I'm just curious about how YOU are doing. You've shared some of your health news over the past few years and I hope you are getting better. We need you in the fight. I agree with many that your podcasts renew my faith in progress and human ingenuity (I also love your very direct comments about 'What could these people possibly be thinking?' (about the rather large percentage of the US population that has drunk some very toxic Koolaid )
How do you personally deal with despair and eco-anxiety from climate change?
Listening to Volts helps me because it reminds me that good people are working on this and powerful forces like learning curves exist. I'm also doing everything people say to do, like getting engaged in activism and donations, therapy, taking breaks, and recognizing my powerfulness and powerlessness as an individual. Yet, as a 27-year-old, I sometimes still get overwhelmed knowing how much climate change is screwing people over and will only get worse.
I'm curious if you're willing to share your personal experience with eco-anxiety and despair, given how on the front lines you are in this fight.
How do we deal with the human inequities we’ll be witnessing and or experiencing as the fuller forces and ramifications of climate change take hold on our air, heat, water and food supply? The world’s food supply? How do we begin to think of the devastation, contamination and starvation? We may be able to mitigate, for how long and for how many? Some folks are going to get screwed over, just as they have with globalization. And nothing has been done, the horses are out of the barn now. Food inflation, do you know how many people live on all their disposable income for nourishment? Who is watching over this? Where are our academics, civil servants, politicians and journalists. I am sure they are there, I am the one who has not done my work. I am disappointed in myself for saying that my survival was more important. Myopic and immature. I will go find these people and listen to their positions and recalculate the number of people who can not endure food inflation. And inflation it is going to be. We have lived with 40 years of free money in the United States. The cost of borrowing is not returning t0 those numbers any time soon. This is going to hurt, we need to get use to this new normal.
I think the best thing that Americans can do to prepare themselves for what may befall them or people they know as Climate Change really starts to bite is this: look at the way most of the people in the world live. If you can't go see it for yourself, then use another unique asset that the US has always had: immigrants. Chances are, your community has people in it who are either themselves or just one generation removed from living in the poorest and least stable countries in the world, where floods and droughts and famines and fires have always been a disaster without any good guys coming to save them. That's reality for billions of people right now. Their crisis already arrived when they were born and never ended.
Something a little less dire but closer to what poverty within the United States looks like is the actual average experience of the median person on earth today: "Middle Class" in Brazil or India or Nigeria is poor in the US. And they are the lucky ones! Their humble and rather shabby lifestyles would be intolerable to most Americans.
I spent eight years living in various Sub-Saharan African countries in my 20s and the experience really shook me because everything I took for granted was an unimaginable luxury for the people I met, worked with, and became friends with. It was often awkward to have and have had so much that they just didn't, and that was true even as I was a "broke" young person living in rather stoic digs and riding around and eating as close to a local as a privileged foreigner could be. Every time I opened my mouth I betrayed how out-of-depth I was.
Then I came back home and just marveled at things like *clean water coming out of a tap.* This MIRACLE, the result of *billions* and decades and centuries worth of infrastructure investment, Americans hated to drink and preferred to replace with the bottled water that most developing world people can't escape (except, unlike people in poor countries, we just threw them away afterwards instead of reusing the bottle, which itself is a miracle item). What a joke!
I cleaned out and reused my Ziplocs for years afterward, just out of habit and not some token environmentalism. I never got back into the habit of drying clothes in a machine or taking 20-minute hot showers because... why? To this day it makes me ill to see how much we Americans waste without even thinking about it. But I did it, too, before I had any idea how extravagant and unusual our material excess was.
The bad news is I'm pretty sure that we're going to have to learn rather more quickly than we could ever dream how people who don't live in our fantasy world actually live. Because we will have to start to live more like that ourselves. And not because the government or Greta Thunberg is going to nag us into it. But because the stable natural world that gave us the ability to mine such grotesque abundance is ending and can't sustain our excess any longer. We won't have the luxury of waste and thoughtless consumption. It will be very humbling.
Thank you twice and twice again. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Colombia, in 1967-68, I live what you did in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is humbling and enlightening, indeed. Im afraid I have to work very hard to keep from being furious at my fellow Anericans, most of whom think we 'got all this through hard work and brains' and the corollary: that if other peoples had ' found what we've done' they'd be just as comfortable. Most have no knowledge of much less intetest in history. They do not realize wealth of the U S came from the genocide and land theft from Native Americans nor the labor theft from kidnapped and enslaved Africans. They refuse to see how all the wealth we take for granted came from these seminal works still in progress. Still stealing lives from both groups.
So of course people just blind to their own reality and demanding to live high, taking vacations in places they 'have' yo get to in planes, sitting at the curb in their gas guzzler SUVs and monsyer trucks, engine running, texting or surfing the web. Honestly, I cannot feel sorry for those people when reality hits. Like you, busy seeing how we can help those who need it desperately now.
Another commenter talked about avoiding Climate grief. I'd add that it's a challenge to avoid existential anger. How to look at the way people act and not get angry? This is a constant struggle for me because in my wiser moments I know that it's not really fair to condemn others for doing what they've been taught and constantly rewarded for doing--this is their "normal." It was mine, too, before.
And, if I'm really honest, I have to admit that even my less-wasteful normal now is still extremely and unsustainably wasteful. I recycle 100% of my recyclables, sure, but I still consume more than almost any human who has ever lived. I still use more energy and resources than most people alive. I still contribute disproportionately to overshoot and Climate Change. For me to do otherwise would be to abandon what I know of as comfort and to be an exile within my own affluent culture.
So, I know that when I get angry at others, part of that anger is just anger at myself. I'm projecting. It's easy to look at a somebody who's clearly not even trying and blame them. But *we* are together the problem. There's nothing really that unusual about Americans, either. Americans are just really rich and entitled to do the stuff that other people can quickly learn to aspire to. When I lived in Ethiopia, for example, I saw, in real time, one of the poorest countries on the planet experience a decade of hyper-growth and the emergence of a kind of mass affluence. Suddenly, young people in Addis Ababa all wanted mobile phones, fast-fashion, hamburgers, new cars, and McMansions, too. They gorged on everything they could. The only limit was external. A lot of times its easy to romanticize the poor, as if they're more "authentic" than the rest of us. But, really, they're just more poor. And it's *extremely* difficult for us to voluntarily forsake comfort and abundance when that's an option.
Unfortunately for Americans (and the world), our social development has locked in a lot of wasteful behaviors that are beyond the individual's ability to overcome. Our car-dependency is a perfect example. But I notice it everywhere there: a normal American home is designed to waste an extraordinary amount of water, electricity, natural gas, etc. to just even function. Culturally, frugality and thrift are not only not encouraged, but actively frowned upon. Try wearing the same (perfectly clean) clothes twice in a row! Or having furniture that's perfectly functional but a little worn. Embarrassing! It's exhausting to always have to be "different" in order to just be as practical as most people have always had to be.
I actually live in Sweden now and it's a lot easier for me to be "good" because the system here rewards and encourages it. I don't need a car as much because the public transit is excellent. It's easy and convenient to recycle and compost. I can take trains instead of flying. It's more expensive to shop and most people's homes aren't cavernous, so we don't accumulate so much stuff. Swedes are a little embarrassed by always buying their way to a solution, so they still fix things and there's social pressure to do so. But I can't really claim that my exponentially-lower carbon footprint here is all down to personal choices and willpower. It's structural!
In the Great Depression US of my dad's childhood, he also had a much lower environmental footprint and more frugality as a matter of course because his Washington, DC had trolly lines going everywhere (since removed), flying in a plane was an unimaginable dream, owning even one car was beyond the ability for many households, and people just didn't have any option but to live very modestly. So, for the rest of his life, that was "normal." We could create a society for ourselves that encouraged that, again. Or, we can likely find ourselves forced to by circumstance!
I have a suggestion rather than a question. I think a good subject for the podcast would be rural electric cooperatives. How they compare with investor owned utilities and how they might contribute to the energy transition. If it’s already been done I guess I missed it.
And how they are regulated and, in many cases, are barriers to the transition within the context and foundation of COOPS for rural electrification in the 1920's and 30's. Its a mixed bag - some in Georgia are pushing beyond the investor owned utility and many others are regressive (particularly for residential) and doing way less than the investor owned utility.
A question for your AMA: Being absolutely analytical about it, how much of the IRA could a new Trump administration throttle? Trump and congressional Republicans wasted a lot of time acting as though they were going to repeal the ACA before backing away from it in 2017. Would we see the same for IRA, a policy which, as far as I can tell, has not caused anywhere near the uproar that the ACA did (you don't hearing Republicans saying they will "Repeal IRA" the way that "Repeal Obamacare" became a talking point for Republicans in the early 2010s)? I can see a Republican administration scaling back many regulatory components of IRA, but wouldn't Trump like the ability the dole out loans from DOE (in a more cronyish fashion, sure, but count me skeptical it's an authority he would like to set aside completely) and enjoy cutting ribbons at new factories, whatever they are making (EVs, batteries, solar panels)? IRA's tax credits are written into law, so they cannot be turned off, but might Treasury rework definitions and legal interpretations to make them less available to EV manufacturers? Which industries are organized and connected well-enough in Washington to fight such changes? In short, what would happen to green industrial policy under a second Trump administration? And what can the Biden administration do this year to lock in as much of IRA as possible?
Thanks, and sorry for the long and multi-pronged question.
Great question, and one that a lot of people asked. It's a big enough question that it'll probably be answered in an episode as we draw nearer to the election.
Recently you did a podcast with an entrepeneur who was inspired to start her work in part due to a article of yours on vox. What is the best / most impactful business idea from your podcasts you hope aspiring entrepeneurs will take up?
Hi Jen, FYI we *may* talk more in-depth about the survey at a later date, so I'm going to keep the answer mildly brief:
In summary, nothing mind-blowing, but the results were extremely helpful in terms of validating what Volts should prioritize in 2024. For example, many people said that they didn't know that Volts provides episode transcripts, and others requested that transcripts be included within the episode emails. We've worked really hard behind the scenes to improve this, and as of last week, transcripts are now included in the emails! Other requested quality of life improvements like this are coming.
In terms of opinions... lots of contrasts. Some people want more politics, others want less. Some people want local coverage, others prefer international. Volts is a balancing act :)
My main question now is, can you provide another avenue to support you that isn't Substack (for all the obvious reasons). I would transfer my subscription instantly if you can.
Andrew -- David thanks you for your support! Volts has a one-time donations page set up on Stripe, you can support his work there if you'd prefer: https://www.volts.wtf/p/donate-to-volts
What topic have you been the most wrong about over the last year or so? What if anything about your process changed to avoid repeating that kind of mistake?
I enjoy the deep learning you and your guests provide on energy along with the political guests who contribute to what's happening in parts of the political arena. I'd be very interested to see guests from time to time who work in storytelling across various mediums (besides Adam McKay) with a lens on taking people, moving their personal and broader energy systems to climate friendly ones. Who are you reading in fiction, poetry, appreciating in art, etc?
I was just doing some research for work and was trying to figure out if anyone has ever tried to measure the impact of individual behavior change on emissions. Like, what is the cumulative impact from people deciding to reduce aviation, eat less meat, put solar panels on their house, buy less stuff, etc.? Probably impossible to measure which is why no one has ever tried, but it piqued my curiosity.
Another wicked problem that I would love your take on is -- when a company like, say, BP decides to offload a piece of fossil fuel infrastructure that's too polluting for them to want in their portfolio (say a well that's prone to methane leaks), they often will sell it to a less scrupulous owner, rather than capping and decommissioning it. I'm really curious to learn more about the business of shutting down oil infrastructure properly and what the economics of that are going to be. The amount of infrastructure that's going to have to be retired and cleaned up is just mind boggling.
Spinning of and/or selling off environmental "risks and liabilities" as been a historic main stay of corporate strategy that resulted in the Superfund Statute of the 1980's and root of many a designated "superfund site" - much of this at taxpayers expense (once the tax on the chemical industry expired). No different from tobacco to Lead to PFAS - taxpayers continue subsidize this practise. Nothing new here though I agree transparency is called for on how these "stranded assets" and associated "joint and severally liabilities" and associated environmental and social impacts will be dealt with.
I suspect there are models for the impacts of individual behavior on emissions. We see news now and then about how very wealthy people's private jets, for example, dwarf the emissions of the average person who drives a car and eats meat at least sometimes.
What is top of mind for me is something I recently learned from Grant Ennis's book Dark PR: there is a zero-sum relationship between spending time on individual behavior change, and spending time on advocacy and political organizing. (He's got numerous references.)
Um, yes. Although, is it the music? Or sweet pavlovian relief at the prospect of having planetary angst melted for a joyous, hopeful, and (most importantly) realistic hour? But no, seriously, the music is great in and of itself and whoever put it together deserves kudos. 👍 It hits just the right balance of thoughtful/catchy
Why is it taking so long to replace municipal vehicles, like school buses, with EVs?
Any America companies copying Lunaz in the UK, converting diesel engines with electric engines in existing trucks? Seemed significantly cheaper and less carbon-intensive...
Have you come across Nate Hagens and his (IMO) excellent podcast/YouTube program, "The Great Simplification?" He's affiliated with the Post Carbon Institute and University of Minnesota and kind of straddles (and invites people in from) the Sustainability, Climate Action, Degrowth, Peak Oil, and those involved in or influenced by the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" study.
What I find interesting about him is that his is a real systems ecology approach and he attempts, at least, to view our Climate Change "predicament" (as he terms it, pointedly) and attempted "energy transition" (often skeptically) through the lenses of the polycrisis, overshoot, collapse, or whatever you want to call it.
Long story short, he's convinced that we're going to hit a world of energy limits without my lifetime where dirty energy isn't just untenable environmentally, but actually increasingly unavailable as an option at all since all the cheapest oil has already been dredged up, without a real replacement in the form of renewable energy that can (or ever will be able to) really power even a majority the harder-to-decarbonize material underbelly of our global system.
Which leads inexorably to a gradual comedown (or "simplification") from our developed, industrialized, consumerist "normal" that we built during a two-century "carbon pulse" world of cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy, without sufficient care for the increasingly obvious externalities of burning all this stuff and the even more obvious reality that we can't have limitless resource consumption on a limited planet. This also means that he's also skeptical of Green New Deal-type decoupling of growth from (fossil fuel) energy and reluctantly pessimistic about more techno-optimistic solar punk utopianism.
So, his news isn't particularly good news: the best we can hope for is a managed and orderly decline of material expectations and embrace of a simpler, more austere life (perhaps the Degrowth scenario). But, given our social dynamics, the more likely outcome is actually a chaotic, stop-start, slow-motion collapse that we are likely in the throes of as we speak, which will result in a lot of undue pain and suffering until we reach that "simpler" equilibrium of a sustainable (if degraded), lower-energy future.
What do you think about this kind of thing? More outmoded Doomerism from Peak Oil cranks? Or a valuable and holistic perspective that is a little lost in the environmentalist mainstream? I find his podcast convincing, but I'm always weary of being swayed unduly by one influence. And, of course, I'd love for him to be wrong.
So much of energy transition is going to involve decisionmaking at the state and local levels, and, increasingly, we don't really have media that covers such decisionmaking -- or if we do it's spotty, such that only with great rarity can you expect to see dedicated coverage of decisions about energy infrastructure. You've done wonderful interviews with folks about messaging and those have touched on the need for channels/apparatus, but I'd love to hear more of a structural analysis + any worthy anecdotes that have come to your attention on the role of local journalism (or its absence) in debates and decisions that either enable or stymie energy transition measures. More bluntly: am I right to think that this is maybe a prerequisite to getting some of the harder energy transition stuff done? And if you think I'm wrong, please say why so that I can just relax and put greater trust in social media.
I'm just curious about how YOU are doing. You've shared some of your health news over the past few years and I hope you are getting better. We need you in the fight. I agree with many that your podcasts renew my faith in progress and human ingenuity (I also love your very direct comments about 'What could these people possibly be thinking?' (about the rather large percentage of the US population that has drunk some very toxic Koolaid )
How do you personally deal with despair and eco-anxiety from climate change?
Listening to Volts helps me because it reminds me that good people are working on this and powerful forces like learning curves exist. I'm also doing everything people say to do, like getting engaged in activism and donations, therapy, taking breaks, and recognizing my powerfulness and powerlessness as an individual. Yet, as a 27-year-old, I sometimes still get overwhelmed knowing how much climate change is screwing people over and will only get worse.
I'm curious if you're willing to share your personal experience with eco-anxiety and despair, given how on the front lines you are in this fight.
How do we deal with the human inequities we’ll be witnessing and or experiencing as the fuller forces and ramifications of climate change take hold on our air, heat, water and food supply? The world’s food supply? How do we begin to think of the devastation, contamination and starvation? We may be able to mitigate, for how long and for how many? Some folks are going to get screwed over, just as they have with globalization. And nothing has been done, the horses are out of the barn now. Food inflation, do you know how many people live on all their disposable income for nourishment? Who is watching over this? Where are our academics, civil servants, politicians and journalists. I am sure they are there, I am the one who has not done my work. I am disappointed in myself for saying that my survival was more important. Myopic and immature. I will go find these people and listen to their positions and recalculate the number of people who can not endure food inflation. And inflation it is going to be. We have lived with 40 years of free money in the United States. The cost of borrowing is not returning t0 those numbers any time soon. This is going to hurt, we need to get use to this new normal.
I think the best thing that Americans can do to prepare themselves for what may befall them or people they know as Climate Change really starts to bite is this: look at the way most of the people in the world live. If you can't go see it for yourself, then use another unique asset that the US has always had: immigrants. Chances are, your community has people in it who are either themselves or just one generation removed from living in the poorest and least stable countries in the world, where floods and droughts and famines and fires have always been a disaster without any good guys coming to save them. That's reality for billions of people right now. Their crisis already arrived when they were born and never ended.
Something a little less dire but closer to what poverty within the United States looks like is the actual average experience of the median person on earth today: "Middle Class" in Brazil or India or Nigeria is poor in the US. And they are the lucky ones! Their humble and rather shabby lifestyles would be intolerable to most Americans.
I spent eight years living in various Sub-Saharan African countries in my 20s and the experience really shook me because everything I took for granted was an unimaginable luxury for the people I met, worked with, and became friends with. It was often awkward to have and have had so much that they just didn't, and that was true even as I was a "broke" young person living in rather stoic digs and riding around and eating as close to a local as a privileged foreigner could be. Every time I opened my mouth I betrayed how out-of-depth I was.
Then I came back home and just marveled at things like *clean water coming out of a tap.* This MIRACLE, the result of *billions* and decades and centuries worth of infrastructure investment, Americans hated to drink and preferred to replace with the bottled water that most developing world people can't escape (except, unlike people in poor countries, we just threw them away afterwards instead of reusing the bottle, which itself is a miracle item). What a joke!
I cleaned out and reused my Ziplocs for years afterward, just out of habit and not some token environmentalism. I never got back into the habit of drying clothes in a machine or taking 20-minute hot showers because... why? To this day it makes me ill to see how much we Americans waste without even thinking about it. But I did it, too, before I had any idea how extravagant and unusual our material excess was.
The bad news is I'm pretty sure that we're going to have to learn rather more quickly than we could ever dream how people who don't live in our fantasy world actually live. Because we will have to start to live more like that ourselves. And not because the government or Greta Thunberg is going to nag us into it. But because the stable natural world that gave us the ability to mine such grotesque abundance is ending and can't sustain our excess any longer. We won't have the luxury of waste and thoughtless consumption. It will be very humbling.
Thank you twice and twice again. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Colombia, in 1967-68, I live what you did in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is humbling and enlightening, indeed. Im afraid I have to work very hard to keep from being furious at my fellow Anericans, most of whom think we 'got all this through hard work and brains' and the corollary: that if other peoples had ' found what we've done' they'd be just as comfortable. Most have no knowledge of much less intetest in history. They do not realize wealth of the U S came from the genocide and land theft from Native Americans nor the labor theft from kidnapped and enslaved Africans. They refuse to see how all the wealth we take for granted came from these seminal works still in progress. Still stealing lives from both groups.
So of course people just blind to their own reality and demanding to live high, taking vacations in places they 'have' yo get to in planes, sitting at the curb in their gas guzzler SUVs and monsyer trucks, engine running, texting or surfing the web. Honestly, I cannot feel sorry for those people when reality hits. Like you, busy seeing how we can help those who need it desperately now.
Another commenter talked about avoiding Climate grief. I'd add that it's a challenge to avoid existential anger. How to look at the way people act and not get angry? This is a constant struggle for me because in my wiser moments I know that it's not really fair to condemn others for doing what they've been taught and constantly rewarded for doing--this is their "normal." It was mine, too, before.
And, if I'm really honest, I have to admit that even my less-wasteful normal now is still extremely and unsustainably wasteful. I recycle 100% of my recyclables, sure, but I still consume more than almost any human who has ever lived. I still use more energy and resources than most people alive. I still contribute disproportionately to overshoot and Climate Change. For me to do otherwise would be to abandon what I know of as comfort and to be an exile within my own affluent culture.
So, I know that when I get angry at others, part of that anger is just anger at myself. I'm projecting. It's easy to look at a somebody who's clearly not even trying and blame them. But *we* are together the problem. There's nothing really that unusual about Americans, either. Americans are just really rich and entitled to do the stuff that other people can quickly learn to aspire to. When I lived in Ethiopia, for example, I saw, in real time, one of the poorest countries on the planet experience a decade of hyper-growth and the emergence of a kind of mass affluence. Suddenly, young people in Addis Ababa all wanted mobile phones, fast-fashion, hamburgers, new cars, and McMansions, too. They gorged on everything they could. The only limit was external. A lot of times its easy to romanticize the poor, as if they're more "authentic" than the rest of us. But, really, they're just more poor. And it's *extremely* difficult for us to voluntarily forsake comfort and abundance when that's an option.
Unfortunately for Americans (and the world), our social development has locked in a lot of wasteful behaviors that are beyond the individual's ability to overcome. Our car-dependency is a perfect example. But I notice it everywhere there: a normal American home is designed to waste an extraordinary amount of water, electricity, natural gas, etc. to just even function. Culturally, frugality and thrift are not only not encouraged, but actively frowned upon. Try wearing the same (perfectly clean) clothes twice in a row! Or having furniture that's perfectly functional but a little worn. Embarrassing! It's exhausting to always have to be "different" in order to just be as practical as most people have always had to be.
I actually live in Sweden now and it's a lot easier for me to be "good" because the system here rewards and encourages it. I don't need a car as much because the public transit is excellent. It's easy and convenient to recycle and compost. I can take trains instead of flying. It's more expensive to shop and most people's homes aren't cavernous, so we don't accumulate so much stuff. Swedes are a little embarrassed by always buying their way to a solution, so they still fix things and there's social pressure to do so. But I can't really claim that my exponentially-lower carbon footprint here is all down to personal choices and willpower. It's structural!
In the Great Depression US of my dad's childhood, he also had a much lower environmental footprint and more frugality as a matter of course because his Washington, DC had trolly lines going everywhere (since removed), flying in a plane was an unimaginable dream, owning even one car was beyond the ability for many households, and people just didn't have any option but to live very modestly. So, for the rest of his life, that was "normal." We could create a society for ourselves that encouraged that, again. Or, we can likely find ourselves forced to by circumstance!
I have a suggestion rather than a question. I think a good subject for the podcast would be rural electric cooperatives. How they compare with investor owned utilities and how they might contribute to the energy transition. If it’s already been done I guess I missed it.
And how they are regulated and, in many cases, are barriers to the transition within the context and foundation of COOPS for rural electrification in the 1920's and 30's. Its a mixed bag - some in Georgia are pushing beyond the investor owned utility and many others are regressive (particularly for residential) and doing way less than the investor owned utility.
A question for your AMA: Being absolutely analytical about it, how much of the IRA could a new Trump administration throttle? Trump and congressional Republicans wasted a lot of time acting as though they were going to repeal the ACA before backing away from it in 2017. Would we see the same for IRA, a policy which, as far as I can tell, has not caused anywhere near the uproar that the ACA did (you don't hearing Republicans saying they will "Repeal IRA" the way that "Repeal Obamacare" became a talking point for Republicans in the early 2010s)? I can see a Republican administration scaling back many regulatory components of IRA, but wouldn't Trump like the ability the dole out loans from DOE (in a more cronyish fashion, sure, but count me skeptical it's an authority he would like to set aside completely) and enjoy cutting ribbons at new factories, whatever they are making (EVs, batteries, solar panels)? IRA's tax credits are written into law, so they cannot be turned off, but might Treasury rework definitions and legal interpretations to make them less available to EV manufacturers? Which industries are organized and connected well-enough in Washington to fight such changes? In short, what would happen to green industrial policy under a second Trump administration? And what can the Biden administration do this year to lock in as much of IRA as possible?
Thanks, and sorry for the long and multi-pronged question.
Great question, and one that a lot of people asked. It's a big enough question that it'll probably be answered in an episode as we draw nearer to the election.
Recently you did a podcast with an entrepeneur who was inspired to start her work in part due to a article of yours on vox. What is the best / most impactful business idea from your podcasts you hope aspiring entrepeneurs will take up?
Any interesting findings from the recent subscriber survey?
Hi Jen, FYI we *may* talk more in-depth about the survey at a later date, so I'm going to keep the answer mildly brief:
In summary, nothing mind-blowing, but the results were extremely helpful in terms of validating what Volts should prioritize in 2024. For example, many people said that they didn't know that Volts provides episode transcripts, and others requested that transcripts be included within the episode emails. We've worked really hard behind the scenes to improve this, and as of last week, transcripts are now included in the emails! Other requested quality of life improvements like this are coming.
In terms of opinions... lots of contrasts. Some people want more politics, others want less. Some people want local coverage, others prefer international. Volts is a balancing act :)
My main question now is, can you provide another avenue to support you that isn't Substack (for all the obvious reasons). I would transfer my subscription instantly if you can.
Andrew -- David thanks you for your support! Volts has a one-time donations page set up on Stripe, you can support his work there if you'd prefer: https://www.volts.wtf/p/donate-to-volts
Do you have any brilliant—or even moderately smart—ideas about how to revitalize local journalism in the US?
What topic have you been the most wrong about over the last year or so? What if anything about your process changed to avoid repeating that kind of mistake?
I enjoy the deep learning you and your guests provide on energy along with the political guests who contribute to what's happening in parts of the political arena. I'd be very interested to see guests from time to time who work in storytelling across various mediums (besides Adam McKay) with a lens on taking people, moving their personal and broader energy systems to climate friendly ones. Who are you reading in fiction, poetry, appreciating in art, etc?
I was just doing some research for work and was trying to figure out if anyone has ever tried to measure the impact of individual behavior change on emissions. Like, what is the cumulative impact from people deciding to reduce aviation, eat less meat, put solar panels on their house, buy less stuff, etc.? Probably impossible to measure which is why no one has ever tried, but it piqued my curiosity.
Another wicked problem that I would love your take on is -- when a company like, say, BP decides to offload a piece of fossil fuel infrastructure that's too polluting for them to want in their portfolio (say a well that's prone to methane leaks), they often will sell it to a less scrupulous owner, rather than capping and decommissioning it. I'm really curious to learn more about the business of shutting down oil infrastructure properly and what the economics of that are going to be. The amount of infrastructure that's going to have to be retired and cleaned up is just mind boggling.
Spinning of and/or selling off environmental "risks and liabilities" as been a historic main stay of corporate strategy that resulted in the Superfund Statute of the 1980's and root of many a designated "superfund site" - much of this at taxpayers expense (once the tax on the chemical industry expired). No different from tobacco to Lead to PFAS - taxpayers continue subsidize this practise. Nothing new here though I agree transparency is called for on how these "stranded assets" and associated "joint and severally liabilities" and associated environmental and social impacts will be dealt with.
Less scrupulous than BP??
I suspect there are models for the impacts of individual behavior on emissions. We see news now and then about how very wealthy people's private jets, for example, dwarf the emissions of the average person who drives a car and eats meat at least sometimes.
What is top of mind for me is something I recently learned from Grant Ennis's book Dark PR: there is a zero-sum relationship between spending time on individual behavior change, and spending time on advocacy and political organizing. (He's got numerous references.)
Who made the music for the podcast? I love it.
Um, yes. Although, is it the music? Or sweet pavlovian relief at the prospect of having planetary angst melted for a joyous, hopeful, and (most importantly) realistic hour? But no, seriously, the music is great in and of itself and whoever put it together deserves kudos. 👍 It hits just the right balance of thoughtful/catchy
Do you have any favorite examples of times your kids changed your mind about something?
Why is it taking so long to replace municipal vehicles, like school buses, with EVs?
Any America companies copying Lunaz in the UK, converting diesel engines with electric engines in existing trucks? Seemed significantly cheaper and less carbon-intensive...
Have you come across Nate Hagens and his (IMO) excellent podcast/YouTube program, "The Great Simplification?" He's affiliated with the Post Carbon Institute and University of Minnesota and kind of straddles (and invites people in from) the Sustainability, Climate Action, Degrowth, Peak Oil, and those involved in or influenced by the Club of Rome "Limits to Growth" study.
What I find interesting about him is that his is a real systems ecology approach and he attempts, at least, to view our Climate Change "predicament" (as he terms it, pointedly) and attempted "energy transition" (often skeptically) through the lenses of the polycrisis, overshoot, collapse, or whatever you want to call it.
Long story short, he's convinced that we're going to hit a world of energy limits without my lifetime where dirty energy isn't just untenable environmentally, but actually increasingly unavailable as an option at all since all the cheapest oil has already been dredged up, without a real replacement in the form of renewable energy that can (or ever will be able to) really power even a majority the harder-to-decarbonize material underbelly of our global system.
Which leads inexorably to a gradual comedown (or "simplification") from our developed, industrialized, consumerist "normal" that we built during a two-century "carbon pulse" world of cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy, without sufficient care for the increasingly obvious externalities of burning all this stuff and the even more obvious reality that we can't have limitless resource consumption on a limited planet. This also means that he's also skeptical of Green New Deal-type decoupling of growth from (fossil fuel) energy and reluctantly pessimistic about more techno-optimistic solar punk utopianism.
So, his news isn't particularly good news: the best we can hope for is a managed and orderly decline of material expectations and embrace of a simpler, more austere life (perhaps the Degrowth scenario). But, given our social dynamics, the more likely outcome is actually a chaotic, stop-start, slow-motion collapse that we are likely in the throes of as we speak, which will result in a lot of undue pain and suffering until we reach that "simpler" equilibrium of a sustainable (if degraded), lower-energy future.
What do you think about this kind of thing? More outmoded Doomerism from Peak Oil cranks? Or a valuable and holistic perspective that is a little lost in the environmentalist mainstream? I find his podcast convincing, but I'm always weary of being swayed unduly by one influence. And, of course, I'd love for him to be wrong.
So much of energy transition is going to involve decisionmaking at the state and local levels, and, increasingly, we don't really have media that covers such decisionmaking -- or if we do it's spotty, such that only with great rarity can you expect to see dedicated coverage of decisions about energy infrastructure. You've done wonderful interviews with folks about messaging and those have touched on the need for channels/apparatus, but I'd love to hear more of a structural analysis + any worthy anecdotes that have come to your attention on the role of local journalism (or its absence) in debates and decisions that either enable or stymie energy transition measures. More bluntly: am I right to think that this is maybe a prerequisite to getting some of the harder energy transition stuff done? And if you think I'm wrong, please say why so that I can just relax and put greater trust in social media.