Volts

A newly published research paper out of Oxford suggests that a rapid energy transition will not "cost" anything -- it will save nearly a trillion dollars relative to the no-transition case. And the faster we move, the more money we save. I talk with complex-systems scientist and co-author Doyne Farmer about his optimistic projections. 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, two Clean Air Act experts — Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, and Kirti Datla, director of strategic legal advocacy at Earthjustice — discuss the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of West Virginia v. EPA, which would dramatically curtail EPA's powers based on legal justifications that are, charitably, underbaked. 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, MIT Professor David Hsu discusses a paper he wrote that charts the history, evolution, and current fortunes of community choice aggregation, a tool whereby a community can take ownership over its own energy procurement. It is the rare example of energy democracy breaking out in America's monopoly-dominated system — a good news story in an era of bad vibes. 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, Dartmouth professor Erin Mayfield discusses some new modeling on the Build Back Better Act, showing how and where it would reduce emissions in the US economy, how it would affect inflation, and how many jobs it would produce. 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

Two veteran climate experts -- analyst Hal Harvey & journalist Justin Gillis -- have released a new book that seeks to home in on the climate policies that offer the most impact for the least effort. I talk with them about learning curves, performance standards, industrial policy, & more. 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, Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Blunt discusses her new book, California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas & Electric — and What It Means for America's Power Grid, in which she details PG&E’s decades of setbacks and missteps.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsReporter Katherine Blunt was still new to The Wall Street Journal when 2018’s devastating Camp Fire broke out in California and she was swept into the biggest story of her career. Alongside colleagues Russell Gold and Rebecca Smith, she wrote a series of pieces on the ongoing travails of Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E, the utility whose power lines had started at the Camp Fire.The Journal's coverage was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, and Blunt has now expanded it into a new book: California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas & Electric — and What It Means for America's Power Grid. It is a rollicking tour through PG&E’s decades-long series of disasters and their roots in the early 20th century.I am a longtime critic of utilities, but even I was stunned to see all of PG&E’s incompetence and malfeasance gathered together in one place, alongside its well-meaning but serially failed attempts to put things right. It’s a story of failure and redemption, except the redemption keeps being interrupted by more failure. I couldn't put the book down, so I am eager to talk to Blunt about how the utility’s travails began, why is has struggled so mightily to take control of its fate, and what might come next for the electricity sector’s favorite punching bag.So, without further ado, Katherine Blunt. Welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.Katherine BluntThank you so much for having me.David RobertsThis book, Katherine, is a bit of a mindblower. I mean, I probably, because of my job, followed this stuff as it was happening, closer than the average Joe or Jane, but it is still stunning to see it all put in one place. As far as I can tell, for the entirety of the 21st century, PG&E has been in one of three states: either a) causing some disaster that kills a bunch of people, b) dealing with the blowback and lawsuits that come as a result of the disaster that killed a bunch of people, or c) implementing an ultimately failed and useless attempt to mitigate the disasters that killed a bunch of people and prevent future disasters.There has not been a period of just normal operation of PG&E for decades now. It's all its perpetual crisis. How how much of that did you appreciate going into this story? How much of that? I mean, it's just such a dumpster fire. I can't believe I wasn't more aware of it. And I can't believe, like, the public's not more aware of it. How aware were you going in?Katherine BluntYeah, it's totally true. These last 20 years have been just exceptionally bad for the company. I had some idea of this going into it because of my coverage at the "Journal" that, as you say, I had collaborated on with two close colleagues. And one of the final stories that we did together was a really big picture narrative that tried to take readers through the last 20 years and what that's meant for PG&E. But as I got more into the details, I, too, was really surprised at some things and how bad it was.David RobertsWell, let's go back into the recesses of history. One of the most sort of telling tales from the beginning is that the original merger of PG&E with Great Western, another utility. This is the merger that ended up sort of saddling PG&E with all these power lines, that it never really understood. And that, to me, is kind of like the original sin, like the seed of everything that came after us. To tell us a little bit about the story of those two utilities and how they ended up as one.Katherine BluntThere's a couple of ways to think about this. It is a really fascinating part of PG&E's history. So, as I'm sure at least some listeners know, PG&E is a very old company, more than 100 years old at this point. It's got roots dating back to the Gold Rush. It only ever had, in the early days, one real competitor, and that was Great Western Power. Both PG&E and Great Western were competing to build systems to serve San Francisco to support the population growth there. And around this time, you're beginning to see the solidification of the conventional wisdom that utilities should be these monopoly companies. Because, of course, this industry is very capital intensive. And the idea was you shouldn't have a bunch of companies building duplicative infrastructure. And you're beginning to see the regulator emerge to oversee all of this.David RobertsThere's some wild quotes from that period where people are like, "nothing scares customers more than an outbreak of competition among you." It's just such a weird perspective based on our current way we talk about markets.Katherine BluntYeah, absolutely. There was a lot of kind of colorful stuff that I managed to dig up, like a lawyer for PG&E and a lawyer for Great Western,

As part of his price for agreeing to pass the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, Senator Joe Manchin extracted a promise from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass a "sidecar deal” addressing the issue of permitting reform. Earthjustice president Abigail Dillen thinks it's a bad deal. I called her to talk through her reservations about the deal, her larger take on permitting reform, and her thoughts on how to build the renewable energy needed to address climate change. 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, director Adam McKay returns to hash over some of his reservations about the Inflation Reduction Act and the larger political situation in the US. I try to persuade him to be happy about the IRA. 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, energy modeler and expert Jesse Jenkins is back yet again, completing our two-part discussion of the details of the Inflation Reduction Act. This time around, we get into the tax credits, the green bank, the methane fee, and much more. 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, professor and energy expert Jesse Jenkins returns to the pod to dig further into the details of the Inflation Reduction Act. We discuss what the models can and can't tell us, the ugly fossil-fuel leases embedded in the bill, and what to think about the carbon capture provisions. 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, it’s just me by my lonesome, sharing some thoughts about the history and context of the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate legislation ever passed by the US Congress. 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, transportation planner Warren Logan shares his expertise on how cities can make fast, cheap, impactful improvements to safety and walkability.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsWhen it comes to reducing transportation emissions, two main ideas compete for mindshare in the climate space. First is switching out internal combustion engine vehicles for electric vehicles. Second is improving the built environment to make walking, biking, and public transit easier, to reduce the amount of miles traveled in cars and trucks altogether.The conventional wisdom is that the former is faster. There are a few key policy levers that can be pulled to get massive numbers of EVs on the roads, whereas urban improvements proceed one at a time, each facing its own bespoke set of challenges.But there are people out there at the city level working to increase the speed of those improvements. One of them is Warren Logan, currently a partner at Lighthouse Public Affairs, but before that, policy director of mobility in the Oakland, California, mayor's office, a senior transportation planner for San Francisco, and an intern in the transportation office at Berkeley, California.In his time working on transportation projects, Logan has given a lot of thought to, and done a lot of work on, improving city processes to make safety and walkability improvements faster and less capital-intensive. He wants cities to free themselves up to make fast, cheap changes that can have big impacts without an enormous investment of time and money.As listeners will have noticed, I have been somewhat obsessed lately with urban design and transportation issues. I hope you will indulge me in another conversation about the nature of resistance to urban improvements, the kinds of changes that can be made quickly to dramatically improve safety, and the larger need to avoid over-reliance on EVs.Warren Logan, thank you for coming to Volts and sharing your time.Warren LoganThank you so much for having me, David.David RobertsLet's start with a little Warren background, a little Warren history here. Tell us sort of what your position was and what you're more to the point, sort of what your engagement was in transportation and transportation projects. Tell us about your last few years.Warren LoganSure. So before my time at Lighthouse Public Affairs, as a partner in Public Affairs, I was Mayor Libby Schaaf's Policy Director of Transportation and Government Affairs of the City of Oakland, which is two jobs that they pushed together. And I think it's important to share here just quickly that before my time in the mayor's office, I was also a transportation planner in the city and county of San Francisco. And before that was an urban designer as a consultant in the East Bay, in the Bay area here. And before that was a transportation planner again for the city of Berkeley.So my point here is I've done a lot of different cool transportation work across the Bay.David RobertsYeah, you must know so many NIMBYs. It's like a NIMBY survey you've done with your career.Warren LoganYeah.David RobertsBerkeley to Oakland.Warren LoganYou got it. And this might come out later in our podcast, but most of the subjects I've worked on have been like, "what's the most contentious issue at the time? Changing parking pricing. Let's talk about bike lanes. Let's talk about ... let's keep the city from falling apart during COVID," easy subjects really.David RobertsTell us then at the sort of high level of abstraction, which is just let's address this argument. If I'm Joe Schmo on the street, I know transportation needs to be decarbonized. And I look around and I was like, "oh, there's the decarbonized transportation right there. It's called an electric vehicle. Let's just stop making the gas vehicles, start making the electric vehicles. Problem done. Let's move on to the next problem." I think that is a fairly widespread disposition toward this issue. So just tell us why you think that at the broadest level, why that kind of thinking is insufficient.Warren LoganSure. So to all the Joe Schmos out there, the truth of the matter is that just switching to electric cars is not going to solve all of our climate issues. And I'm sure we'll go into all the different reasons why. But for me, and probably for anyone who's ever been near cars at all, it's not just about the climate that we have to think about. It's like traffic safety as well. And I can only stress this enough, that if you get hit by a car, it doesn't matter if it was an electric vehicle or not. In fact, it might be worse because they're heavier, which is in no way to say we shouldn't be considering electric vehicles.David RobertsAnd you might not hear it coming right?Warren LoganAnd you might not hear it coming, right. So, David, your point is so good, though, that there is certainly room for absolutely decarbonizing our vehicles. I will admit I own an electric vehicle, and I own an electric bi

A long-range transmission plan just announced by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, lays out a roadmap for $10 billion worth of investment in some 2,000 miles of new transmission lines, potentially unlocking more than 50 gigawatts of renewable energy. In this episode, attorney Lauren Azar celebrates this win and traces the years of work and advocacy that went into it.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsVolts subscribers are well aware that the US, like most places, badly needs more long-distance power lines. Such lines unlock the potential of regions where renewable energy is abundant but people are scarce. They lower system costs for all customers on the grid. They make the grid more reliable and resilient.However, it is incredibly difficult to build these lines. The process is a bureaucratic tangle, with ubiquitous controversies over how to allocate costs and benefits, and the pace of building is woefully short of what will be needed to help the US hit its carbon emissions targets.But a ray of sunshine pierced that generally gloomy situation last week, when the market monitor of the midwest wholesale electricity market — the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO — announced the results of its Long-Range Transmission Planning Initiative. It laid out a roadmap that would involve $10 billion worth of investment in some 2,000 miles of new transmission lines, which MISO anticipates could unlock more than 50 gigawatts of pent-up renewable energy.To someone like me, so accustomed to stories of failure around transmission, it came as a bit of a bolt from the blue. But it is, in fact, the result of years of long, steady work by advocates, stakeholders, and experts — including my guest today.Lauren Azar is a longtime attorney and consultant working in the electricity industry. During her time as a lawyer, she has also worked as a senior advisor to the US secretary of energy on electricity grid issues, a commissioner on the Wisconsin Public Service Commission, and president of the Organization of MISO States, which was deeply involved in the last round of transmission planning in MISO. There's nobody in a better position to explain what has just happened in MISO and what it means for the larger field of transmission planning, so I'm extremely excited to welcome her on to the pod today.Lauren Azar, thank you for coming to Volts.Lauren AzarThank you, David. Looking forward to this discussion.David RobertsIt's rare I get to discuss positive transmission news, so this is exciting. As I said, I think listeners know the basics about why transmission is good, why we need more of it, and why it's so difficult to build. So let's take a few steps back and just talk about MISO, where this happened. So maybe just start by — MISO is what they call a Regional Transmission Operator, an RTO, which means it has an area that includes a bunch of utilities within it, and it runs the wholesale electricity market in that region and plans transmission in that region. So tell us a little bit about where MISO is and what and who it includes.Lauren AzarSure. So MISO stands for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, and they operate the transmission grid from Manitoba, Canada, all the way down south to Louisiana and Mississippi. In addition to operating the transmission grid, they also run an energy market which decides what generators are going to run to deliver electricity to customers. And under federal law as an RTO, they are also obligated to ensure that the grid itself is able to deliver sufficient electricity to customers. And so that is where the transmission planning comes in.MISO actually does transmission planning all of the time, every year, but it's smaller scale. It's these long-range transmission planning processes that don't happen very often. And the result of some LRTP planning happened and was approved last week.David RobertsRight. And so this is a process. MISO includes a bunch of states, a bunch of utilities. They're varied in terms of not only their resource mix but in terms of their goals. and aspirations, and political character. So it's quite a milage they're dealing with there. So let's talk a little bit about the process. So what is MISO setting out to do with this process, and who gets to be involved in the process?Lauren AzarMISO with regards to long-range planning, and that's planning for 20 years out. MISO uses what is called the "Strategic Foresight Process", which essentially what MISO does is it creates a series of hypothetical worlds for 20 years out, and then figures out what kind of transmission grid would be needed for those hypothetical worlds and what you are looking for. And those hypothetical worlds are called scenarios, or MISO calls them futures. And usually, in this process you try to get plausible bookended futures, so one that's more tepid and then one that's aggressive, and you try to then design solutions that would work in both

In this episode, two Volts favorites — Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins and UC Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes — join me discuss the Inflation Reduction Act, the somewhat miraculous last-minute agreement between Senators Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer. It represents the tattered remains of Build Back Better, but many if not most of the climate and clean energy provisions remain intact. We discuss what's in the bill and reasons to be excited 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

In this episode, Zale Schoenborn shares about emphasizing sustainability at Pickathon, the Northwest music festival he founded.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsListeners, today at Volts we've got something a little different, a little off our beaten path. It’s an episode about one of my favorite music festivals. It might not seem obvious to you why you should care about a small music festival in the far northwest of the country, but I think if you are patient and listen for a little bit, you'll get a sense of why I’m spending time on it (beyond self-indulgence).By the time 2011 rolled around, I was more or less done with music festivals. I love live music and have been to many great concerts, but most festival experiences were so hectic, stressful, crowded, dirty, and exploitative that it just no longer seemed worth the effort. (That has only gotten more true in intervening years.) So I was a little skeptical when a friend told me about the Pickathon festival, held every year about 20 miles outside of Portland, Oregon.For one thing … “Pickathon”? Sounds like one of those twangy festivals with crunchy hippies playing mandolins and banjos. That is not my bag. But he assured me that the lineup is diverse, from all genres, focused on acts that are about to break bigger. He talked me into going. And listener, it blew my mind. For one thing, the land itself is gorgeous — it is held at Pendarvis Farm, a sprawling area of pastureland and wooded hills that is used only once a year for gatherings, only for Pickathon. Every attendee camps (the festival lasts three days), but not in some crowded parking lot. Rather, there is a whole network of trails running through the woods, with established camping spots that have been used and reused since 1999 when the festival started. Then there’s the crowd. It wasn't jam-packed. You could always get food or drink with very little line. You could always see the band, no matter which band you wanted to see. There were tons and tons of families and children and almost no backward-baseball-cap bros. It felt oddly wholesome.But perhaps the strongest impression I took away that first weekend was how weirdly, anomalously clean the festival was. One staple of festival life is giant, overflowing trash cans, with food wrappings and disposable cups strewn everywhere. At Pickathon there was none of that. There was virtually no visible trash. Water was free, available at spigots across the grounds.It all struck me as so intensely human, so humane, that I fell in love and attended almost every year thereafter. (Here’s a 2013 story I did for Grist and a 2017 story I did for Vox, in which I interviewed 20 artists in three days.)Pickathon is back this year after a two-year hiatus, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with festival founder Zale Schoenborn about how the festival has evolved since 1999, what's next on the sustainability front, and what's new at the festival this year. Even if you don't happen to live in the Pacific Northwest and can't attend, I think you'll enjoy hearing from someone who has put so much thought into into bringing humans together to commune and celebrate in a socially and environmentally sustainable way.Alright. Zale Schoenborn of Pickathon, thank you for coming to Volts.Zale SchoenbornThanks for having me.David RobertsI'm sure this must be an insanely busy week for you, so thanks for taking the time.Zale SchoenbornNo problem. It is definitely exciting.David RobertsYeah. So there's a ton to talk about with your music festival, but first, I guess I'd like to just go back and hear a story that I'm sure you have told hundreds of times by now. But Pickathon is remarkably long-running, in the context of the music festival world. It started in 1999, which is just wild. So stretch your mind back, if you can, that far, and tell our listeners the story of just why did you start a music festival? And initially, when you started it, what was kind of the vision? And to what extent is that vision changed or sort of held steady in the, doing math, 24 years? 3? 23 years since?Zale Schoenborn24? I don't know. It's all ... you got to count one extra year in there, I think. Great question. Well, going all the way back, something that lasts 24 years, if anyone has the honor of kind of a hobby that grows out of control, that can turn into something, that's the only way you get to what Pickathon is. It's years of making horrible mistakes, and fixing them, and surviving them. So, like, all of the above. But if you rewind all the way back to 1999, it really was pretty humble beginnings. We just thought of, why don't we have kind of a better music party with our friends? And we always had this idea of "genre-based music festivals are really annoying." Like, how come we have to be so isolated in a Bluegrass festival or a Rock festival?David RobertsYes, thank you for saying that. I don't know why that's not a more widespread opinion. "We're having an

In this episode, Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner, attorneys at the Center of Biological Diversity, discuss which executive actions President Biden could take to aggressively address climate change, and what might happen if he did so.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIt now seems fairly clear that no climate legislation is going to pass this Congress before the midterm elections. After the midterms, Democrats are highly unlikely to retain control of both houses, so there likely will not be any federal climate legislation in the US for many years to come. This is, obviously, to the country's immense shame.That means Biden finds himself in the same situation that Obama ended up in: if he wants anything at all to get done on climate change during his term, he's going to have to do it himself, through executive action. He has already begun announcing some executive orders.However, there is a case to be made that the president has the power to do much, much more. Two senior attorneys at the Center for Biological Diversity — Jean Su, director of CBD’s energy justice program, and Maya Golden-Krasner, deputy director of its Climate Law Institute — have been aggressively making that case for the past three years, laying out a broad suite of actions available to a president and accompanying them with arguments rooting those powers in statutory authority.They've just released a new report called “The Climate President’s Emergency Powers,” which digs into what it would mean for Biden to declare a state of emergency over climate change and what sort of statutory powers that would grant him. In this moment of utter legislative failure, I wanted to talk to Su and Golden-Krasner about the kind of things Biden is capable of doing, which actions he ought to prioritize, how he should think about the hostile Supreme Court, and the political optics of governing so aggressively and unilaterally.Alright. Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner of the Center for Biological Diversity. Thanks for coming to Volts.Maya Golden-KrasnerThanks for having us.David RobertsSo there's a lot to discuss, a lot to discuss here. So I just want to start maybe with this sort of background assumption. Let's just assume, for the sake of our conversation, that Build Back Better does not miraculously rise from the ashes and pass in the next, whatever, however much time we have to pass it a week or two. Let's just assume that it's dead dead. That legislation is dead dead. And that, as all odds are pointing to that, all the prognostications now say that Democrats are almost certainly going to lose at least one House of Congress in the midterms, which will mean legislation is dead for the rest of Biden's term.That leaves us with what Biden can do on his own. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again, as they say on Battlestar Galactica. This was exactly the situation Obama found himself in, as we all remember. So it's a little depressing to be back here, but let's make the best of it. So the other thing I wanted to say, just by way of preparation is I think it's fair to say that you all, that the CBD, has what I would characterize as a sort of maximalist interpretation of Biden's executive powers. Extremely sweeping.Your 2019 report on the executive powers available to the President. I mean, if you read through that whole thing, I mean, jeez, Biden could just sort of revolutionize all of government, and all of industry, and justice, and there's almost nothing he couldn't do under some legal authority or another. So I might be, throughout this, playing a little bit of devil's advocate, trying to push back a little bit on some of that. So just to let you know. So with all that said, let's start with what seems to be most in the news these days, which is whether or not Biden is going to declare a Climate Emergency.There's a lot of talk about this, a lot of hand waving, a lot of sort of ... I don't think it's very well understood what exactly means for him to do that and what it would enable him to do. So let's just start there. Maybe we'll start with you, Jean, maybe you can just tell us what does it mean for Biden to declare a Climate Emergency, what is the legal authority under which he would do that, and then we can get into sort of what it would enable him to do that he couldn't otherwise do.Jean SuSo I think you've painted a really bleak picture of where we are right now.David RobertsLook around, Jean.Jean SuAnd it's very real, and this is exactly where we hope we wouldn't be. But it didn't also take a crystal ball to let us know that we would be here, as well. And so I think on that note, one of the things that we have at the Center have always focused on is the executive branch, and that is an equal branch of the three branches. And we've always have looked at what are the available tools for the president, not to the exclusion of anything else.We absolutely need legislation. I pray that your prediction is not tru

In this episode, journalist David Wallace-Wells raises the alarm about how incredibly unsafe our air is, the impact it’s having on human welfare, and why it doesn’t get as much attention as it should.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBack in 2020, I wrote an article about some eye-popping new research on air pollution which found that the damage it is doing to human health is roughly twice as bad as previously thought, and moreover, that the economic benefits of pollution reduction vastly outweigh the costs of transitioning to clean energy.It seemed to me then that the findings should have gotten more attention in the press, and I wasn't the only person who thought so. Journalist David Wallace-Wells, who made a splash a few years ago with his terrifying book on climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth, also dove in to new air pollution research and produced a magisterial overview for the London Review of Books last year. Recently he revisited the subject for his New York Times newsletter, asking why social mobilization against climate change, which promises millions of deaths in decades, is so much greater than mobilization against air pollution, which kills 10 million a year today.It's a challenging question, and I'm not certain I have a great answer, so I wanted to talk to David about it — what the new research says about the mind-boggling scope and scale of air pollution’s damage to human welfare, how we ought to think about it relative to climate change, and what scares him most about the process of normalization that allows us to live with 10 million deaths a year.David Wallace-Wells, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming on.David Wallace-WellsOh, my pleasure. It's great to talk. Really good to be here.David RobertsSo you made a big splash, several years ago, with your article on climate change and the subsequent book, but in the last year or so, year two, you have been writing more and more about just good old-fashioned air pollution. And it seems like you're kind of getting sucked in, like it keeps pulling you in. So tell me kind of the story of how you first interacted with the story and why you keep coming back to it.David Wallace-WellsWell, on some level, it's the same answer I give when people ask me how I got worried about climate change, which is just to say I was seeing scientific research that was really quite alarming. And the more that I looked at it, the bigger the story seemed and the more it seemed to demand of me as someone who wrote on anything close to these issues. The slightly more personal version of it is, like, I wrote my book, I spent a lot of time talking about it, talking about climate change, and I found myself again and again in describing the scale of the impact, citing a small handful of data points or projections that I found really useful to communicate what I saw as to scary it all was.And one of those was this data point that at two degrees of warming, we should expect 153 million additional deaths from air pollution produced from the burning of fossil fuels. And I would always caveat that and say, "no, that's not exactly climate change, but it's caused by the same things that cause climate change." And the more I said it and the more that I thought about it, I was like, "wait, hang on a second. If the most dramatic data point that I can come up with to explain how scary the world that we're going to be living in is ... is not actually about temperature rise, maybe I should spend some time thinking about what that means and how it might change my own perspective on warming and what that's likely to be like."And so I wrote a piece. It actually was a very slow burn piece, and it was actually, even though it totally contradicts what I just said, was a story that was proposed to me by the LRB. I wrote a piece for the London Review of Books that was published last fall, but which they had actually invited me to write before the pandemic began. And over the course of those couple of years, I was just collecting more and more material. And as I sort of had done with climate, it just felt like the more I looked, the more I saw, the darker the picture got.Now, there are some really important distinctions, and it's not an easy parallel. We could talk about some of the contrasts, but in general the sort of emotional experience of it, for me, was the same, which is just to say I had my eyes opened out of some amount of horror or fear, and the deeper that I looked into the subject, the bleaker it seemed to get.David RobertsRight, well, I want to talk about some of those parallels in a minute, but first let's just dwell on the research for a minute because I feel like there's sort of a popular conception of air pollution in the US, insofar as people think about it anymore. It's like the river used to burn. Then we got the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and more or less tackled that problem and now it's just a problem for overseas. I think th

In this episode, Lori Lodes of Climate Power discusses how climate activists can maintain momentum when federal action feels entirely out of reach.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIt is a dark time for climate activists. The immense hope they felt at the introduction of the original Build Back Better bill has curdled. It is still possible that some kind of deal might emerge from the Senate in this final month, but if it does it will be a pale shadow of what it once was.Meanwhile, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court has just taken away one of the EPA's principal tools for addressing greenhouse gases. And that is, of course, only one tiny sliver of the damage that the court has done and is continuing to do. A Supreme Court that is hostile to climate action seems fated to be a fact of life for at least a generation.It is not clear what climate activists could have done differently to avert these grim outcomes. And it is not at all clear how they should proceed from here. They have no way of encouraging West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin to be a decent human being and once the reconciliation bill is done, the midterms will be upon us, and all signs point toward disastrous Democratic losses that will take legislation off the table entirely.What should climate activists be doing right now? How should they be maintaining hope and momentum?To discuss these difficult questions, I contacted Lori Lodes, the head of the nonprofit advocacy organization Climate Power, which was created by John Podesta and others in the run-up to the 2020 election to ensure that climate had a place on the Democratic agenda. Lodes is a veteran of several difficult Democratic fights going back to Obamacare and is a self-proclaimed lover of political combat, so I was eager to hear from her on what climate activists should be doing, how they should feel about whatever emerges from the Build Back Better negotiations, and how they should move forward in a world where federal action has become all but impossible.Without further ado, Lori Lodes of Climate Power. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Lori LodesThank you for having me.David RobertsWe are meeting here, I guess, what you'd say, under inclement circumstances of a variety of kinds. Among them, I'm on the downside of a piece of COVID which is why I'm coughing and sound hoarse. So bear with me. I want to talk about what's going on and what's coming next. Lori, but just to start with, you were chosen by John Podesta to run this new climate organization in the run up to the 2020 elections.Lori LodesThat's right.David RobertsTalk a little bit about what your experience prior to that. And I know you played a big role in fighting for Obamacare and then fighting to protect Obamacare afterwards. And we're on the Hillary campaign, the ill-fated 2016 Hillary campaign. So maybe just talk a little bit about your pre-climate work and the sort of things you picked up from it about Democrats, and their problems, and how they can win.Lori LodesBig question, I mean ...David RobertsThat's a lot.Lori LodesI got my start in politics. Like a lot of people, I just cared deeply and was a complete idealist. I read the newspaper every day with my family. But the big thing for me was saying, "I like big fights," and I have a complete belief or ideology that we can do better, that we can form a more perfect union, but it takes a lot of hard work. And so I've been on one side of the battle or the other, fighting to expand health care, to get as many people health insurance as humanly possible with certain limitations, with certain political limitations that we have from trying to pass minimum wage laws, from trying to prevent Justice Kavanaugh from getting on the bench.And now I've started Climate Power with Podesta to really do everything that we can to win the politics of climate. And that's really at the heart of so much of these big political battles. The policy is smart policy, right? If this was just about the policy, we would have passed climate laws to take care of climate change a decade, two decades, three decades ago.David RobertsIf this were a battle of white papers, we would have won an overwhelming victory long ago.Lori LodesYes, right. And as progressives who care about policy and who think a lot, our side has a lot of those white papers, a lot of them, what we haven't been able to do is change the political calculation. It's getting a lot better, right. If you look back to 2016, when Hillary Clinton ran for president, she really wasn't talking about climate change very much, right? Bernie Sanders really wasn't talking about climate change very much. It came up in very specific instances, but they weren't running on it. And that's really why we started Climate Power in 2020, was how do we make sure that whoever the presidential nominee was going up against Trump was going to fight on climate?Because the politics of climate we believe, and I still believe this, have ch

In this episode, lawyer Jay Duffy, who represented environmental groups in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, explains the ins and outs and potential implications of the Supreme Court’s final ruling in the case.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOn June 30th, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. There was a great deal of dread in the climate community in advance of the ruling, and a great deal of hyperbolic coverage in its wake. But what did it actually say?Volts listeners will already be familiar with the case thanks to a pod I did on it a few months ago with Jack Lienke and Kirti Datla, and they will recall that it was somewhat bizarre for the court to take this case at all, since it regards a set of regulations that never were and never will be put into effect. Rather, the court seemed eager to pass judgment on the legal justification that it anticipates EPA might use when regulating greenhouse gases under Biden. It was, in other words, an advisory opinion, which the Supreme Court is not supposed to do.Nonetheless, it took the case and now it has ruled. The headline is that the majority opinion is not as bad as many anticipated, especially in the wake of the unhinged Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. This was a Chief Justice Roberts special, carefully parsed and hedged.To get clear on what the ruling does and doesn't actually say, I contacted one of the lawyers on the case, Jay Duffy of the Clean Air Task Force. Duffy was responsible for several of the key briefs and arguments in the case, so I thought he would have a good read, not only on what the Roberts decision says, but what it portends for subsequent cases.So, without further ado, Jay Duffy, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Jay DuffyThanks so much, David. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for asking me to come on.David RobertsLet's start just really briefly, tell us about your involvement in the case.Jay DuffySure. So I represent a number of environmental and public health groups. American Lung Association, American Public Health Association, Appalachian Mountain Club, Cleaner Council, Clean Wisconsin, Conservative ... "Conservative no", Conservation Law Foundation, and Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy. We challenged the ACE rule in the CPP repeal when it came out in the DC Circuit. I argued a portion of that oral argument on a nine hour zoom call. Yeah, I hope this pod won't be as painful as that was. We won below, and then that was, of course, appealed by State Attorney General and coal interest, and I continued to represent the same clients before the Supreme Court.David RobertsSo at a headline level, everybody saw the Dobbs ruling, which was a Sam Alito special, i.e. completely unbound, and unrestrained, and deranged, and I think were subsequently filled with fear about this ruling. But this is a Roberts decision, not an Alito decision. And it seems to bear the sort of typical characteristics of a Roberts decision, in that it is sort of a little bit of this, a little bit of that, kind of trying to cut it down the middle, not quite dramatic, slightly more technical, slightly more narrow. So am I right in thinking that in the spectrum of outcomes that climate people anticipated or imagined, this is toward the better side?Right. This is one of the better outcomes we could have envisioned. Is that roughly right?Jay DuffyThat's roughly right. I think there are two kind of lanes in this decision. There is what is the path forward for regulating greenhouse gases from power plants? And I think there is still a lane there. And we were concerned that we would have a roadblock on the major questions, doctrine expansion, that piece is more troubling and I think we could probably get into that. But I do think, even though the Roberts opinion kind of throws shade on multiple pathways forward, at the end, he says, "this is just a narrow opinion. All we're saying is that the Clean Power Plan and the system underlying the Clean Power Plan is outside of EPA's authority."David RobertsRight? So they didn't nuke Mass vs. EPA. They didn't take away EPA's ability to address CO2. They didn't try to mess with the endangerment finding whereby EPA found that CO2 is a danger. There's a lot of bigger things they could have done that they didn't do. And we'll get into later sort of where we think they're going from here. Let's talk about then what Roberts did say. And when I first was reading about this, I thought that Roberts was focusing on the sort of inside the fence-line versus outside the fence-line question, which for listeners who don't have the background on this, the question is, if you're regulating coal plants, do you have to confine your regulations to the coal plant itself?Or in some sense, can you regulate the fleet, or can you do what the Clean Power Plan did, which is regulate the entire electricity fleet, not just coal

In this episode, Charles Marohn of Strong Towns discusses why urban planning too often creates money-sucking suburbs, what it might look like to build healthy communities, and why there are so many barriers to doing so.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsCharles Marohn — “Chuck” to his friends — grew up in a small town in Minnesota and later became an urban planner and traffic engineer in the state. After a few years, he began noticing that the projects he was building were hurting the towns he was putting them in — subtracting more tax value than they added, forcing everyone into cars, breaking apart communities and saddling them with unsustainable long-term liabilities.He began recording his observations on a blog called Strong Towns. It quickly caught on, and over the years, Strong Towns has grown into a full-fledged nonprofit with an educational curriculum, an awards program, and a rich network of local chapters working to improve the towns where they are located.Marohn has since written several books, most recently 2021’s Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and 2019’s Strong Towns. Intellectually, he sits somewhat orthogonally to most of the contemporary urbanist community. He’s an avowed conservative and opposes many of the state and federal solutions to the housing crisis favored by today’s YIMBYs. But there is arguably no one alive in America who has done more to get people thinking about what makes for a healthy community and how the US can begin to repair its abysmal late-20th-century land-use choices. I was excited to talk to Marohn about why suburbs are money-losers, the right way to think about NIMBYs and local control, and why the city planning profession is so resistant to reform.Okey-doke, without any further ado, Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Charles MarohnHey, thanks for having me.David RobertsThis is really cool. I've been sort of a follower of Strong Towns for many, many years. It's great to finally get you on here. I wish we could be talking under more pleasant circumstances.Charles MarohnOh yeah. You got to always have some joy and optimism to things.David RobertsI'm trying. Before we get into any of that stuff, I am sure this is something you've talked about a million times, but I still don't know that it's sunk into the general public. So let's just summarize real quick right off the bat, the core of the Strong Town's critique of suburbs, the sort of Ponzi scheme critique. Because I think still to this day, it probably comes as a surprise to most average Americans, just the idea that suburbs don't pay for themselves, but I just don't think most people know it. So let's just review that real quick.Charles MarohnIt's astounding though because we've come a long way, because now I see when people bring up what is kind of like an ignorant statement of like, "I pay my taxes, this stuff is paying ..." people are like, "Whoa, hang on, let me show you something." So when I was a young engineer and planner, I have a civil engineering degree, I have a planning degree, I was building all this stuff to make cities really successful. I was putting in roads and streets and pipes and building Walmart parking lots and Arby's drive throughs and ...David RobertsEvery architect's dream as a child.Charles MarohnOh, yeah, no, this was great stuff. And I believed in my heart that I was making the city that I live in, the city that I grew up in, wealthier and more prosperous. But over and over and over again, I would be exposed to these insane projects. These projects that if you're an engineer, you kind of work in a silo of design. If you're a planner, you kind of work in a silo of regulation. But when you do both, you wind up with this left brain, right brain conflict that makes you ask like weird questions. And that's what I was doing.I was asking questions like, "Okay, this is going to cost us a million dollars. How long will it take us to recoup that with the tax base that we get?" And I would run these numbers and it would be insane things like 120 years. It's like, okay, either I'm calculating this wrong, or something's really messed up. And I started just doing this over and over and over again with all these different developments that I had worked on. And in 2008, I started to publish this stuff. I started to write a blog and I share this stuff.And quite frankly, I was open to the idea that maybe I was crazy, right? There's got to be something I'm not seeing because there's a lot of smart people doing this work. I can't be the only one asking this question. But turns out, I was the only one really asking this question. Or there were others, but they were disparate voices, either from the past or silent. And we started to build at Strong Towns. Myself and some of my colleagues and friends started to build this body of insight, this body of evidence that at a certain point just became undeniable.And the undeniable nature of it is that

Readers, I am keenly aware that you subscribed to this newsletter to get articles and podcasts about clean energy, not to hear about my life and travails. And I’ve already sent you one life-and-travails message this year. So I debated with myself a long time about whether to send this one, especially given all the other horrible stuff happening in the world.But, in the end, there is an unavoidable intimacy to this format and that is one of the things I like about it. I don’t have any bosses or advertisers or funders to report to — there’s just me, trying to create good content, and (some of) you, paying for it. Given that life events are currently affecting my ability to work, I feel I owe you some explanation.Attentive readers may recall that I’m supposed to be in Italy right now, vacationing with my family to celebrate my oldest son’s high school graduation and impending departure to college. As fate would have it, that vacation has been canceled. Why? Well, part of it is that, as followers of my tweets may already know, my entire family has Covid at the moment. But the other part, which I haven’t yet shared, is that I also have cancer. Specifically, I have a relatively rare cancer called urothelial carcinoma — a 4.5-cm mass in my right kidney cavity. It was identified via a CT scan about a month ago. A few weeks ago, I had a procedure: a right ureteroscopy with biopsy and ureteral stent insertion. They also fired some lasers at the mass, which I found oddly gratifying. The good news is that, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, the biopsy indicates that the cancer is low-grade. The bad news is that the mass is so big that it’s got to come out regardless; my surgical options are no different than if it were high-grade. Because it has gotten so big, trying to laser it to pieces could take two, three, or even more full surgeries, followed by a lifetime of vigilance, since this type of cancer tends to recur in surrounding tissue via the “field effect.” Recurrence in my kidney or ureter would be bad; recurrence in my bladder (which I only have one of) would be worse.The other option is just to have my right kidney taken out entirely, which is what I’m scheduled to do next month — what the official documentation refers to as a “nephroureterectomy, robot-assisted,” which I also find oddly gratifying. I like having robots and lasers on my side.Having a kidney out is not a small thing — it’s a serious surgery — but there are very good chances of full recovery. People lose or donate kidneys all the time and go on to live long, healthy lives. My colleague at Vox, Dylan Matthews, donated one of his kidneys out of pure altruism and wrote a detailed account, which has been a great comfort to me. To be clear: I’m in no pain. The cancer itself is causing me no symptoms outside of hematuria (bloody urine), which admittedly is no fun, but it was the only way this thing got caught. A tumor in your kidney lining (as opposed to the cavity, where mine is) can grow for a long time and cause no symptoms at all. It’s a good thing my tumor made a ruckus.Suffice it to say, in the vast hellscape of possible cancers, I could have done a lot worse. I am, in the grand scheme of things, quite lucky.That said, losing the vacation is a real bummer. For one thing, it was all set up: the plane tickets were bought; the lodgings were booked; the train tickets were reserved; the cars were rented; the tours and outings were all lined up. It was going to be magic. But what really hurts my heart is not getting to send my son off with some indelible memories of his final summer with us. I wanted that time with him so badly. As a sad, sweet gesture, Mrs. Volts made us reservations at an Italian restaurant in Seattle for last Monday night — the night we were supposed to leave for Italy — but then, over the weekend, the older boy tested positive for Covid. He isolated immediately, but the next day I tested positive and the day after that, Mrs. Volts and the younger boy. To summarize: rather than nibbling gelato and sipping espresso at a street-side cafe in Florence, we are at the end of a week spent slumping around our house, coughing and snorting and unable to do much but watch TV. (The Old Man is really good.)One additional downer: remember a while back I told you about my aching wrists and elbows? Yeah, that’s worse than ever. I can type for short bursts, but holding my hands steady in any position for more than about 30 seconds brings sharp pain. This means I can’t really sustain concentrated work on longer writing. I can basically … tweet. And given that tweeting is already what I do when I’m anxious, I’ve been tweeting a lot lately. It’s not great.I tried some voice control and transcription programs, but I found them weirdly enervating. It is exhausting to talk all the time! But I’m going to have another go at them, since this doesn’t seem to be going away and I still can’t think of a practical way to take six months away from a keyboard to let t

In this episode, Kimberly Nicholas discusses her published research on the most effective policies to reduce car use in cities.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn the US, the movement to get cars out of cities is … what’s the nice word? … nascent. But in Europe, where many cities were built before cars and big-box sprawl never completely dominated, there is growing agreement that cars need to be reigned in. It’s partly about fighting climate change, but beyond that it’s about quality of life — living without air and noise pollution, using your legs to get around, and enjoying public spaces.More and more European cities are discovering what Copenhagen found when it studied the problem in earnest: every mile traveled on a bike adds value to a city, whereas every mile traveled in a car subtracts value. The pushback against cars in the Europe has been going on for decades now, but there has been little effort to catalogue and rank the various policies and initiatives involved. What works and what doesn’t? What should other cities prioritize?Into that breach came a recent research paper in Case Studies on Transport Policy that dove into the academic literature (surveying 800 papers) to rank the top car-reducing strategies. It was co-authored by Paula Kuss (based on her master’s research) and Kimberly Nicholas of Sweden’s Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. Nicholas later wrote a summary of the research for The Conversation that received an enormous amount of attention. As it happens, driving cars out of cities is one of my enduring obsessions, so I eagerly accepted Nicholas’ offer to review the research, discuss the themes evident in the top-performing policies, and ponder whether such policies could ever take hold in the US. Our conversation was enlightening and heartening, despite making me want to move to Europe.With no further ado, Kim Nicholas. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Kimberly NicholasThank you so much. Long-time listener, first-time guest.David RobertsI want to talk about your study, but before we jump in, there's just a couple of kind of background things I want to establish. One point, which you emphasize a couple of times, which I don't feel like is super well understood. I feel like a lot of times, in my experience, when we talk about declining cars, or trying to get rid of cars, or blocking cars, or anything that inhibits cars, it strikes people, I think, intuitively as a punishment to the poor. And the point you make, at the top of your post about your paper, is that this is not in fact, the case.In fact, the sort of transportation sector is weighted as it is toward the wealthier. So say just a little bit about that by way of background.Kimberly NicholasYeah, I think that's so important that people understand that it is overwhelmingly the rich who drive the most, and it's very important to design climate and transport policies that simultaneously tackle the very serious and increasing problem of inequality. But that's fully possible to do. Some of the people who benefit the most from active and public transport are lower-income folks. So our study focused on Europe because Europe actually has a policy to ...David RobertsStudy.Kimberly NicholasExactly. The European Union has promised to deliver 100 climate-neutral cities by 2030. And those cities have just been chosen. And in order for that to actually happen, cities have to reduce the number of cars.And when we look in Europe, the data show that it's the rich who drive the most, the richest 10%, about 21% of their emissions comes from driving. And they take up so much more space in cities, which is something we often don't think about. But in Berlin, for example, it's three and a half times more public space that goes to car drivers than non-car drivers. So the car really is a tool to increase inequality.David RobertsAnd that's just parking mostly, right? That public space?Kimberly NicholasLargely parking. Also roads and other car infrastructure. In Sweden, it's about 100 m², roughly 1000 square feet. That's the size of many apartments in cities, here. So you think, "Okay, what value could we get for that land? That could be public parks, that could be more housing where we need it in cities." And it's just a really inefficient use of space.David RobertsAnd you make the point that EU is doing fairly well on some climate metrics, but its transportation sector is actually kind of a little bit of its Achilles' heel. It's not on a good trajectory.Kimberly NicholasNo. And I think that this is really something that it's important for the world to take a look at because to get down to zero emissions and actually stop climate change, the first thing is to produce a lot of clean energy. And I think listeners to your podcast are well aware of that, and you talk about that a lot. But then you have to electrify everything to run on that clean energy. And transport is the next sort of phase. And you see in

In this episode, political communications expert Dan Pfeiffer speaks to the wide influence of right-wing media, why Democrats keep losing messaging battles, and what they need to do about it.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsYou probably know Dan Pfeiffer best as one of the hosts of the wildly successful Pod Save America podcast, part of the growing Crooked Media empire of which he is a co-founder. Or perhaps you know him as the author of the Message Box newsletter, where he dispenses communications advice to left-leaning subscribers. But before he was a new media mogul, Pfeiffer was in the thick of politics as a top aide on Obama’s campaign and then in Obama’s White House, where he ran communications and strategy.Pfeiffer has seen the media war between the parties play out, and he has seen Democrats lose messaging battles again and again. He has first-hand experience of the growing power of the right-wing media machine to spread disinformation, set the agenda for the rest of the media, and deflect accountability.Now he has written a book on the subject: Battling the Big Lie is an extended examination of the growing imbalance between the conservative movement’s massive media megaphone … and the left’s lack of one. Listeners know that I have been obsessed with this imbalance for as long as I’ve been following politics, so I was super geeked to talk with Pfeiffer about how right-wing media grew, how it successfully intimidated both mainstream media and social media companies, and how Democrats can begin building a comparable megaphone of their own, before it’s too late.Dan Pfeiffer. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Dan PfeifferThanks for having me.David RobertsCongratulations on writing a book under extreme time pressure. An extremely stressful time to be alive. I hope the psychological damage has been minimal.Dan PfeifferI think we'll only know how much damage there was many years from now, so the full cost of this endeavor will not be known.David RobertsWell, I want to talk about the current situation, but just briefly at the beginning, let's look a little bit at history. So I wonder what you think are sort of the kind of the landmarks on the road to the current situation. So for instance, tell us a little bit about when the press, the mainstream press as the enemy, became a popular thing on the right. That's sort of the first and then the second is like, what are the sort of markers of the growth of their own media apparatus? How did we get here?Dan PfeifferSure, there had been a bubbling sentiment of conservative anti-press sentiment dating back to the New Deal and FDR and Democrats sort of dominating the conversation. But it became a political strategy, primarily in Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. He hammered the press, he hammered Eastern elites. He handed out pins to the press on the press planes, calling them members of the Eastern establishment. The press as enemy became an explanation to the right, themselves and their voters why they kept losing elections. It wasn't that their policies were bad. It wasn't that they were unpopular. It wasn't that their rhetoric wasn't good.It was that the press hated them. Nixon took that into hyperdrive because of his own set of insecurities and grievances. And even before Watergate, like in the course of the Nixon administration, there was real thoughts on how you go about destroying the press. Richard Nixon had his enemies list, which included members of the press. He also explored with Roger Ailes and some of his other aides very specific forerunners, the Fox News. In terms of state sponsored propaganda, there was an effort where they explored creating local news pieces created by the White House that would then be under a sort of undercover that would be sent to local news stations.There was an effort to fund a pro-Vietnam War documentary to push back against the Pentagon Papers and other efforts out there. And then when the press, in the common "tell all the President's men" telling of what happened, took down Nixon, that became sort of the cause celeb in the right. "The press is out to get us. The press is out to get us." Reagan took that in the 80s. Getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine as a part of it was part of his campaign.David RobertsOne question about that, about the Fairness Doctrine thing, I'm curious what sort of the public versus private justifications for that were, like, did Reagan and his people consciously do that in order to bolster right wing voices or was there some sincere ideological motivation back there somewhere?Dan PfeifferI think there was probably some sincere ideological motivation, but the primary driving factor, as I understand the history, was the fact that the Fairness Doctrine was putting downward pressure on efforts to have an emerging right wing radio ecosystem. And that in order to have that, every time they kept trying to move towards local stations, kept trying to move towards sort of the

In this episode, Johannes Ackva of Founders Pledge discusses his thinking on the most effective forms of climate philanthropy.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsSay you’re a private individual (or a company, or a foundation) who cares about climate change and has some money to spend on it. What’s the best way to spend that money? How can you ensure the largest possible impact?Similar questions about maximizing philanthropic impact have led to an entire field of study and practice known as “effective altruism,” which seeks to apply logical and empirical rigor to do-gooderism. But it is only very recently that effective altruists have turned their attention to climate change. One of the leading EA voices on climate is Johannes Ackva. He’s a researcher at Founders Pledge, an organization through which business owners and entrepreneurs donate a portion of their earnings to charity. For years, Ackva has been thinking through the puzzle of how best to channel climate philanthropy, given the structure of the problem and the politics around it. If you’re interested in what groups Founders Pledge has chosen for its donations, you can find a list on the website, but I was more interested in the thinking that led Ackva to those recommendations. Given the enormous spatial and temporal scales involved in climate change, the many social and political complexities, the extensive and irreducible uncertainties, how can a well-meaning donor have any confidence in their choices? I found our conversation quite enlightening — a new lens through which to view this familiar problem — it and I think you will too.Johannes Ackva, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Johannes Ackva:Yeah, thank you, David. Thanks for having me. It's an honor and pleasure to be here.David Roberts:Let's start a few steps back since I'm not entirely sure that the Volts audience will be familiar with the effective altruism movement, even though it gained quite a bit of press attention recently. So to start with, just tell us briefly, what is effective altruism and what is it trying to do?Johannes Ackva: So effective altruism is really a social and intellectual movement that tries to answer the question, “how can we do the most good possible?” And, not only answer that question in a theoretical way, but in a very practical way, actually trying to do as much good as possible. There are two components to it. The first one that I would stress is, of course: altruism, which is about trying to be really serious about helping other people and other beings. So, effective altruists usually take a global take, including all humans, also all future humans, also all animals. So, having a really expansive form of altruism. And many effective altruists donate a large part of their income to the global poor or change their careers. So this is the altruism piece of it. And then there's this effectiveness piece, which is like thinking really hard and long, and trying to use as much evidence as possible to think about “how can we have the most impact?”, the most positive impact. And one thing about impact here that I think is crucial, because I think it will come up throughout our conversation, is that a lot of what I'm saying on climate is motivated by this notion of counterfactual impact. Given what everyone else is doing, what is the thing that is additional, should be done next? So, not only trying to have impact, but trying to have impact that otherwise would not happen in the world. And I think that's really key to how we think about climate.David Roberts:And this is the concept of additionality, doing something that would not otherwise be done?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, doing something that would not otherwise be done. Yes, that's the concept of additionality.David Roberts:I won't claim any deep familiarity with the ins and outs of the movement, but my impression over the last few years is that some of the most prominent spokespeople for effective altruism are relatively down on climate change as a target for philanthropic giving. I think the idea is that they're trying to think about all humans today and all humans that will ever be. They're thinking about what might cause the extinction of the human race, and they say climate is unlikely to cause extinction, whereas, you know, a terrible pandemic or an asteroid or an AI that becomes sentient and does a terminator on us are much greater threats of extinction. So why, within the context of effective altruism, do you think that climate change is a worthy target for people's giving and attention?Johannes Ackva: First, I would say you're broadly right there. And it’s funny, because I was a climate person before I was an effective altruist, before I encountered effective altruism. So, it was the first instance of having to justify myself. Why am I working on climate? Growing up in Germany this was something I never had to justify. So I think that's broadly right, most effective altruists do not fo

In this episode, Dr. Ye Tao discusses his vision for combatting climate change by using fields of mirrors that reflect solar radiation.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsGeoengineering — using large-scale engineering projects to directly cool the Earth’s atmosphere — is an intensely controversial topic in climate circles. On one hand, such schemes strike many people as dangerous hubris, interfering with large-scale systems we don’t fully understand, risking catastrophic unintended consequences. On the other hand, there is good reason to believe that even a wildly successful program of decarbonization will not be enough to avoid devastating levels of heat in the atmosphere.Dr. Ye Tao was early in his career as a researcher at Harvard’s Rowland Institute, working on nanotechnology, when he became gripped by the problem of climate change. As he dug into the research, he concluded that even rapid decarbonization — especially insofar as it reduces the aerosol pollution that temporarily cools the atmosphere — would leave the Earth roasting in levels of heat hostile to most life forms.As he reviewed available options for carbon capture and geoengineering, he realized that none of them were safe or scalable enough to do the necessary cooling work in time. So he came up with a technique of his own: mirrors.The MEER project — Mirrors for Earth’s Energy Rebalancing — is a nonprofit established to advance Tao’s vision, which involves covering some mix of land and ocean with fields of mirrors. The mirrors would reflect solar radiation, and thus heat, back up out of the atmosphere. If 10 to 15 percent of developed agricultural land could be covered with mirrors, Tao has calculated, it would return Earth’s heat to safe preindustrial levels, providing a range of local benefits to agriculture and water in the meantime.It’s a brash idea, somewhere between crazy and obvious, and I was excited to hear more from Tao about why he thinks it’s necessary, how it would work, the materials that would be required, and how the MEER framework changes the way we view carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Alright. Ye Tao. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming on.Ye TaoYeah, thanks for inviting.David RobertsYe I have to confess when I first invited you on the pod, I had not yet really done a deep dive into into the MEER Project, and I was just sort of thinking, "Oh, a bunch of mirrors. How novel. That sounds fun. Let's talk about that." But I've spent a while now digging in and listening to more of your presentations and reading more, and there's really a lot going on here. There's a lot going on here. The mirrors are at the end of a sort of chain of reasoning that in many, many ways contradicts conventional wisdom about climate change.So I do want to get to the mirrors. I'm excited to talk about the mirrors, but let's do a little background building first. So I want to start with, it seems like the key to understanding your whole framework here is the distinction between CO2 and heat. We sort of conflate carbon and heat. When we talk about climate change, what's the problem? It's more carbon, and carbon causes heat. How do we reduce heat? We reduce the carbon dioxide emissions. We sort of have those coupled in our mind. And you say it's important to decouple them. So talk a little bit about why we need to keep them conceptually distinct, and then also decouple them in terms of the physics of the system.Ye TaoOkay, yeah, that's a good place to start. It's true that we created this problem by emitting CO2, and it's important to shut it down as quickly as we can manage, practically. And in the Earth system, everything is basically linked. So it's only natural that when you perturb one important component to a very significant extent, such as CO2 concentrations, you should expect some downstream consequences — and the most urgent of which is overheating of the planet. And heat is really the driver of weather patterns and precipitation patterns. So when you have excess thermal energy that's really different from the state Earth was before the CO2 perturbation, that you can expect downstream extreme events and also perturbation to the biochemical cycle.And if we look at the responses of different organisms and plants, insects, and mammals, and how they respond to individual perturbations in CO2 versus temperature, universally they really suffer when temperature gets ramped up to a few degrees above their normal temperature niche values. But in terms of CO2, essentially most species, like 90% plus or more, are actually not perturbed really by the current increase in CO2 levels. So basically, we initiate this avalanche by burning CO2. But the real environmental stressor that's really creating havoc are a combination of overheating and the resulting drying of land and moisture.David RobertsSo what we talk about as the effects of climate change are the effects of heat, basically, our heat playing its way through the system. A

In this episode, Chris Hayes of MSNBC discusses how American politics and society changed after the Obama years, where things might head in the future, and how his own views have shifted along the way.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsI often reflect on a particular moment in the summer of 2015. It was not long after the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal across the nation in Obergefell v. Hodges. And America was in the middle of one of its regular fights over Confederate monuments and flags, which were being pulled down by progressives across the country.One afternoon I ran across a cartoon — I think it was on Facebook? — showing a Confederate flag being lowered and the LGBTQ flag being raised in its stead.Hot damn, I thought. Maybe we really do get it right eventually.I now think back on that moment as the peak of my belief in what you might call the Obama creed, which the nation's first black president repeated in one way or another in virtually every speech: that the essence of America is its continuous struggle toward the egalitarian ideals of its founding. Again and again it delays and falls short and takes two steps back, but it never stops striving, improving, bit by hard-fought bit. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.To a first approximation, everything that has happened since then has sucked. We fell into the ugly 2016 Democratic nomination fight, followed by the ugly presidential election, then four years of daily insults to dignity and compassion by Trump, then a plague that we bungled in countless ways and that has killed more than a million of us, and now, the Supreme Court is systematically dismantling the pillars of the modern administrative state while Biden and the Democrats fumble their way through a slow-motion catastrophe, setting up an openly seditious Republican Party to seize near-total power in the coming two elections.To put it mildly, these developments have been rough on the Obama creed, at least for me and many people I know. Much of what Obama himself did was crushed or reversed by Trump, and Biden has barely begun rebuilding from the wreckage. More than that, America's reactionary minority seems ascendent. And its intentions are clear: to follow Viktor Orban's lead in Hungary. To whittle democracy down until it's entirely hollow, one-party rule in all but name. It finds echoes in similar reactionary backlashes currently rising in nations across the globe.Is America redeemable? Is white Christian patriarchy ready and willing to destroy the country before it gives up power? Is the arc of history bending, or is it merely flailing back and forth, with no larger purpose or pattern? Is modern multi-racial, multi-cultural democracy still a viable long-term project?To help ponder these weighty questions, I've turned to the inimitable Chris Hayes, who, as they say, needs no introduction. You've seen his shows on MSNBC, you've listened to his podcast, you've read his essays and books, you know that he is one of the leading liberal voices of our time. He’s also a friend. We are part of the same generation of journalists, living through the same dumpster fires, seeing the same patterns, and our paths have crossed regularly over the years. I’ve also been on several of his shows! We go way back.I’ve always felt that Chris and I share similar political and intellectual instincts — one of the few people at the commanding heights of US journalism and punditry about whom I can say that — so I’m curious to hear how his political outlook has changed since 2015, whether he still believes in the Obama creed, and what he thinks is coming in America’s near future. So with that portentous wind-up, let's bring him into the conversation.Chris HayesThat was great. I love that. I found that very moving.David RobertsOh, great. Alright, well, thanks for coming on Volts.Chris HayesI should say I'm a Volts reader, too.David RobertsThank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. We're talking during a very dark time. Dark. I mean, it's all shades of dark these days. It's particularly dark in the wake of the latest ...Chris HayesChild murder?David RobertsChild murder. Yes, child mass murder. That we're all going through the motions as we always do, until that fades and something else horrible comes up in the news. But let's pull the lens back. I want to do some big picture talking, and then a little bit more close in, like proximate, what's our proximate future talk? But let's start with the big picture. So I just want to start by asking you in the most general possible terms, if you think back to 2015, which I mark as sort of the last normal year, how has your political outlook changed?I think of you as basically sort of a Left liberal, Scandinavian, welfare-state kind of guy. Has any of that fundamentally changed? Or if not, have you changed your mind about any big things? How have you evolved since then?Chris HayesYeah, I think my basic orientation, which is like,

In this episode, policy analyst Danny Cullenward of CarbonPlan talks about the disconnect between California’s ambitious climate goals and its actual practical plans for achieving them.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsCalifornia has long been known, nationally and internationally, as a leader on climate policy. The sheer scale of its economy and the stringency of its emissions targets have made it a model for other states with climate ambitions. As a role model, its successes (and failures) reverberate far beyond its borders.So it matters a great deal whether California has a practical plan to meet its aspirations. This year offers something of an answer, and … it’s not great. Volts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Every five years, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issues a “scoping plan,” laying out how it intends to meet the state’s targets. The last one, in 2017, raised serious questions about whether the state’s cap-and-trade system could do the emission-reduction work that the state planned to require of it through 2030. This year’s draft scoping plan (there’s still time for public comment) answers none of those questions, and instead, looking out to 2045, raises new questions about whether carbon-dioxide removal (CDR) can do the work the state plans to require of it.That’s a lot of questions. To hash through them, and get a sense of just how prepared California is to meet its climate targets, I called up Danny Cullenward, a long-time policy analyst in the state. (Volts fans will remember him from one of the very first Volts posts.) He is currently policy director at the nonprofit CarbonPlan and a research fellow at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy. Cullenward and I discussed what policies have worked to reduce emissions in California, whether the cap-and-trade program can do what’s asked of it, why the current scoping plan leans so heavily on CDR, and whether there’s still time to improve the plan before it’s locked in for five years.Without any further ado, Danny Cullenward. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Danny CullenwardThanks for having me on, Dave.David RobertsDanny, you were the first interview I ever did for Volts a couple of years ago. And as far as I know, now you're the first return guest.Danny CullenwardAnd the first to pivot to audio. This is fun.David RobertsYeah, the first to pivot to audio. I'm sure this is the kind of accomplishment you used to dream about as a young man.Danny CullenwardIf I were still an academic, it would be going on my CV.David RobertsAlright, so the purpose of our conversation here today is to get a handle on California and climate, sort of where it's been, where it says it's going, and whether it is in fact prepared to go where it says it's going. Before we get there, though, let's do just a little sort of scene setting, a little background. I think everybody hears about laws coming out of California all the time. California is doing this, doing that, and it becomes a little bit of a blur. So let's just sort of clarify what are the targets to which California is committed by statute, and sort of what are its other targets which are less statutory.Danny CullenwardI think that's the formal legal definition. That's great.David RobertsSemi statutory.Danny CullenwardWell, so there's a reason people talk about California and also why people, I think, sometimes get confused about exactly what's going on. And the reason that it matters is California was one of the first states to move forward on some of the macro climate policy issues, and many states are either copying or learning from its experience. So what it does turns out to matter a lot to sort of what other people start to do. I think the story begins in earnest in climate policy with the passage of AB 32. Our famous climate law back in 2006.David RobertsUnder Arnold.Danny CullenwardUnder Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a progressive Democratic legislature came together, found common ground on this bill, did a couple of things.It set a target to reduce emissions back down to 1990 emissions, by the year 2020. And it empowered the climate regulator, the California Air Resources Board, with the authority to undertake new regulations, including a cap-and-trade program, as well as to coordinate with other agencies, like our clean energy regulators that had already been pushing on renewables in the past. And that sort of set up the meta-framework and delegated the planning exercise to this regulator. So that's target number one. Target number two is about a decade later. In fact, one of the same principal legislators, then-Senator Fran Pavley, led a bill called SB 32, which codified a target of 40% below 1990 levels by the year 2030.So both of those are statutory targets. They're legally binding. The regulator is obligated to plan to and meet those targets. And the

In this episode, Abigail Hopper of the Solar Energy Industries Association discusses the trade complaint that has cast a pall over the US solar industry, why she believes it should be dismissed, and the complexities of tariff policy.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBack in 2012, the Obama administration levied tariffs on solar panels from China, to punish the country for unfairly subsidizing its panels in an attempt to corner the market. In the ensuing years, US imports from China fell off sharply and imports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam rose just as quickly.Early this year, a tiny California-based solar manufacturer, Auxin, filed a trade complaint with the US Department of Commerce, alleging that China is effectively laundering its solar supply chain through third-party countries, thereby illegally circumventing tariffs. It asked Commerce to apply commensurate tariffs on imports from those countries. (Canary Media has extremely thorough coverage of the case, if you want to catch up.)Commerce is investigating. Meanwhile, the industry has been thrown for a loop — imports have fallen off, projects are being cancelled, and projections of growth are being revised radically downward. The tariffs could be anywhere from 30 to 250 percent, which would radically change the economics of big solar projects, and if applied, will be retrospective over the past two years, which means even existing contracts are in jeopardy. The uncertainty has cast a pall over the entire sector.The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has been advocating against tariffs from the beginning and is calling on Commerce to dismiss the complaint. I contacted Abigail Hopper, the head of SEIA, to talk about the merits of the case, whether building a domestic solar supply chain is a good goal, whether tariffs work, and what other policies might be preferable. With no further ado, Abigail Hopper of SEIA. I'm not going to say the whole thing. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Abigail HopperThanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.David RobertsSo this is a knotty and complicated issue we're going to get in here.Abigail HopperIs that the K-N-O-T-T-Y naughty?David RobertsYes, exactly.Abigail HopperOkay, just checking.David RobertsAlso, perhaps naughty, we'll see at the end. So I want to kind of go through it piece by piece, before we get to the tariff dispute, the tariff case that's at issue here, let's go back a little bit and just talk about the tariffs. These date back to Obama, the Obama era. So why don't maybe you just tell us sort of what tariffs are in place, and what is the rationale for tariffs, like when Obama put these in place in 2012? What is the sort of stated rationale? What are they meant to accomplish?Abigail HopperSure. And you already have displayed more knowledge than the average person around the multiple layers of tariffs that the solar industry is dealing with. So, yes, these go back to 2012. And at that time, there was an allegation and then a finding, that China was dumping its product into United States. That meant that the Chinese government was unfairly subsidizing production of solar cells and solar modules and then selling them into the United States below cost. So if it cost $10 to make it, they would sell it in for $5, and the Chinese government would suck up the other $5.David RobertsAnd presumably this is not just, like, unfair or unsporting. This violates some law or treaty.Abigail HopperYes, it violates the trade laws, and therefore the tariffs were put in place to address that unfair practice.David RobertsAnd then there were more under Trump. What did he add?Abigail HopperSo the ones we just talked about, people refer to usually as the ADCBD, Anti-Dumping Countervailing Duties cases, and those are from 2012, and those apply to products coming out of China. In 2017, a case was initiated, and then in 2018, President Trump imposed tariffs. And those are the Section 201. That's the section of the statute it applies to. And those were placed on cells and modules coming from any country in the world. There were a couple of specific exceptions, but generally, any country in the world, these tariffs applied and they started at 30% and stepped down.There's a whole drama around the bifacial modules and that exclusion, I'm happy to talk about. But those were additive to whatever ADCBD tariffs that were already in place.David RobertsSo specifically, then, imports from China would face both of these tariffs added together.Abigail HopperCorrect.David RobertsI mean, the rationale for the first set makes sense. If China is doing something illegal under trade law, that makes sense. But what is the rationale for just slapping tariffs on all imports? That can't be that all importers are breaking trade laws. What's the rationale there?Abigail HopperYeah, it's a totally different theory of the case. It is not a claim based on fault or anyone being nefarious or violating laws. Ra

In this episode, Lauren Melodia and Kristina Karlsson of the Roosevelt Institute explain why it’s counter-productive to increase domestic oil and gas production when energy prices rise, and how building out clean-energy infrastructure is the actual best way to address the price volatility of fossil fuels. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsAmericans are struggling with two related problems: one, there’s general inflation, which means pretty much everything is expensive; two, there’s energy price inflation, which means that energy in particular (specifically, oil and gas) is expensive.This has led some politicians, mainly Republicans-and-Joe-Manchin, to propose a dual solution: cut back on government spending (to tame inflation) and increase domestic oil and gas production (to tame energy prices). This approach is wrong-headed and counter-productive on both counts. The reasons why are laid out in a new issue brief from the Roosevelt Institute, the first in a series called “All Economic Policy Is Climate Policy” (which, hell yes).Lauren Melodia, deputy director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, and Kristina Karlsson, the institute’s program manager for climate and economic transformation, argue that fossil fuel prices are inherently volatile, and that volatility has serious macroeconomic effects; on the flip side, electricity prices — specifically renewable electricity prices — tend to be far more stable and manageable.It follows that government spending to build out clean-energy infrastructure is itself anti-inflationary; it removes a source of price instability and replaces it with stability. This argument is my favorite kind — it put words to something that’s been rattling around in my head for years — so I was excited to talk to Melodia and Karlsson about the volatility of fossil fuels, why we’ve come to accept it as an inevitable fact of life, and why it is, in fact, a choice that we could make differently. With no further ado, Lauren Melodia and Kristina Karlsson from the Roosevelt Institute. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Kristina KarlssonThanks for having us.Lauren MelodiaThanks so much for having us.David RobertsYou have written this report about energy and inflation. It's one of my favorite kinds of reports, in that, after I read it, I was like, "Oh, well, duh, of course that's true." But it's like it hadn't occurred to me before. It's one of those things where just hearing it stated clearly, I think is very eye-opening. So let's walk through a little bit, the pieces of it, and then we'll get into what it means for policy. So to start with, something I found interesting and didn't really know, which is that these traditional measures of inflation, which are gently sort of like bundles of products through which inflation is measured and tested, exclude energy.Typically, energy is not included in them because energy is sort of inherently volatile and is swinging up and down all the time. And so the idea, I think, is if we include that, it's going to sort of obscure what we're trying to look at. So we'll set that aside and look at another bundle of products, and if they are going up, then it's real inflation. This is sort of how things are typically done. But as you say, this can be somewhat misleading since energy price volatility plays a huge role in inflation, and, specifically, is playing a huge role in current inflation.So explain briefly sort of the role of energy prices in the inflation we are currently experiencing.Lauren MelodiaSure, absolutely. I mean, I think that there's two ways that they're at play, despite the fact that the Fed or certain macro analysts might not want to think about energy prices in the overall inflation rate. One is simply that people spend a lot of money on energy. And so even if the core CPI, Consumer Price Index, or other indicators show that there's price stability, people are experiencing rising gasoline prices. And we've seen over the past year, that really fuel the conversation around inflation.David RobertsConsumers definitely don't hold energy as some separate category, right. Like they experience it as inflation when prices rise.Lauren MelodiaExactly. So if we're talking about rising prices in society and trying to ground that conversation and connect with consumers, people who are consuming the media, your constituents, these are the prices that people are going to be talking about. The other way that they really do influence kind of the overall economy is that these energy price volatility, the changes in energy prices, actually do have a huge impact on our economy overall even if we don't want to be thinking about them when it comes to inflation. And that simply is because energy is foundational to business operations and household consumption.If there's a spike in gasoline prices or other energy prices, it is something that people just have to deal with. You can't delay consuming energy, you have to pay

In this episode, Jesse Morris of international nonprofit Energy Web discusses his group’s work toward building a transparent and trusted “operating system” for distributed energy resources, with an end goal of enabling a more sophisticated and resilient energy grid.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsRecent years have seen an explosive rise in distributed energy resources (DERs) — energy devices that are located “behind the meter,” on the customer side, like solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), and smart appliances.Distributed energy has the potential to change the grid for the better, making it cleaner and more resilient, but as things stand, there’s a problem.Consider an EV. The customer has a relationship to it, a way to see its capacity and behavior; it wants to operate the EV in a way that best serves their own transportation needs. The aggregator — an entity that gathers DERs and treats them as a single entity, to sell their services — has a different relationship with the EV; it wants to operate the EV to meet contractual requirements. The distribution utility has a different relationship; it wants to operate the EV to maintain grid stability. And the market manager (ISO) has yet a different relationship; it wants to operate the EV in the way that best serves the market.All these entities want different things from the EV, but they’ve all built bespoke systems to track it — systems that do not communicate with one another. Consequently, most DERs are wildly underutilized. This can not last. Confusion and crossed wires will only grow with distributed energy. What the world needs is a common, transparent, trusted way to track DERs, their capacity and interaction with the grid. That is what Energy Web, an international nonprofit, aims to provide: “an operating system for DERs” that will assign each DER a record on the blockchain (yes, the blockchain), allowing all interested entities to have a common source of information and tracking.I am a bit of a skeptic of toward blockchain hype, but this seems like an excellent use of it, which could unlock a much more sophisticated and resilient grid. I’m eager to talk to Energy Web CEO Jesse Morris about what the product is, how it can help DERs, and where we might see it adopted next.Alright, then. With no further ado, Jesse Morris of Energy Web. Thanks for coming to Volts.Jesse MorrisThank you for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.David RobertsYou know, I want to get into the nuts and bolts of Energy Web, but I feel like we should do a little background, a little scene setting, a little contexting. So let's start, then, because Energy Web is, I think, primarily a way of solving the problems, some of the problems posed by distributed energy. And so I don't want to assume too much background knowledge on the part of listeners. So why don't you just really quickly sort of tell us what qualifies as distributed energy? What's the sort of technical definition of distributed energy? What is it? How much of it is there? How much is coming on board? And what challenge does it pose to the grid?Jesse MorrisSo I think that is a very accurate statement, in terms of our primary focus at Energy Web and the problems we're trying to solve. For us, distributed energy, and I'll add the additional word on here, distributed energy resources. What are we talking about there, at least in kind of Energy Web's world? So we're really talking about any kind of electricity using, storing, or generating device. So that could range from a battery in a home, a battery in a commercial and industrial building, an electric vehicle, a charge point, a heat pump, any kind of load that can be flexed over time.So our definition of distributed energy resources, at least in terms of the work that we're doing, is actually quite broad. And if I think about the challenges and opportunities there, these are things that anyone working kind of under the broad umbrella of the energy transition, especially you, David, would be super familiar with. We know that in many grids around the world, we're undergoing one of the biggest shifts in the 100+ year history of the grid. More and more customers are adopting these distributed energy resources. Again, I'm sitting here in California, massive amounts of rooftop solar coming online.The model three is the fastest selling and the best selling automobile in the state. So all of these distributed energy resources, in some places, are presenting problems. We do a lot of work in Australia, where they have too much solar at specific times of the day. It's literally backfeeding into the transmission system. It's unbelievable. But then we also are in places where those same resources can provide immense value to the grid. My electric vehicle can help reduce congestion at certain times of the day to prevent our overhead lines from overheating and starting more wildfires. So a little bit of the context about what we're f

In this episode, Doug Thompson, associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina, sings the praises of bureaucracy and its essential role in the fight against climate change.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIt’s well-understood that the modern US conservative movement is a mix of two primary forces, fiscal and social conservatism. (See: fusionism.) Put more crudely: it’s the oligarchs and the evangelical white nationalists. The left’s pushback to social conservatism — anti-racism and civil rights more broadly — is well-developed and richly articulated. But what about the oligarchs and their stated mission to, in Steve Bannon’s words, “deconstruct the administrative state”? Where is the left’s defense of the administrative state, or as it’s less fondly known, the bureaucracy, or even less fondly, the “deep state”? Who will speak up for the deep state?The left has an ambivalent relationship with bureaucracy (which, after all, only overlapped with democracy for the last century or so) and has largely failed to articulate a coherent defense, even as Biden’s administration scrambles to rebuild the agencies Trump decimated. The right has told a clear, consistent story: government bureaucracies are corrupt, inefficient, incompetent, and expensive. It has been repeated to the point that it is folk wisdom. To this day, the left does not have a similarly clear and consistent counter-story about the merits of bureaucracy, or, to use a less loaded term, administrative capacity.State administrative capacity may not be well-theorized on the left, but it is nonetheless a necessary condition of virtually all progressives’ solutions to contemporary problems, climate change chief among them. The wealthy can not be taxed, corporations can not be forced to follow the rules, and wealth can not be transferred to those in need without a robust, competent administrative state. My guest today, Doug Thompson, an associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina, has been thinking and writing about bureaucracy lately, as part of a larger book project on authoritarianism in America. He wondered why aspiring autocrats invariably degrade administrative capacity the second they are able — what they know about it that small-d democrats don’t seem to — which led him to an investigation of bureacracy that traced through Tocqueville and du Bois.Anyway, I’m excited to geek out with Thompson about the intense oligarchic hatred of the administrative state, America’s rich and somewhat surprising history with bureaucracy, and the kinds of positive arguments that can be made on behalf of administrative capacity as such.Without further ado, Doug Thompson, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Doug Thompson: Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.David Roberts: We're going to talk about bureaucracy, which many people mistakenly think is a boring subject; we're going to set them straight. One of the points you make in your writing is that bureaucracy and democracy have somewhat separate histories and only really intertwined recently. As a consequence, our ways of thinking and talking about democracy were shaped in a pre-bureaucratic age and we don't have a robust language to defend democratic bureaucracy as such. Tell us a little bit about that history and how it’s shaped political science and political views.Doug Thompson: Sure. Bureaucracy has been around for thousands of years. The first unified Chinese Empire was founded and established by putting together all of these little statelets that had been at war with each other for a few hundred years. All of these states, over the course of their development, had acquired pretty significant administrative capacity. They had a dedicated, somewhat professionalized bureaucracy that was able to levy taxes and measure the population and measure land and take all that information down to help the first Chinese emperors rule. This set China on this path that it continues to be on to this day, of the rise and fall of dynasties but the constant reconstruction of those dynasties on the basis of a pretty significantly powerful and centralized bureaucratic state. Of course, those are autocratic societies. On the other hand, democratic societies typically developed not only in the absence of bureaucracy, but in many cases because of the absence of bureaucracy. If you're a ruler and you want to demand your people pay some taxes, you can't just yell it from the treetops and expect them to pay up. If you don't have a dedicated administrative system to collect that kind of revenue – the kind of policy that nobody likes; no one wants to pay taxes – then you have to go to other elites in your society, or perhaps even a broad swath of the population if it's a relatively democratic place, and you have to consult with them and convince them to pay up and why it's in their interests. We see the development of early dem

In this episode, Andy Frank, president and co-founder of Sealed, discusses his company’s pay-for-performance model for home electrification.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOne of the greatest riddles of the decarbonization effort is the residential sector, responsible for about 20 percent of US energy-related carbon emissions. There are about 142 million housing units in the US, around 83 million of which are “owner-occupied.” Substantially changing them involves dealing with 83 million separate owners, each with their own circumstances and preferences.Residential decarbonization seems incredibly difficult to scale up, and attempts to date have not been particularly successful. At the rate we are going, it will take hundreds of years to decarbonize America’s housing stock. The crew at New York-based climate tech company Sealed is trying something new, imported from the commercial efficiency market. Rather than trying to persuade homeowners to buy and install things with their own scarce resources, Sealed covers all the upfront costs and coordinates the work with trusted contractors. Homeowners pay the retrofit back out of energy savings, which means Sealed only gets paid if there are, in fact, measurable energy savings. This kind of pay-for-performance arrangement is called an energy services agreement (ESA). Listeners of my pod with Rob Harmon will recognize the concept: customers are paying for metered energy efficiency, in the same way they would pay for energy. Sealed started small but is growing quickly, so I’m excited to talk to its president and co-founder Andy Frank about the frustrations and failures of residential energy efficiency to date, what he’s learned about homeowner preferences, and what kind of benefits come along with having a fully electrified home. Without further ado, Andy Frank of Sealed, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Andy Frank: Thanks for having me.David Roberts: Where do residential emissions and energy use sit in the larger picture? How big of a piece of the climate puzzle are they?Andy Frank: They’re a pretty big piece of the puzzle. Home energy use represents about 20 percent of US carbon emissions. It's a big enough piece where we're really not going to be able to meet our climate goals without nailing residential efficiency and electrification. It is a large opportunity, but also one that has historically been very frustrating to make progress on.David Roberts: The arguments for home energy efficiency stand regardless of climate change; it makes sense to save money and use less energy to do so. We've talked for decades about weatherization and nation-wide retrofits, etc., but nothing ever seems to get off the ground. Why has this been such a tough nut to crack and why have previous efforts not cracked it?Andy Frank: There have been many more ambitious goals than there have been success stories. There's essentially been what I'd call 50 years of failure. The first efforts to really promote energy efficiency – they mostly called it conservation back then – were around 1973, with the first oil embargo, the first big energy crisis. Fast forward to today, we're still not in a great place. At the current pace of retrofits, it's going to take us more than 500 years to retrofit every single home. We don't have 50 years, much less 500, so we definitely need to do something.David Roberts: What have we been trying and why hasn't it been working? Andy Frank: We've tried a lot of things; not a lot of them have worked. A lot of people associate the early days of energy efficiency with Jimmy Carter asking Americans to wear a sweater. But actually, President Nixon, a Republican, was the first one to push for conservation in the early 70s – to turn down thermostats and take shorter showers and change your behavior. Obviously, we're American, we don't like conservation, we don't like having to sacrifice. So the next wave, which was through the late 70s and 80s, was led by legends of this field: Amory Lovins, who was a big inspiration to me, and Art Rosenfeld, and folks saying hey, this isn't about sacrificing; this is about producing more with less, a better quality of life. The old line “people don't want kilowatt hours, they want cold beer and hot showers” – that was the next wave, and that, of course, makes sense and has always made sense. One of the original sins of the energy efficiency industry, at least in my mind, is it was created by government for government, and through the utilities and local contractors. What that meant was you were essentially pushing largely home energy audits, very technocratic solutions, on the populace. I loved your pod recently talking about the economic style of thinking; that was very en vogue with energy efficiency. The idea was, if only we could educate people and give them exactly the right amount of information about what they're doing with home energy use and how much energy they can save, of course they would spe

In this episode, UC Davis assistant professor Fran Moore discusses her research team’s effort to construct a climate model that includes (instead of ignores) effects from the interplay of social conditions and policy change.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsOne of my long-time gripes about the climate-economic models that outfits like the IPCC produce is that they ignore politics. More broadly, they ignore social change and the way it can both drive and be driven by technology and climate impacts. This isn’t difficult to explain — unlike technology costs, biophysical feedbacks, and other easily quantifiable variables, the dynamics of social change seem fuzzy and qualitative, too soft and poorly understood to include in a quantitative model. Consequently, those dynamics have been treated as “exogenous” to models. Modelers simply determine those values, feed in a set level of policy change, and the models react. Parameters internal to the model can not affect policy and be affected by it in turn; models do not capture socio-physical and socio-economic feedback loops.But we know those feedback loops exist. We know that falling costs of technology can shift public sentiment which can lead to policy which can further reduce the costs of technology. All kinds of loops like that exist, among and between climate, technology, and human social variables. Leaving them out entirely can produce misleading results. At long last, a new research paper has tackled this problem head-on. Fran Moore, an assistant professor at UC Davis working at the intersection of climate science and economics, took a stab at it in a recent Nature paper, “Determinants of emissions pathways in the coupled climate–social system.” Moore, along with several co-authors, attempted to construct a climate model that includes social feedback loops, to help determine what kinds of social conditions produce policy change and how policy change helps change social conditions.I am fascinated by this effort and by the larger questions of how to integrate social-science dynamics into climate analysis, so I was eager to talk to Moore about how she constructed her model, what kinds of data she drew on, and how she views the dangers and opportunities of quantifying social variables. Without further ado, Fran Moore, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.Fran Moore:Thanks for having me.David Roberts: In climate modeling, we put in values for what we think is going to happen to the price and then watch the model play out. I've been looking at climate modeling my whole career, and I've always thought that what's actually going to determine the outcomes are our social and political processes, which are not in the model. So really, the models amount to a wild guess, we're all wallowing in uncertainty, and we just have to live with it. You confronted the same situation, and being a much more stalwart and ambitious person than I, said, “I'm going to try to get the social and political stuff into the model to make the model better.” In conventional climate modeling, these sociopolitical variables are treated as exogenous. What does it mean for them to be exogenous to the model?Fran Moore:Exogenous means that they come in from outside, so as the researcher using the model, you have to specify that. In particular, when we're thinking about climate change, those really important exogenous variables are the ambition of climate policy, whether that be in terms of trajectories of carbon prices, or target for temperature, or target for emissions levels. Typically, those are things that you set and they appear exogenously in two ways.One is, in climate modeling, you take some radiative forcing trajectory, or some greenhouse gas concentration, and you ask, what does the climate system do in response to that? But it also comes up in other types of modeling, like energy modeling, where these policies appear exogenously as constraints on the model. So you're asking an energy model to tell you what's the least cost pathway for getting to a 2° temperature target, or to a certain carbon concentration limit in the atmosphere. Those are both versions of exogenous inputs of policy into climate-relevant modeling.David Roberts: The upshot is that the modeler is basically specifying the trajectory of policy and then asking the model: given that, what will happen? What it means to make it endogenous, then, is allowing social and political factors to be affected by other variables and to affect them in return inside the model. What does it look like for something like this to be endogenous? What does that mean to us?Fran Moore:The way it works in our model is that climate policy becomes endogenous. We don't specify what it does; it arises from modeling of more fundamental social-political processes that we think are going to drive or enable climate policy as it might play out over the future. By taking that step back we see this policy not just as something

In this episode, Nan Ransohoff, head of carbon at Stripe, discusses the company's new spinoff, Frontier, which will pool money from partners and make it available to early contenders in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) market. We chat about that market, the technologies that show promise in it, in the role of private industry in accelerating 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

In this episode, Google’s director of energy, Michael Terrell, explains the company's new goal of supplying all of its facilities with clean energy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We discuss how its going, what kinds of new technologies will be needed, and what new policies could help move things along. 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, I discussed swappable, rechargeable batteries in two-wheeled electric scooters with Horace Luke, the CEO of Gogoro. Luke’s company is selling subscriptions to batteries in bustling emerging-market cities like Taiwan. We talked about consumer requirements for swappable batteries, the other kinds of technologies that might use them, and his plans for expansion.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Horace Luke, April 22, 2022(PDF version)David Roberts:Electric vehicles are all the rage these days, but at least here in the western world, most of the attention has focused on four-wheeled passenger vehicles, first Tesla and then all the companies trying to catch up with Tesla. However, across the globe, more than 50 percent of commute miles are undertaken on two-wheelers — scooters, mopeds, and the like. China, India, and Indonesia alone contain more than 500 million two-wheelers; anyone who has visited big cities in those countries has seen the vehicles swarming the streets.And they are dirty as hell. Their two-stroke motors emit as much as five times the pollutants of the average new car in the US. Millions of people have died from two-wheeler pollution, to say nothing of the climate impacts.But two-wheelers are difficult to electrify. Their owners tend not to have extra cash; theft is a constant danger; and urban density makes plugging in, especially in a place sheltered from the elements, difficult.Today’s guest, Horace Luke, set out to solve this problem with his company Gogoro, founded in 2011. The idea was simple: consumers would own the scooters, but Gogoro would own the batteries, which would be made available in stations across the urban fabric, such that riders could easily find one to swap. Consumers would subscribe to the service, effectively ensuring that they would always have a charged battery available. The company took a different course than he expected — Gogoro ended up building its own scooters, stations, and batteries, doing far more hardware than the software-minded Luke had originally envisioned — but his persistence won out and the model is taking off, preparing to expand from Taiwan (where it started) to a range of other burgeoning megacities in emerging economies. It’s a clever model, a mental shift that opens up all kinds of new possibilities, so I was excited to chat with Luke about the problem of two-wheelers, the consumer experience of subscribing to Gogoro, and the other kinds of things, outside of transportation, that cities might be able to do with thousands of distributed, swappable batteries. So without further ado, welcome, Horace Luke, to Volts. Thanks for coming. Horace Luke:Thanks, David. David Roberts:I'm so taken by this whole idea. Tell us a little bit about the problem of two-wheelers: where they are, how dirty they are, and how big a part of the climate problem they are.Horace Luke: Most of the people in the audience probably don't realize that more than 50 percent of all commute miles done globally every day are done on two-wheelers.While we in the United States look at it as more of a recreational or very short-distance commute, in the East – Vietnam, Thailand, China, India, Indonesia – you can't cross the street without being hit by one if you’re not careful. They're just everywhere. In China, India, and Indonesia alone, there are more than 500 million two-wheelers roaming around every day – taking people to school, to work, to the market. They are the absolute utility dependency vehicle that people look for when they're moving around town, and people on average ride somewhere between 300-700 miles a month. Unfortunately, because of the economics of it, the chance of them being clean is not very high. When compared to a gasoline vehicle in, let’s say, California, there are five times more pollutants coming out of the tailpipe per kilometer, easily. On top of that, you have people not using premium fuel and other carelessness that makes owning a two-wheel vehicle extremely polluting. On top of that, they're usually being used in densely populated cities where thousands of people are living on top of each other. If you're walking down the street, you can definitely smell them, you can feel the heat from them. It is a central problem that we need to solve.I grew up on the west coast of the United States. I worked for Microsoft, where I was one of the original founders of Xbox, then eventually was fortunate enough to lead the Windows XP user experience and product experience side of the business. Eventually I moved to Taiwan, where I worked for a company called High Tech Computer (now HTC). I created some of the world’s first Android phones – the T-Mobile myTouch, the Verizon Droid – and was pretty successful there. At age 40 I was traveling around Asia, thinking, “I made that company number one in the world, shipping 43 million phones a year – now what? As the world is moving to 5G and then to 6G and beyond, is that really the end game? Is human c

For years now, I’ve been dithering about getting an electric vehicle (EV). Much of that dithering has been done in public, on Twitter and for various sites I’ve worked for — just a few weeks ago I subjected you to my handwringing about an EV test drive — so I figured I might as well document how the journey finally ended.Long story short, we bought a used 2017 Chevy Bolt. That is about the least sexy sentence one can write about EVs in the year of our lord 2022, but there you have it. We thought about leasing or buying one of the fancy new EVs, the Kia EV6 or the Ford Mustang or a Tesla. But we’re pretty cheap and didn’t want to pay that much. And we felt slightly guilty about buying a new car. And those cars feel like statements. As Mrs. Volts put it, “I just don’t want to say that much with my car.” The Bolt (along with the Nissan Leaf) is the closest thing to an econo-box option in the EV market, and that’s more our speed. We paid $25K — considerably more than we would have paid for the same car 12 months ago, thanks to lingering supply issues, but less than half of a tricked-out, new version of any of the fancier models. In terms of value, though, there’s a twist — the “cheat code” of the current EV market. As you probably know, there has been a massive recall of Bolt batteries. Every battery in every Bolt from 2017 to 2022 will be replaced, at no charge, by Chevrolet. That means, at some point in the next year (my local Chevy dealer estimates seven months from now), they’ll call me, I’ll drop the car off at the dealership, they’ll put in a brand new, 260-mile-range battery, and I’ll get it back the next day. Given that the rest of the car is in good shape (~57K miles on the odometer), this will effectively be like getting a new EV for the cost of a used one. Score.The econo-box of EVsThe car itself is somewhat spartan, if comfortable. It has the “premier” trim, so I got my beloved heated steering wheel, Mrs. Volts her beloved heated seats. It has one-pedal driving and lane assist and parking assist and all-around cameras and Android Auto. The only fancy-pants feature I notice missing is wireless phone charging (which I got used to real quick in the Mustang). As for acceleration, even if it isn’t the insane road-rocket the Mustang was, it is considerably zippier than either of our aged current vehicles, more than zippy enough to make it fun getting around the city. (It has a “sport” mode, with higher torque and lower range, but I haven’t had occasion to use it yet.)The interface is lower end, which means it involves more physical buttons and knobs and less screen real estate than newer EVs, but to be honest I like that much better. There’s less occasion and temptation to look at the screen. I can find most stuff I really need with my fingers. There’s not enough console space and the Bluetooth interface with phones is somewhat janky — listening to music on my phone involves a lot more button-poking than I’d like — but it’s tolerable. As for accessories, I bought a back-seat cover (for the dogs) and a level-two charger (we had a 220-volt outlet already installed). I can’t think of much else we need. We are now driving (semi-)guilt-free. Getting an EV is easier than everOne final note: early in this process I was contacted by a company called Link that is devoted to making it easy for people to get EVs. You can use their site to shop for the EV you want — they offer an advisory service — and then they’ll arrange the lease or purchase for you.After wasting way too much time shopping around, I told Link I wanted a used Bolt. For a few weeks, they sent me notices of Bolts (that had been inspected) as they came on the market. When we saw one we liked, they did all the purchasing and transferring of titles. They mailed me the paperwork (including detailed inspection reports), I signed and mailed it back, and then the car was dropped off in my driveway. I never had to haggle or talk to a salesperson. All I had to do is register it at the DMV and let the Chevy dealership know I had it. It could not have been easier. Link is mostly operating on the West Coast for now, but if you have been dithering about an EV like I was, I can’t recommend it enough. (I know other services like this are springing up — it’s a big and eager market, I would think.)Anyway, that’s the story of how I finally got an EV. You’ll hear no more dithering from me. Instead I’ll to go back to daydreaming about living somewhere where I don’t need a car at all. 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, sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman discusses her new book, Thinking Like an Economist, about the “economic style of thinking” and how it took over in US policy circles in the post-war period. It remains embedded there to this day, but alternatives are beginning to emerge. 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, Carnegie Mellon professor Paulina Jaramillo discusses the IPCC's working group 3 report, “mitigation of climate change,” of which she was a co-author. It's the most comprehensive look to date at the economic sectors that emit greenhouse gases, the strategies and technologies that can reduce emissions, and the state of play in climate policy around the world. 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

Earlier this year, I stumbled on the news videos from the team at Some More News. They are like The Daily Show, but longer, smarter, more in-depth, more profane, and free of Jon Stewart’s unfortunate navel-gazing centrism. But still funny as hell!In other words: they might as well be targeted directly at me. I’ve been gorging on them for months. (You could start with this one on critical race theory.) Anyway, imagine my delight when I discovered that Some More News also has a podcast, Even More News, and they wanted me to come on it! So that’s what today’s episode of Volts is: an episode of Even More News that the team has graciously allowed me to send to you on the Volts channel. We talk about IPCC stuff briefly, but I also got to let loose on Joe Manchin, lament Dems’ general media fecklessness, and heap scorn on Elon Musk’s Twitter moves. It was fun to get away from the wonky stuff for a while and just riff. It’s a different side of Dr. Volts! You can decide for yourself whether it’s better or worse. You should definitely subscribe to Some More News and support the team via Patreon. The left needs much more of this kind of thing — new ways of reaching people where they are. Also! Last week I was on PBS Newshour to discuss the new IPCC report and the state of clean-energy technology. You can watch here:I always underestimate the reach of PBS — it’s wild how many people saw this and contacted me! And how many saw it and contacted my parents. Love you, PBS. Back later this week with some nerdy pods of my own! 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

Economist Noah Smith runs the excellent substack Noahpinion, where he writes and podcasts about … pretty much everything. Economics. Politics. The war. Housing. Technology. On and on. The guy is ludicrously productive. This week, he interviewed me! We talked about the new IPCC reports, the state of technology, some dumb tweets of mine, and NIMBYs, among other things. It was a fun and wide-ranging conversation. Check it out! (And subscribe to Noahpinion.)The video is below. The audio is posted as a podcast above. 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, activists Matthew Metz and Janelle London discuss their new report on gasoline “superusers” — the subset of drivers who drive long distances each year — and the policy recommendations around EV subsidies that it contains. It's a clever idea I haven't been able to stop thinking about. 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, activists and entrepreneurs Audrey Schulman and Zeyneb Magavi discuss their audacious plan to replace the nation's natural gas distribution infrastructure with a series of networked geothermal heat pumps. Basically, neighborhoods would be heated by warm water rather than natural gas. It would be the most efficient collective heating option available in the world. 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, entrepreneur Rob Harmon discusses his new method for tracking and monetizing energy efficiency in commercial buildings. Traditionally, efficiency policy has consisted in subsidizing equipment up front. Harmon explains how to get reliable numbers about actual performance and begin to build a market around them. Surprisingly fascinating. 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

(Hey y’all — I’m attempting to dictate this post rather than type it, so please forgive any sins of grammar or structure.)My family and I own two extremely old cars, a 2001 Honda Odyssey minivan and a 2009 Toyota Prius hybrid. The van is literally falling apart, so we have been looking around lately for a new vehicle. Obviously, we would prefer an EV.A representative from Ford saw me musing about it on Twitter, contacted me, and offered to loan me a Ford Mustang Mach-E electric vehicle for a week. I've been driving it for a few days and I thought I would report my early impressions, along with some larger reservations.Holy s*** EVs are fun to driveI should note up top that I’m not a car guy. I don’t know much about them, don’t much like them, and don’t much like driving them. I never learned to drive a stick shift or change the oil. I don’t drool over muscle cars or know what “hemi” means. Truth be told, I kind of hate car culture.I should also note that I have only ever driven two EVs in my life. The first was the Kia EV6, which I test-drove last week. The second is this Ford. I can say very little about the fine differences in EV driving experience.In short, I am the least qualified car reviewer on the planet.As I said, both of my current cars are extremely old, so I am easily impressed by modern vehicular technology. I still get a kick out of remote key fobs. With this car, when you approach, it lights up, unlocks, and projects a picture of a Mustang on the ground next to the vehicle.There are heated seats, a heated steering wheel, a wireless phone-charging pad, and a giant touch screen with about 50 menus. It all feels like a spaceship to me.The first thing anyone notices when they drive an EV for the first time is the acceleration. With either of my gasoline vehicles — even the Prius when it’s driving in electric mode — there is a lag between pressing the accelerator and speeding up. You are always thinking a second or two ahead, about what speed you'll need to be going, and trying to anticipate. With the EV, acceleration is instant. You are going the speed you want to go the second you want to go it. It is wild.And when you use one-pedal driving mode, when you let off on the accelerator, you immediately slow. It’s difficult to put in words, but it adds up to a sense of much more precise control.I was driving home from a restaurant on Tuesday evening and fiddling with the Spotify menu when I drifted slightly onto the middle line between lanes. With a tiny little push — boomp — the car nudged me back into my lane, as though it were semi-sentient. I hadn’t even thought about the driver-assist features before that, but my one experience with them so far was reassuring, albeit faintly creepy.I’m one of those old guys who resists getting a Tesla because I don’t want to be forced to do every-dang-thing with a touch screen. Give me something physical, with feedback that goes beyond a haptic buzz. I like knobs! Ford’s screen has one giant knob toward the bottom, for volume — it’s better than nothing. In general, Ford has done a pretty good job with its screens and interface. Crucially, unlike in the Tesla, there’s a second screen just under eye level with key information like speed and range. On the bigger center screen, finding the basic stuff is painless. And there are some cool things if you poke around — you can save different profiles (mirror and seat positions, music playlists) that attach to different key fobs. Or you can use your phone as a key fob. I haven’t used any of these features enough to know how they’ll age, but it’s all pretty dazzling. The ride is smooth and quiet, the stereo system kicks ass, and that heated steering wheel … I mean, I’ve found nothing to complain about. And I’m pretty good at complaining. Car & Driver named the Ford Mach-E its EV of the year in 2021 and far be it from me to disagree.It’s not clear Americans can handle this kind of powerHowever! As I was driving home, hands blissfully warm, thinking I might take the long way so I could drive more, I started feeling some reservations. I started thinking about what it would mean for EVs to become dominant, the default choice, with most people driving them.For one thing, they make driving much more fun, even for someone like me who has a deep-seated antipathy toward cars and has never enjoyed driving. All the electric gizmos and screens and features, combined with the unbelievable torque and acceleration, make driving feel like a game in which you’ve just leveled up. It's difficult to believe that if driving is more fun … people won't do it more. And electric or not, less driving is better.The other thing is, the acceleration puts an enormous amount of power in your hands. For someone like me, who drives fairly carefully and pays attention, it can feel more precise and controlled, and thus safer. But it's not difficult to see how this kind of power could be misused. These cars can leap across intersections, going from standing

Hey, y’all, just a short note to catch you up on my current situation and my plans for the coming weeks.Long story short: I have tendonitis in both arms. I’ve had problems with pain in my forearms for years, but it always faded or went away after a while and was manageable. A few months after quarantine started, in 2020, it started getting worse, to the point I had to give up playing bass guitar — my one non-computer hobby. Then, a few months ago, it started getting a lot worse, quickly. I have been to see two physical therapists, done stretches and exercises, received regular therapeutic massage, bought a split keyboard and a vertical mouse, worn compression sleeves during the day and braces at night, iced both arms every day, taken a bunch of goofball supplements (hoping for some placebo effect at least), and even ordered one of these widgets. Nothing has worked, at least not yet; it’s just gotten worse and worse. It feels like a boulder rolling downhill. Nothing slows its momentum. (And don’t bother suggesting resentment and self-pity — I’ve tried those too.)One result is that typing has become a chore. I can get through about a paragraph before my wrists and forearms start to ache and I have to take a break. What’s worse, it has messed up my thinking. Over many years of writing, the act of laying my hands on a keyboard has become a somatic cue that triggers my thinking; I can not write without it. But now it involves pain, and the pain is clouding the thinking. This has made it difficult to write the next piece in my minerals series. It’s made it difficult to write anything. Just contemplating writing makes my arms ache. Of all the advice I’ve gotten, one bit seems reliably true: the only thing that fixes this problem is rest. I’ve got to stop doing the repetitive motions that damaged the tissues. In my case, that means I need to cut way back on holding my phone and typing. I’m told these things take from four to six months to heal.Four to six months of no typing obviously presents something of a challenge for someone who makes his living with a newsletter. Quite a challenge indeed. [eye twitches]So, just to be fully transparent about it, here’s my plan:Next week, I’m taking the week off. It’s winter break and my 16-year-old and I are heading down to Bend, Oregon, to see friends and do some snowboarding/skiing on Mt. Bachelor (where it hasn’t snowed in weeks, sigh). I’m going to endeavor to get through the week with a minimum of screens.After that, I am going to shift — at least temporarily — to doing more podcasting and less writing. This pains me. As much as I make writing a misery for myself, I love it. But working my way into a permanent state of diminished capacity is not something I’m ready for at the tender young age of almost 50. Six months of no typing sounds bad; 20 years of no typing (and no bass playing) sounds way worse. I’m also going to have a go at dictation software; if I can’t type, I can always speak. I admit this fills me with horror. I hate Siri. I hate Alexa. I hate talking to computers. It’s … demeaning. This has been one of my stalwart Dad Things for years; it’s a running joke in my house. But I’m going to bite the bullet. (By the way, Dragon no longer makes dictation software for Mac and apparently nothing else is as good. Let me know if you’ve heard of alternatives. I’m aware that Mac has built-in dictation, but trust me, it sucks.)I’m also going to start doing hot yoga again. I did it regularly for years and it was a blessing. It cured my lifelong back pain and generally warded off the decay of my aging body. I stopped doing it early in the pandemic, and it feels like, in the last year or so, all that aging I held off for those many years has found me at once.Hopefully I can recapture some of the magic. Or at least keep from puking or passing out in my first class back. So, that’s what I’m thinking, at least for now. I don’t know how this will ultimately impact Volts and I’m somewhat reluctant to make any promises at this point — this thing could get worse or it could get better. I need to put my health first. If any of this, now or going forward, affects anyone’s subscription decisions, no worries, I get it. We here at Volts management apologize for any inconvenience.With that said, I’m going to sign off, pack for my trip, and try to forget about my arms for a while. I hope you have a pleasant week and that when I return, the climate parts of Build Back Better will have passed. 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, Gerald Butts and Catherine McKenna discuss their experiences passing a carbon tax in Canada, as advisor to prime minister Justin Trudeau and minister of the environment respectively. In particular, we focus on a key feature of the Canadian tax: all the revenue collected goes back to the province from which it was collected, mostly as per-capita dividends. Butts and McKenna believe that feature was central to selling the public on the policy.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Gerald Butts and Catherine McKenna, February 16, 2022(PDF version)David Roberts:In 2015, after nearly a decade of conservative rule, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party won a majority of seats in the Canadian parliament and control of the federal government. Part of Trudeau’s election platform was a carbon tax.The proposed tax had a few key features. First, it would only be imposed on provinces that did not have their own pricing system that met a few minimum requirements. And second, all the money collected from a province would be returned to that province as carbon dividends.After years of vigorous advocacy and negotiations, Trudeau’s liberals got the tax passed through parliament. It was implemented in early 2019, just before another federal election that became widely seen as a national referendum on the tax.Liberals won again. The carbon tax was affirmed. It’s going to stick — and rise to a whopping $170 a ton by 2030. This is a startling success story for climate policy that was largely overlooked in the US. We, uh, had some other stuff going on. But it’s worth taking a closer look at how Canada pulled it off.Two people at the core of the tax pitch were Gerald Butts, who was principal secretary to the prime minister from 2015 to 2019 and Trudeau’s closest personal advisor, and Catherine McKenna, who was the minister of environment and climate change during the same period.Butts and McKenna were in the trenches and they have the scars to show for it. Both of them noticed the piece I published on Volts in January on carbon tax refunds — and they objected to the conclusion that dividends did not make the carbon tax more popular in Canada.So I had them on the pod! We talked about how the carbon tax was conceived, what enabled it to secure majority support (yes, they say, refunds were important), and where the politics of carbon pricing stand as we move into the 2020s. Not only were my spirits lifted — it’s nice to know there’s a sane country out there somewhere — I learned an enormous amount. I think you will too. Without further ado, Catherine McKenna and Gerald Butts, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Catherine McKenna:Very happy to be on.Gerald Butts: It's great to be here.David Roberts: When Justin Trudeau announced his candidacy [for prime minister of Canada] in 2015, the carbon tax was part of his initial pitch. How far back does the carbon tax idea go? Who got it in Trudeau’s ear? How long had it been bouncing around up there before it made its debut on the national stage? Gerald Butts: The first time it was a real issue in Canada was during the federal election campaign in 2008. Important for the context of the story, for reasons I'll go into later, is that the Liberal Party proposed something called the Green Shift, which was an elaborate take on a carbon tax, under the leadership of Stéphane Dion. But it was easily caricatured as a regional wealth redistribution program, because the revenue from the tax was paid into the consolidated revenue fund at the federal government, and it was redistributed by the federal government to programs of its own choosing, not all of which were environmentally related. To me, there were a lot of reasons beyond the Green Shift that the Liberal Party lost the election in 2008, but that was the fundamental flaw in the policy.David Roberts: The idea is that you're just taking wealth from carbon-intensive provinces and redistributing it elsewhere.Gerald Butts: Absolutely. That, of course, has a history in this country that goes back to when the current Prime Minister Trudeau’s father was prime minister and he created the National Energy Program. The conservative government in 2008, under Stephen Harper — which, to be diplomatic, was not inclined to climate action — easily caricatured this as the second coming of the National Energy Program in Western Canada in particular, and made it out to be that the Liberal Party was after Western money to pay for Eastern programs, which is always death in politics in Canada. When we designed our program, there were lots of people within the party who thought we should stay a million miles away from it, because they were convinced that they lost the election in 2008 because of carbon taxes. We were very careful to make sure that any of the revenue collected went back to the province from which it originated. That, I think, was what unlocked the political constituency for carbon pricing in Canada.David Roberts: So that design — money

In this episode, Rebecca Dell, who runs the industry program at the ClimateWorks Foundation, offers a comprehensive overview of the problems of industrial decarbonization, the most promising technological solutions in steel, cement, and chemicals, and the kinds of policies that could accelerate progress. Incredibly informative.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Rebecca Dell, February 11, 2022(PDF version)David Roberts:For most of the carbon-intensive sectors of the economy — electricity, transportation, buildings — we have a pretty good sense of how to eliminate carbon emissions. None of those sectors will be easy to decarbonize. Every one is an enormous practical challenge. But in each case, the basic path to zero is clear, and it mostly involves switching out fossil-fueled machines with machines that generate or run on clean electricity. Then there’s that other wedge on the pie chart, the one that gets less attention: industry. Manufacturing, mining, construction, and waste processing are responsible for about a third of global carbon emissions (about a quarter of US emissions).The path to zero emissions in heavy industry is much murkier than it is for other sectors. Low-carbon alternatives are early in development and commercialization; in some cases, there are no alternatives except to capture and bury the carbon when it’s emitted.In future pods, I might get deeper into some specific industries (like steel). But for this one, I wanted to attempt a broad overview: What You Need to Know About Decarbonizing Industry.Nobody knows the sector and its challenges better than Rebecca Dell, who runs the industry program at the ClimateWorks Foundation. Dell previously worked at the Department of Energy, where she helped coordinate Obama’s climate action plan, and before that was a research scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She’s a researcher, author, and, as more attention turns to industry, an increasingly frequent podcast guest. (She was on Canary’s Catalyst pod last month.) It takes a while — okay, almost two hours — but Dell and I manage to cover all the big industrial sectors, why they emit so much, prospects for reducing emissions, and the policies that could make it happen. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shopping primer on industry and climate, this is for you. Without further ado, Rebecca Dell, welcome to Volts.Rebecca Dell: Thanks so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.David Roberts:I'm excited for this. We are going to attempt to cover a lot of ground. I want to try to give a 30,000-foot overview of industry and decarbonization; obviously any of the subtopics could be podcasts of their own. Among the Volts audience, people are probably basically familiar with the famous Energy Information Administration pie chart of where US greenhouse gases come from. There are wedges for transportation, electricity, buildings, agriculture — I think people mostly have their heads around how to decarbonize those. Then there's that big wedge that just says “industry.” My sense is that, to a lot of people, that is a bit of a black box — it’s not clear what's in it or how to approach decarbonizing it. Historically, that has been the neglected stepchild of the decarbonization conversation. But am I right in saying that attention on that little wedge has rapidly increased in recent years?Rebecca Dell: Yes, and for people who work on this area, it's been exciting to see how much new interest has come in the last year or two. David Roberts:Do you have an explanation for why?Rebecca Dell:The phenomenon that is more in need of explanation is why so few people were looking at this area until the last year or so, considering that the industrial sector globally, under the most parsimonious accounting, is responsible for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, and under a broader definition, it's responsible for more than a third.David Roberts: Does that roughly echo the US pie chart? Or is the US different because we have deindustrialized a little bit?Rebecca Dell: The US is a little lower in terms of the portion of our emissions that come from the industrial sector. But if you add back in the greenhouse gas emissions that come from manufacturing products in other countries that will be consumed in the United States — you can think of those as our imported emissions — then you get back to something pretty close to the global average.David Roberts: So let's say about a third — that's a lot of emissions to neglect for this long. When we say industry, what do we mean by that? What does that category inclue? What are the boundaries? And what, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, are the top line items?Rebecca Dell: That's a really important question, because when we talk about “industry” in the climate community, it’s a piece of stealth jargon. It’s the worst kind of jargon: it's a word that sounds like a normal word, but it actually is a jargon word. Basically, what we're talking about when we

In a previous post, I offered a broad overview of the problems related to minerals needed for the clean-energy transition. To recap: * clean-energy technologies are more minerals-intensive to build than their fossil-fuel counterparts; * the growth of clean energy will rapidly raise demand for a set of key minerals;* mining and processing of those minerals is geographically concentrated, often in countries with weak labor and environmental protections;* mineral mines and processing facilities often pollute water, scar landscapes, and impoverish communities;* production may not be able to expand fast enough to keep up with demand, which could cause supply constrictions and price fluctuations and slow the transition away from fossil fuels.That’s the big picture. In today’s post, I want to take a take a closer look at some of the biggest clean-energy technologies and the minerals required to build them. Specifically, I’ll cover batteries, solar PV, wind, geothermal, concentrated solar, and carbon capture and storage (CCS). I’m not going to get too deep into any one of these — just a quick tour.I’ll be drawing heavily on a 2020 World Bank report that projects demand for key minerals under rapid decarbonization scenarios from the International Energy Agency (IEA) — specifically the RTS (reference technology scenario, or current policy), 2DS (2-degree scenario), and B2DS (beyond 2-degree scenario, aiming for 1.5). (The World Bank and IEA use the word minerals to refer to the mineral and metal value chain, and I do the same in this post.)This tour will reveal which minerals are expected to be most in demand — which ones are certain to be needed and which depend on the direction taken by particular technologies. It will help focus attention on possible supply stress points. It will also reveal that there is enormous uncertainty about the pace and scale of demand growth for specific minerals and minerals generally. Much depends on unpredictable developments in technology, policy, and politics. Epistemic humility is called for, along with policy focused on resilience. (More on policy in the next post.)One fact that is certain: the more ambitious the world’s decarbonization efforts, the higher mineral demand will rise. Here’s an overview table of energy sources and technologies and the key minerals they use:Let’s start the tour with the 800-pound gorilla of minerals demand: batteries.Batteries are the biggest growth sector for minerals demandOf all the clean-energy technologies set to boom in coming decades, none will put a strain on minerals supply like batteries, shown as energy storage in the chart above. They account for about half of the projected growth in minerals demand over the next two decades in a rapid decarbonization scenario.In large part, this has to do with the expected rise in battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs), which represent 90 percent of battery demand growth; the other 10 percent will come from growth in stationary storage, used to balance out wind and solar on the grid. If the world targets 2°, minerals demand from energy storage will double from the baseline scenario; if the world targets 1.5°, it will more than double again.Batteries, readers of my battery series will recall, are composed of two electrodes, a cathode and an anode, and an electrolyte through which they exchange ions. (The outlier is redox flow batteries, which pump a liquid electrolyte past electrodes.)Depending on what those three parts are made of, batteries require different minerals. Many EVs still use lead-acid batteries, which use lead and sulfuric acid, but lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are expected to rapidly take over the market, so demand for lead-acid batteries won’t grow much.As for LIBs, most use graphite as the anode, which means graphite will be the most sought-after mineral in energy storage. Cathodes vary more widely. The most common use nickel, with various mixes of cobalt, lithium, and manganese also common. (It should be noted that lithium is used across all LIBs, not just for the cathode.)It should be noted that these projections out to 2050 are to a large extent guesses, just an extension of the “average” LIB into the future. In fact, LIB technology could evolve a number of different ways, and other storage technologies could play bigger roles in subsequent decades. “The assumption that Li-ion batteries dominate both the mobile and stationary market for the next decade is conservative,” the World Bank writes. “Post-2030, the scale of uncertainty is much greater, with a wide range of options in both markets.”Consider the options for LIBs. For cathodes, NMC111 batteries use one part nickel, one part manganese, and one part cobalt, while newer NMC811 batteries use much more nickel and less cobalt. Tesla and other automakers are trying to eventually eliminate cobalt from their batteries; it’s too early to say how far they’ll get.Right now, almost all anodes are graphite (a market dominated by China) but the

In this episode, Jigar Shah, the recently appointed head of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), discusses how he and his team have reformed the office and pulled into into the modern age, the kinds of help LPO is offering entrepreneurs, and the frontier technologies that have him most excited.Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Jigar Shah, February 2, 2022(PDF version)David Roberts:Back in 2010, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) briefly became what kids these days call the main character, the focus of a storm of controversy and media attention, thanks to the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a solar company that received the very first loan guarantee under Obama’s Recovery Act and then promptly gone bankrupt. Despite that wildly overhyped controversy, the LPO did reasonably well under Obama. It ultimately turned a profit for the government and was arguably crucial to the explosive subsequent growth in markets for utility-scale solar and wind. Under Trump, the LPO basically went dormant, doing little beyond shoveling money into the ill-fated Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia. Now the LPO is being revived, reformed, and reinvigorated by new director Jigar Shah. Shah has a long history on the business side of clean energy — he was the co-founder and president of Generate Capital and before that founded “no money down” solar pioneer SunEdison — but he’s perhaps best known to energy nerds as the co-host of the late, lamented podcast The Energy Gang. (The team behind The Energy Gang now has a new show: The Carbon Copy.)He wants to streamline the process of getting loan guarantees from LPO and rethink how the office approaches risk. And he’s got about $40 billion to work with, more if Build Back Better passes. (For the best account of Shah’s new approach, read these two Canary pieces — one, two — from Jeff St. John.) Under Shah’s leadership, the LPO has been doing due diligence on the hundreds of applications that have flooded in since the office reopened for business. In December, it issued its first new conditional commitment for a loan guarantee, to a plant in Nebraska that will transform methane into hydrogen and carbon black. Many more loan guarantees are in the pipeline.I’ve been looking forward to chatting with Shah about how the office is reforming under Biden, how to think about risk and communicate it to the public, and the kinds of clean-energy technologies that have him excited these days. Without further ado, Jigar Shah, welcome to Volts.Jigar Shah: Thanks for having me.David Roberts: I'm a longtime fan of your career and your many podcasts, so it's great to finally get you on here.Jigar Shah: Well, the feeling's mutual.David Roberts: Give us the elevator pitch: What is the Loan Programs Office, what does it do, and what is it meant to accomplish?Jigar Shah: The Loan Programs Office was originally conceived of by Senator Pete Domenici in the 2005 Energy Act. It was first funded in 2009 during the Obama stimulus. The main rationale for its existence is that the Department of Energy does so much great work on basic fundamental research; it gets all these technologies to what they call Technology Readiness Level 7, which means that you can actually verify that the technology works; but then they leave them there waiting for the private sector to pick them up and take them the rest of the way. And the private sector is saying, “we're happy to do it, but we can't get any debt for these technologies because the commercial banks are saying, ‘we don't want to spend the effort to understand all the nuances of this and get all the expertise lined up for one project, so until there are 100 projects to do, we’re not in.’”David Roberts: This is the famous “valley of death”?Jigar Shah: That's right. In this case, it's a valley of death that focuses on debt. The vast majority of valley-of-death conversations focus on equity: raising venture capital or raising private equity. In this case, you're talking about debt. When you talk about solving climate change, you're generally talking about trillion-dollar scale, and trillion-dollar scale only exists in infrastructure. In venture capital, we had a banner year last year; it was about $60 billion. That's not trillion-dollar scale. What does it take for the trillion-dollar-scale people to get comfortable with a technology? That's a commercial debt conversation. How do we underwrite a deal for commercial debt? I talked to most of the money center Wall Street banks last year and they said, “Jigar, one thing we will confirm is that the due diligence that comes out of your office is of such high quality that we know that a technology is ready if it gets through your office.”David Roberts: That's one thing that maybe average people don't understand: you're not just handing companies money. The whole process of assessing the company and its technology is a long and labor-intensive process. The bulk of the service you're providing the industry