Volts community thread #13
Open to all free & paid subscribers.
David’s Notes
1. 🎉 Hey look, it’s the one year anniversary of Volts doing monthly threads and mailbag episodes. A year ago we set a regular time for community members to interact, ask questions and share work. We’ve had about 1,000 comments since, and 10 or so mailbags. The system isn’t perfect — the Substack comments section leaves a lot to be desired — but I think it’s been working pretty well. What do you think? Are these things worth continuing?
If you think so, leave mailbag questions in the comments!
2. 🤬 Speaking of manners, the enshittification episode was one of my favorites this year, but it raised a bit of a dilemma for us. We’ve been bleeping curse words, to avoid Apple labeling us “explicit.” But we couldn’t very well bleep the central concept of the episode. Several listeners were annoyed at the inconsistency or annoyed by the bleeps in general.
So, should we just embrace being explicit and give up the bleeps?
3. Speaking of enshittification, I’m leaning into Bluesky now that Twitter/X is reaching the end stages of that disease. It’s all bad vibes. I’ll keep my account there open — it does have over 200K followers — but for now you can find my daily blather here:
https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf
4. 🎁 Delinquent in your duties to buy a loved one a gift? Might I suggest a Volts subscription? We’ve got new goodies in the works for 2025 beyond the mailbags & ticket giveaways that paid subs receive for their kind donations.
5. ✅ Community comment of the month: Ziggy adds some good color to the recent insurance episode:
There is a huge problem with insurer capacity. The capacity problem does not go away even if insurance rates could internalize every possible externality and there are no stranded assets or dysfunctional subsidies. The capacity problem is that massive events (hurricanes, earthquakes, wars) are lumpy, insurance contracts written annually, and capital markets are finite. As a result, insurers cannot write as much insurance as is demanded, even if the policies are perfectly priced. Think of taking a bet in which you put down $1, with a 50:50 outcome of either $3 or losing your dollar. Nice bet, no? Now think of putting down a million dollars, with the outcome either three million or losing your pension, house, and car. Not such a nice bet. This is the catastrophe risk problem.
The three usual answers to this problem are reinsurance--which smoothes the lumps among many insurers--catastrophe bonds (a kind of clunky reinsurance in capital markets drag) and exclusions, such as war risk. Exclusions protect the insurer, but have nothing else going for them. Reinsurance capacity is quite finite, and cat bonds are pretty inefficient, and perhaps also finite.
There is no good solution to this problem in the policy space, although I think that government insurance participations might help. Participations are not subsidies, since the government would simply add capacity, piggybacking on the insurers' (or reinsurers') risk assessments and rate and payout structures.
Monthly Thread — How It Works
This is your monthly opportunity to share! Use the comments section in this community thread to:
CLIMATE JOBS & OPPORTUNITIES: Share climate jobs/opportunities
SHARE WORK, ASK FOR HELP, FIND COLLABORATORS: Share your climate-related work, ask for help, or find collaborators
CLIMATE EVENTS & MEETUPS: Share climate-related events and meetups
EVERYTHING ELSE: Discuss David’s Notes or anything else climate-related
MAILBAG QUESTIONS: Ask a question for this month’s mailbag episode (anyone can ask a question but mailbags are a paid-sub-only perk). Volts has a form for those who are shy, but David prioritizes questions posted in this thread.
🚨 To keep organized, please only “REPLY” directly under one of Sam’s headline comments. Anything inappropriate, spammy, etc may be deleted. Be nice! Check out our Community Guidelines.
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