast called Volts, which discusses clean energy and politics. You can find it at volts.wtf. That is an interesting suffix for your website.David RobertsYes. I didn't even know it existed until I was trying to register a domain, and then I made a rather impulsive purchase.Jordan Heath-RawlingsWell, at least it's memorable. Now, before we get into what's going to happen in clean energy this year, which I'm really intrigued by, can you maybe quickly take us back to December? And I'm sure many people listening will remember a big headline and discussion about fusion. What was that news?David RobertsSure. The National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been experimenting with fusion for years and years now, and they just achieved a goal that they have been pursuing for a long time, which is they got more energy out of a fusion reaction than was put into it. And this is a big milestone in fusion research.Jordan Heath-RawlingsWhy is that milestone, theoretically at least, so important?David RobertsWell, you have to untangle a few things. In the big picture, the hope is that eventually you can master fusion to the point that it can create clean energy because the fuels required to run fusion are cheap and abundant, it's carbon free. Theoretically, fusion power plants would have a very small footprint. So, from the energy perspective it's sort of this tantalizing utopian energy source. In the actual fusion world, the Lawrence Livermore Lab is not even in the business of researching fusion for energy production. They're actually more geared toward weapons research. There are other fusion companies pursuing energy production, but they use actually a fundamentally different technology, a fundamentally different form of fusion which has not reached this threshold, this breakthrough.But there's lots of companies pursuing fusion and depending on how seriously you take their hype, maybe they'll be producing actual power plants that produce actual energy in a decade. Some of them are saying earlier than that, but they're also trying to raise money so one doesn't know how seriously to take them. But one thing to keep in mind is the Lawrence Livermore Facility costs about a billion dollars to create this small amount of energy it created. And the alternative forms of fusion claim that they will be able to create power plants for merely hundreds of millions of dollars. So, all of this is speculative and distant, let's say.Jordan Heath-RawlingsWell yeah, I mean we used theoretically a lot there, there's a lot of caveats I noticed that you kind of threw into your description of

In this episode, author Stephen Markley discusses his new novel, The Deluge, which describes a future affected by climate change that hits uncomfortably close to home.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn 2018, author Stephen Markley won near-universal critical praise with his debut novel Ohio, a tight set piece that takes place over the course of a single night, as four high school classmates reunite at a diner in their northeastern Ohio hometown. “Four characters, one night” is pretty much the opposite of Markley’s sprawling new novel The Deluge, which tracks dozens of characters over the course of decades, from the 2010s out past 2040, everyone from climate activists to scientists to political operatives, as they suffer the effects of climate change (there are some quasi-biblical disasters) and struggle to marshal the political will to address it.The novel crucially involves climate policy, reactionary backlashes, and direct activism, among other topics of great interest to the Volts audience. On Thursday January 12th at Seattle’s Third Place Books, I was lucky enough to talk to Markley about the genesis of the novel, some of its major themes, and the difficulties he faced in writing it.The crew at Third Place was kind enough to record the event (thanks Spencer!), so I'm happy to bring it to you as an episode of Volts. Please enjoy, and while you're at it, do the smart thing and buy copies of The Deluge for all the readers in your life.Third Place Books StaffPlease join me in welcoming Stephen Markley and David Roberts to Third Place Books. David RobertsWhere to begin? I'm just going to jump right in asking Stephen questions because I have nothing interesting to say. So, I've been writing nonfiction my whole life and have thought periodically about writing fiction—like every nonfiction author does—and even took a while one summer or one time when I had some time off to sort of sit and stare at the screen for a while and think about doing it. I had kind of a plot for a near future quasi-scifi thing, and there are tons and tons of reasons why I very quickly concluded that I was not suited to writing fiction.But one of them was the one I still think about, which is just: "What does the near future look like?" And the more I thought about that, the more I thought, "Boy, I have no idea at all what the near future looks like." I mean, I guess you could say that at any time in history, but it seems like particularly now, there's just so much crazy s**t going on. It's really like, how is it all going to interact and play out? And I found myself completely daunted and shut down by that problem.So here you are. You have decided to start a novel basically two years in the past, and then literally just detail what happens—not in some fictional world or some far off world—what happens in this world among these people in this country over the next two, four, six, ten years in detail. And that just strikes me as just, like, fictionally speaking, the highest conceivable level of difficulty that you could set yourself. Why do that? In the book that we talked a little bit beforehand, you were thinking about even before Ohio, it just seems like the hardest thing you could do. Why not write a couple of easy books to start with?Stephen MarkleyYeah, it all breezed by. It all went super easy and nothing surprised me. Yeah, it just came pouring out with no...nothing got in the way, historically or politically, that made... Yeah, no, it was an incredibly high degree of difficulty for the reasons you said. And all the problems of writing a 1,000-page novel, combined with the problems of it has to feel absolutely realistic at the moment of its publication. It has to feel as if it's our world sliding into this next world, right. At dinner, we were talking, I started the book in 2010, at roughly the same time as "Ohio," had to set it aside when "Ohio" was published, and then came back to it in 2017. So in that time, I don't know if you guys heard, a game show host actually got elected president. And so, the terrifying presidential character I was returning to was suddenly really unrealistic in his bombasticness. Because, like the real thing was much...David RobertsThere's a relatively muted fascist president in your book, looking at it from our present vantage point.Stephen MarkleyI mean, look, it was a mind-blowing project for me because I had to keep paying attention to every little detail of what was happening in climate, technology, politics, our society. And unfortunately, I had found the right veins, clearly, just in terms of how our politics were developing. And that just felt like it accelerated so quickly. And then with climate policy, I think that was another, sort of, murky issue. You've talked about on your podcast before, where there was this dead period after Waxman-Markey failed in the Obama administration, where it felt like everybody was throwing up their hands. And I think that was a to

In December 2021, Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE), a Bay Area community choice aggregator (CCA), issued a white paper on the need for 24/7 clean energy, its rationale for pursuing 24/7 by 2025, and the steps it intended to take to get there. Earlier this month, it issued a follow-up white paper reporting on the tool it built to map out 24/7 and the lessons learned.I am fascinated by the practical challenges of getting to 24/7, so I’m excited to talk to Jan Pepper, CEO of Peninsula and lead author on the latest white paper, about why PCE is setting out to achieve 24/7, the main barriers, and the ways it may get easier in the future. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In 2021, a group of Scholars at Oxford University published a paper that made big waves in the energy world. It argued that key clean energy technologies — wind, solar, batteries, and electrolyzers — are on learning curves which guarantee that, if they are deployed at the scale required to reach zero carbon, they will get extremely cheap.This is, as they say, big if true. In September, I had one of the lead authors, Doyne Farmer, on Volts to discuss the paper in-depth. He made a convincing case for the paper’s thesis, but when I asked him why these technologies were on learning curves and others weren't, he could only speculate.That's the question that's been on my mind ever since. Why are some clean-energy technologies getting rapidly cheaper while others aren't? What is it about particular technologies that make them amenable to learning curves?I cast that question to the academic gods, and lo, they returned with a paper, and that paper is what we’re here to discuss today. It’s called “Accelerating Low-Carbon Innovation,” by Abhishek Malhotra of the School of Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India, and Tobias Schmidt of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland.It sets out to chart technologies against two basic axes: design complexity and need for customization. That creates a schema that can help illuminate why some technologies developed quicker than others.I don't want to say much more than that, since I have my Malhotra and Schmidt here with me to help explain. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Volts was born on December 7, 2020. It recently turned two years old and I forgot to wish it a happy birthday. I also forgot to send out my once-a-year fundraising note.However! Better late than never.If you have learned from or been entertained by my podcasts over the last year, if they have helped you become more useful, and if you are in a financial position to do so, I hope you will consider signing up as a paid Volts subscriber. It is a relatively modest sum — you pay less for a year than you'd pay for a nice pair of pants — but it means the difference between me continuing this work and me getting a real job. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, Florida Rep. Kathy Castor, chair of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, describes the committee’s ambitious goals and notable achievements over the past three years.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn 2019, in the wake of Democrats’ congressional victories, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would be re-forming the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which had been disbanded by Republicans in the previous session. She appointed Florida Representative Kathy Castor as chair.At the time, the decision caused considerable controversy in the climate community. Climate activists were pushing for a more ambitious committee, with the power to write a full Green New Deal legislative package. Instead, the committee was to be an advisory body only, meant to do research and develop policy suggestions.History is littered with congressional committees that busily produce reports and whitepapers that no one reads. But the climate committee proved much more potent than that. Castor set about gathering testimony from hundreds of witnesses — scientists, policy wonks, and average citizens alike — and putting her expert staff to work translating their testimony into policy recommendations. But the recommendations did not simply decorate reports. The Democrats on the committee, and the Democrats educated by the committee's work, took those recommendations back to their own committees, where they found their way into a wide variety of bills. The bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act contained numerous policies that originated in the climate committee.Altogether, hundreds of the recommendations made by the committee found their way into law — a crazy-high success rate for a committee with no real power. As the committee prepares to sunset — of course Republicans are disbanding it again — it has put out a final report, summarizing all its achievements and pointing to the work that remains to be done.I called Rep. Castor to get her thoughts on the committee's work, the achievements she is most proud of, and what progress she thinks can be made in the next two years.Alright, then. With no further ado, Representative Kathy Castor. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Rep. Kathy CastorOh, I'm delighted to be here, David. Thank you.David RobertsSo just to start off, I'm assuming that the coming Republican majority is going to shut down the committee. Has this been explicitly stated yet, or is this just ... are we all assuming? Is that a valid assumption?Rep. Kathy CastorYeah, the ranking member, Garret Graves of Louisiana, did kind of spill the beans. The problem is, on the Republican side, the Speaker-to-be, Kevin McCarthy, does not quite have the votes yet. So that leaves everything in limbo getting organized for the new year. But, they've made it plain that the climate crisis is not a priority for them, and therefore the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis will not exist in the next Congress.David RobertsSo then it's been wrapped up. It's been a whirlwind three years, I guess, since you were placed in charge of this committee. Have you had a chance to kind of pause and step back and think about it all, or are you still kind of in a sprint til' the end of the term?Rep. Kathy CastorIt has been a sprint right til' the end, especially since the large appropriations package and the defense bill were not completed due to really foot-dragging of the US Senate. We have so much more left to do. I mean, we are thrilled that this was the most important Congress when it comes to clean energy and climate action and building more resilient, safer communities across the country. I mean, this was the Congress, the one that people inside and outside have been pressing for decades, frankly. But there's still so much more left to do. We're living in a climate emergency, and the world's top scientists tell us it is just urgent that we reduce climate pollution across the board. And now we have the tool. We passed a number of the tools, but implementation will be key, and that's what we're looking ahead towards.David RobertsI wanted to ask you, looking back on it, if you can cast your mind back to 2019, when you became chair and you had a majority in the House, but very narrow-split Senate, looking back, were you surprised by the productivity of this Congress? How did it perform, relative to your expectations from back in 2019?Rep. Kathy CastorGosh, it was yes, I think the the fact that we were able to accomplish so much when the United States Senate was divided 50-50 truly exceeded our expectations, but we really didn't have a choice. Policy could not wait any longer, while so many private actors, private sector, clean energy entrepreneurs, some utilities, some states and local communities are going gangbusters. The federal government and the Congress had not responded. So the stars finally aligned when we kind of knitted tog

Independent journalist Michael Thomas did a deep dive into the methods and misinformation used by right-wing groups to rally community opposition to renewable energy projects. In this episode, he discusses what he found and how climate advocates can fight back.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIt's easy to find stories in the media these days about communities blocking solar, wind, and other clean energy projects. This has prompted an enormous amount of discourse about NIMBYs and the challenges of permitting projects. What's often left out of the discourse — and almost always left out of those stories — is how such community groups receive organizational help and money from billionaire-funded right-wingers. Across the country and the internet, there are hundreds of conservative think tanks, groups, and individuals working to stir up community opposition to renewable energy with misinformation and lies. With virtually no public scrutiny, they have secured state-level policies restricting renewable energy siting in dozens of states.Independent journalist Michael Thomas set about to learn more about these right-wing groups. He joined anti-renewable-energy Facebook groups, combed through the tax filings of various right-wing think tanks, and tried to trace funding sources. He published the results in his own newsletter, Distilled. I'm excited to talk to him about what he found: the groups involved, the tactics they use, the policies they've helped pass, and the best way to fight back.All right then, with no further ado, Michael Thomas. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Michael ThomasThanks for having me. I've been a longtime reader and I'm a fan of the Volts podcast. So really happy to be here.David RobertsSo for some reason you decided to jump in and immerse yourself in the world of anti-renewable-energy people and organizations and communications online. Before we jump into the specifics, what led you to this? Did you get sort of pulled in bit by bit or did you decide to do a project on this at some point?Michael ThomasYeah, it was honestly not that intentional. I was reading a lot of stories over the summer about NIMBY opposition to local solar and wind projects and was following a lot of the discourse and debate over the permitting reform bill. And one story caught my attention that was about a group of residents on the east coast that were trying to block an offshore wind farm and a substation that was going to be put on land to bring the power to land. And it appeared to be just a normal resident group, kind of the classic NIMBY arguments that they were worried about property values or didn't like the site of the wind farm.And then I read this subtle, just one line mention of a think tank that I had heard of, the Caesar Rodney Institute, and this is a part of a much larger group of think tanks that have been funded for years by fossil fuel companies and far-right billionaires. So I started looking into it and discovered that they were very involved in the effort and giving some of these resident groups money to fund lawsuits and support. And so I started to report on that story, and it kind of got me deep into the world of climate misinformation and clean energy misinformation, and I just really became curious about what was going on and if there was a bigger story here, and ended up working on a series of stories over the last month and a half. And I learned a lot in the process.David RobertsYeah, this is a theme I'll return to later, but it really in some sense should not come as a surprise to anyone that this network of anti-renewable energy, "citizen groups" across the country is being funded and coordinated by right-wing operators. Like, of course it is — you know, the Tea Party was — like, we've just learned that over and over again. But it just seems like the pro-renewable energy forces, the pro-climate forces, just kind of sleep on that and just kind of don't pay attention to it, just kind of let it run in the background.So it's a little insane that it's not a bigger point of discussion among green types. So I'm glad you did this and I'm glad we're talking about it. So one of the things you did, God bless you, is wade into Facebook and join a bunch of anti-wind and solar groups — Good Lord — so tell us what messages about renewable energy are they emphasizing in these groups? Like, what are the consistent themes?Michael ThomasYeah, so I clearly know how to have a good time by joining all of these groups and sifting through the posts. So as context, I was doing this reporting on local opposition and learning about some of these think tanks. And I learned in that research that a lot of these resident groups are organizing on Facebook groups and pages. And that makes sense if you look at the demographics of these groups, they tend to be a lot of boomers and a lot of people who are very active on Facebook. And so I joined a few of them at first.And then in th

In this episode, scientist Sam Calisch, whose company just introduced an induction stove with a built-in lithium-ion battery, and Wyatt Merrill of DOE, who helped secure funding for the project, talk about the exciting opportunities that stoves with embedded batteries might offer for chefs, consumers, grid operators, and more.(PDF transcript)(Active Transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn the last few months, two separate fledgling companies — Impulse and Channing Street Copper — have announced the upcoming release of a new product: an induction stove with a lithium-ion battery built in. This might not seem like a big deal, but it is actually a peek into a whole new world of possibilities.Embedding batteries into appliances opens up all kinds of intriguing opportunities. A stove with a battery can deliver more power at the point of cooking. It can continue working when the power grid goes out. And it can serve as distributed storage to assist in grid stability.To explore the new world of battery-enabled appliances, I contacted two experts. The first, Sam Calisch, helped start Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on national electrification. He also worked at Otherlab with previous Volts guest Saul Griffith, from which he helped launch Channing Street Copper Company, where he is chief scientist. Channing’s first product is a stove with a battery (for now, there’s a wait list, and they’re only selling in the Bay Area).My second guest is Wyatt Merrill, who works at the Department of Energy's Building Technologies Office, where he manages programs related to building electrification. He was instrumental in helping Otherlab secure more than $2 million in funding from DOE to help launch the Channing stove project. I am excited to talk to Sam and Wyatt about the merits of embedding batteries in stoves, the things battery-enabled stoves allow consumers to do, and the future grid benefits battery-enabled appliances could yield. With no further ado, Sam Calisch and Wyatt Merrilll. Welcome to Volts. Thank you guys so much for coming.Sam CalischGreat to be here.Wyatt MerrillThanks for having us. A long time. First time.David RobertsAwesome. Sam, I want to start with you putting aside the stove for a moment. Take us back to your work. You've been doing work with Otherlab. You've been doing work with Rewiring America. You're big into the whole Electrification of America thing. You're very immersed in that whole business. Tell us how all that work led to this idea and this proposal.Sam CalischGreat question. So, as you say, I've been spending the last few years really going deep on electrification, both from a technology perspective, which is the majority of my background, but also from a policy perspective, and worked really hard on a lot of the stuff that went into the Inflation reduction act. And so about two years ago, my friend Saul Griffith and I, we were working on this book called "Electrify Together" with our friend Laura Fraser, and we're doing a bunch of data analysis for it, looking at trends in cost of the technologies related to electrification. And the thesis of that book is that we kind of have all the technology we need today and we just need to deploy it.And David, you've done a really good job getting this idea out there. I think you said electrification is the main course. Right. Which I really enjoy. And so it's mostly true that we have what we need today. We just need to deploy it. But there's certainly technology developments that we can do that will make it faster, better, cheaper.David RobertsRight.Sam CalischAnd one of the trends that we were really disturbed about was all these costs were coming down. Like, if you read Bloomberg New Energy Finance, you see battery prices approaching $100 a kilowatt hour, all of this. But if you actually looked at what it cost to install those, to put them on your house or something, those prices weren't coming down. And it was mirroring a very familiar story from residential solar, where now the hardware cost of residential solar is really cheap. It's something like $0.26 a watt for the actual hardware, but it's closer to $3 a watt to put it on your house.And we were seeing the same thing happen with batteries and to do what we needed to do. Those trends couldn't continue. And so we started thinking about ways to get around that. And this idea emerged what we now call energy storage equipped appliances or ESE, or if you're feeling cheeky, maybe easy appliances where you can put a battery into an appliance in a factory instead of putting a battery on your house. And by doing that, you can do it really cheaply and really safely when you put it on your house in a sort of a bespoke way.You need to have a site plan. You need to get a permit. You need to have someone come out and do custom electrical work. You have to get it inspected. All these things just add tons and tons of cost. So we said, well, what if instead of doing that, we allow batteries to be install

To get a grasp on the current state of play in the lithium-ion battery recycling market, I contacted Yayoi Sekine, an analyst who works as head of energy storage at Bloomberg NEF. We talked about current demand for battery recycling, the companies meeting that demand, the technologies used to recycle batteries today, and the coming growth in the industry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

As production of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) scales up, costs will fall to the levels of the materials involved. The cheapest material that still works well to hold energy in LIBs is sulfur. Today I talk with someone working on lithium-sulfur batteries about their remaining engineering challenges & enormous market potential. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

A little something different today on Volts: an interview with my favorite singer-songwriter, Cory Branan. His first album came out 20 years ago and his music has been interwoven into my life ever since. Now he's got a new album out, When I Go I Ghost. We talked about life on the road, songwriting, and what comes next. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

The UK podcast Sustainababble has been around for eight years, but it is shutting down this year. Happily, it had me on as a guest before it turned out the lights -- we discussed the recent US midterms, the right way to think about climate change, & how to keep one's s**t together. Hosts Dave and Oliver were kind enough to allow me to send it out as an episode of Volts, so please enjoy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

David Fenton has just released a new book — The Activist's Media Handbook: Lessons from Fifty Years as a Progressive Agitator — that is a combination biography, photo journal, and accounting of lessons learned in the PR business. He tells the stories of his numerous campaigns over the years (alongside pages and pages of vivid images) and tries to boil down what works to capture media attention and advance progressive causes, and what doesn't. I chat with him about it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

The Ukraine war has seen Germany's supply of methane gas from Russia cut off. Energy prices have spiked as it scrambles to make up the deficit. Some people have taken this to mean that Germany was wrong to move away from fossil fuels as quickly as it has. Others have said it shows that Germany needs to double down on its transition to renewables. To get a better sense of Germany's current situation and what it says about the choices it has made on energy, I contacted Professor Claudia Kemfert, one of Germany's top energy analysts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Despite well-meaning pledges to the contrary from a wide array of countries, banks, and other institutions, new coal plants are still getting financed, putting global climate targets further out of reach. I talk with Ted Nace of Global Energy Monitor and Paddy McCully of Reclaim Finance about the channels through which coal funding is passing -- and how to close them. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

The transition to clean energy is going to radically increase demand for a key set of minerals, many of which are mined today in social & environmentally destructive ways. In recent years, attention has turned to the floor of the Pacific Ocean, where those minerals are found in abundance. I talk with journalist Daniel Ackerman about the opportunities & dangers of deep-sea mining. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

When we look across the broad sweep of human history, what needs explaining is not times of rebellion and upheaval, but the much more common periods of unjust rule facing little resistance. Why do people so often internalize the ideologies upholding systems under which they suffer? Why do they fail to fight back? Psychologist John Jost has an answer. I talked it over with him. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

The massive coming surge of electric vehicles (EVs) could destabilize the grid -- or, if properly managed, become a crucial tool to maintain grid stability as more renewable energy comes online. The key is getting EVs to communicate with the grid, and vice versa. Amanda Myers Wisser and Smriti Mishra of WeaveGrid are working on that. We chat about how it's going. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Emerging economies represent huge potential demand for distributed energy (solar power and microgrids) but to date the markets have been too fragmented to attract large-scale investment. A company called Odyssey has set out to create a platform that can standardize and de-risk these markets so big money can move in. I talk with the CEO. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

I was recently a guest on My Climate Journey, a podcast that features various climate types discussing how they got where they are and how they currently think about the climate crisis. Host Jason Jacobs and I had a fun conversation about my road into journalism and how my views on various perennial climate debates — optimism versus pessimism, green growth versus degrowth, technocracy versus spiritual change — have changed over the years. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, lawyer and activist Ruth Santiago discusses Puerto Rico's latest electricity crisis, as the island struggles to restore power in the wake of Hurricane Fiona. In the wake of Hurricane Maria five years ago, the grid was privatized, but the promised rebuilding still hasn't occurred. Santiago covers what's gone wrong and what can be done. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Geothermal power has conventionally been viewed as a baseload, always-on resource, like nuclear. But new research suggests it could play a much more dynamic & valuable role on the grid than that -- and expand much faster & farther than previously estimated. I chat with one the co-authors. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe