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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 bike, and that together, those two means of transportation get me really far.David RobertsBut if you're talking to Joe Schmo and Joe Schmo says, "if I switch out all the cars, what is the remainder? What is left?" What is the ... and remember, we're just talking climate here. Like, there are obviously other issues of urban life, but if we're just focusing on climate, what is the remainder that's left after the electric vehicles?Warren LoganYeah, the remainder also includes public transit, which also we need to work on decarbonizing here in the Bay. And actually, in California, we passed a bill, I want to say last year or the year before that required that all of the transit agencies shift over the next, I think, ten years to electric buses, or electric and hydrogen, alternate fuel sources. So it's not just that we need more EV cars. We need EV trucks for all of the deliveries. We need EVs for the buses and similarly for trains. Not every train is electric. We're very fortunate here in the bay that Bart runs on electricity, but there are plenty of trains across the country that still use gas and diesel, et cetera.So there's plenty of room for improvement across every subsector of transportation.David RobertsContinuing as Joe Schmo here, I don't know why I chose this name, but we're stuck with it now. Another sort of, I think, intuition a lot of people have in this exchange is, "okay, I get it that maybe EVs aren't enough. I get it that there are other goals. We want quality of life, we want walkability, things like this. We want more public space." But in terms of speed, and this is really where the rubber hits the road in this argument.Warren LoganLiterally.David RobertsYes. I think Joe Schmo thinks, just quitting making ice vehicles and starting making EVs. I can see that happening quickly. The market seems to be accelerating, but it seems like changes in urbanism, changes in urban form, changes in building, changes in the way we do streets, this kind of thing take forever. Aren't they just intrinsically slower?Warren LoganThey don't have to be. Let me kind of break apart what you just shared, the first of which is that I don't think that speed is the only thing we're trying to optimize when it comes to transportation, even though I think you, Joe, and all the other Joes out there think I want to get there quickly. Absolutely. I'm not here to delay your travel, certainly. And yet, one of the things I've learned in my time as a transportation planner is that people really discount just how bad traffic can get at times and that they're part of that issue, and that once you get to your destination, parking is not typically readily available depending on where you're going.And so oftentimes when people say, well, my door to door time is only ten minutes, that's not really true. And there are plenty of studies that have been conducted, in fact, by my alma mater at UC Berkeley showcasing that people underestimate how much time it takes to drive somewhere and overestimate how much time they think it will take to take any other form of transportation. And I think that that's incredibly important. The second bit here. And I think this is kind of fascinating, that we've all gotten kind of explore this during COVID Is that the time that it takes for you to travel from point A to B, B to C, and C to A again or wherever you're going may not necessarily be as fast if you are not driving.But you are able to recoup the value of that time by answering emails or taking phone calls while you're sitting on an ideally quiet train, getting from your place to place. And then the last bit too, is that not everyone can or even wants to drive. Like fundamentally, driving is, I think, an exercise that people have truly believe that it's like the most fun thing you can do. And that's not really true for most people. Like, driving kind of sucks a lot of times.And we kind of have this idea that if only there was one more lane or if only the seats had air conditioning, I would enjoy this really rote exercise that gets really tough. And you're just I mean, there's a thing for it. It's called road rage.David RobertsWell, you'll notice that the number one most notable feature of car commercials is that they only contain one car in them, only the car you're supposed to buy. There are never any other cars on the street. I'm like, "where is that?"Warren LoganLike, where's the rest of this? Right? You never see a commercial of a car like, "hi, this is you stuck in traffic all day because this is what it's like to drive in a real city, or even in suburbs for that matter."David RobertsAll of that is interesting about speed of travel within the city, but that was not exactly the speed I was asking you about. I mean, sure, now I'm fascinated and want to follow up.Warren LoganI understand your second question, which is like, the speed of implementation, right?David RobertsYeah, speed of implementation. How fast are we reducing greenhouse gas, I guess, is where the rubber hits the road. Full of automotive metaphors today. This is not on purpose.Warren LoganI love it. It's great. I'm going to get my book of idioms, and I'll see if I can go toe to toe with you, which there's one right there. So in terms of speed of implementation, I think that I'm going to call BS, right? Like a. some people really can switch their cars quickly. That's true. There are people with means to go out and buy electric vehicles, but they're a. not free, nor are they cheap. The lowest price EV is, I think, the Nissan Leaf maybe. And you're still pushing like 40K. That's an expensive car for a lot of people.There are plenty of people ... and I want to just kind of talk about the ways in which people interact with the city, or even with suburbs, or even rural areas, is that there are lots of people who are in some ways so low income they have to drive, which is a really hard thing for people to conceptualize. But let me just unpack that for a second. We in America have actively discouraged people from living near their jobs vis-a-vis suburbanization. And then as more of, I would suppose, like my generation especially, have started shifting back towards city centers the price of housing in, I want to say all the cities, wildly here for a second, has gotten really, really high in places that are close to jobs.Which means then that the lower income folks, of whatever age we're talking about for a second, are then actively discouraged from both living in a city and actively pushed to farther and farther places that are not well served by transit, not very accessible by buses, or trains, or even bikeways, or by extension jobs. And Oaklanders kind of face this a lot where I live. But it's true of a lot of places that you have no option but to drive, but for the fact that you barely can really afford the car that you're driving, and there isn't an option for you to upgrade to a more efficient car.I think that that's kind of the fantasy that a lot of people want to live in, that if you own a car, you also have the means to maintain that car properly and by extension, perhaps switch the car that you're driving overnight. Oh, I just decided tomorrow I'm going to go buy a Tesla. That's not real. And so for a whole swath of people who are out there on our streets driving, their option for switching vehicles is really, really limited. And I can't speak for many other cities, but I can at least say for the Bay.If I step outside of my house right now, I can watch a bunch of cars that were built in the 90s or even early 80s. None of those people, and this is sort of a sweeping generalization, but I would just expect that most of the people driving those vehicles probably can't afford even a moderately priced electric car. Because we're talking about buying a $1,000 car, not a 10, or a 20, or 30, or $40,000 car, let alone financing a car, right. And I'm not even going down a rabbit hole of people's credit and their ability to buy cars.David RobertsIt's just one more way that we've made it expensive to be poor in the US, right? Like they are paying a ton for gas right now, but do not have the means. They could save money in the long term by buying the electric vehicle, but you have to have that upfront capital. If you don't have it, you're just stuck with these ongoing costs.Warren LoganAbsolutely. And so that is just one example of many that I will share with you in just a second of why this fantasy that we're living in that everyone can just switch to electric vehicles is just not real. So let's now shift gears to all of the other tools in our toolbox that we do have at our disposal. And this is kind of the thing I've said to lots of people, right, that we choose not to use effectively. So if we wanted tomorrow to have half of our streets dedicated to walking and bicycling, that is actually possible.And I know it's possible because I did it. And so you probably saw the kind of beginning of COVID, let's rewind two years plus a few months, right. A number of cities started implementing shared streets, healthy streets, slow streets, whatever name we gave them. I think that that movement proved that we've just been sitting on this gold mine of opportunity. And I want people to truly examine why is it that we refuse to exercise our ability to make that type of big shift, why we choose not to use that power, right? And so implicit in that question is holding all of your listeners by having them hold aside their opinions of whether or not we should have done that, just like set that aside for a second, because I've gotten enough heat about that for now.But to at least focus on the fact that not only was it possible, but it was possible in a lot of different cities with a lot of demographics, a lot of different economics, right, like a lot of different politics, that lots of different places did this really big thing nearly overnight. And not just like when I say nearly overnight, like over a couple of years. I mean, the time and space between a few text messages between myself, Mayor Shaaf and the DOT director here in Oakland, and then them setting up the signs is, I think, 72 hours. So I'm not making this up when I say that truly these types of changes are possible.However, and this is kind of the big caveat about speed, is that we have to choose to want that reality. And I think that that's the part that really gets me about let's just switch everybody to EVs, is that it maintains the sort of Americana suburbanized fantasy that, like, we all drive a car, we all live in our homes, and everybody has this perfect little access to all their little resources, and that's not real. And so the moment that you acknowledge that that's not happening for a lot of the people who live around us, including perhaps ourselves, you then have to examine, I would hope, what are the other potential futures that we need to not only just start considering, but truly start implementing, right? Like right now.David RobertsTo pause on that for a second, because that was a fascinating ...Warren LoganDiatribe?David RobertsNatural experiment, sort of field experiment that nobody had really planned very far in advance. What's your sense of how well that is? Because as a good urbanist, what I would like to be true is everyone saw these open streets, strolled down them, saw fewer cars. It was like, "Ah, it's a new world. We can't ever let this go. We're going to make this permanent." But my understanding is that there's a lot of pushback. A lot of cities are under fire for doing it. A lot of cities have reversed a lot of what they've done.Do you have a sense sort of overall how well those closures are holding up?Warren LoganI think most of them are gone, right? I can even speak for Oakland. Shortly after I left the mayor's office, so did the slow streets. And I won't go down that path right now. But I think that those types of really big decisions require courage and leadership in a way that a lot of people found at the beginning of the pandemic when they said, we have to do something because the sky is on fire here. And in California truly, the confluence of both COVID and the historic fires really felt like the world was falling apart and that suddenly everything was on the table.I don't think that we stopped. And by we, I mean, like, cities generally stopped doing slow streets just because they weren't working. Because that's not true. They were working, and a lot of people really enjoyed them, and where they weren't working highlighted, and I'll kind of use the Oakland example is the one I know, but for the streets and the folks who lived on slow streets that said, "this hasn't actually made me want to go outside more. I'm not walking more or whatever," we still measured that traffic was down. We still measured that traffic was safer, right.That speeds were lower, that DMT was lower, right. That they did, in fact, have a positive impact, even if people didn't necessarily want to acknowledge it or that that wasn't their primary sort of metric of success. I think that they went away because, it's kind of difficult to kind of go back to this, right, but I think they went away because we're not comfortable with change. And I feel like we're so close to just completely turning over into this different paradigm.And honestly, I'm not entirely sure why we look at good ideas and say, "that's not possible. That's not for me, or that's too good for me." And I heard that time and time again as people's feedback about slow streets, not that they didn't want, like, traffic-calm streets, or even cleaner air, but that they felt like, "you're not doing this for me, you're doing it for someone else to try and kick me out of my neighborhood," right. And I completely understand where that distrust comes from because as a Black man myself, I get it. Like, I really do. And we use the G-word gentrification, or by extension, displacement, as a really great tool to actually discourage investments in low income and Black and Brown communities.And I will try and avoid going down this whole rabbit hole here with you.David RobertsBut, well, I mean, it's at least worth noting. We have such a dysfunctional urban administration in this country and urban policies that people now basically think, "if you make my neighborhood better, that's a threat to me."Warren LoganExactly right.David Roberts"Don't come in here making my neighborhood better," right. When people are out angry and yelling at you because you made their neighborhood better, to me, that is just like the endpoint of so many dysfunctional dynamics.Warren LoganIt is. It's representative of the history of our country. That's the tough part. That when people ask, just as you did, "why did slow streets fail, right? Or why did they go away?" There's so many like, how much time do you have, right? Like, there's so many different reasons. Part of it is that all of us wanted to go back to normal, even though COVID still raging in a lot of parts of the country, right. The climate didn't get any better. In fact, it got worse at the same time, I think too, continuing to implement slow streets is like a full-time job that a bunch of my staff didn't sign up for.And in fact, it wasn't really their job. We pulled together this kind of ragtag team that made this program work at the time, but the moment that everybody got back around to saying, "well, I want all of my other goods and services to be delivered to me from the city, or by extension, whoever," right. The priority shifted back to long-term capital planning and long-term delivery of safety improvements. And my primary thesis around that was like, "don't do that. Don't don't go back to doing things the slow, expensive, difficult way," right? Like choose to have a 50 miles network of slow streets that need upgrades on a regular basis, but that you now have a new, a completely different foundation to build from, holding even in that all of the consternation that people felt about them.But truly, one of the things that I repeatedly told people is like, "I don't want to keep apologizing for not implementing the tools that I know we can." When someone gets hit by a car and yells at me and says, "why didn't you do something?" The underlying answer is, "yeah, I could have done something. And we chose not to because of insert any number of reasons," and I don't want to do that anymore.David RobertsOne thing I always think about this, that the slow streets always make me think about, is several years ago I went to Barcelona because this guy obviously wasn't just one guy, but he was sort of one of the sort of visionaries who envisioned it in the first place and had been pushing for it for years. Salvador Rueda wanted to turn over more than half of Barcelona streets to public space, basically return them to people. But he didn't just go in and do it, he spent years, he revised the bus system so that it was much more grid-based, and linear, and much more frequent. And you have to deal with walking paths and trees, and you have to put the pieces in place, such that when you get the streets turned over to people, they're nice and functional, which is very different than just like, parachuting in one day and putting up an orange cone.Warren LoganRight. And what Barcelona has that virtually no American city, save for parts of San Francisco and New York, right, is density.David RobertsYes.Warren LoganAnd that is such a critical issue. And I think this gets all the way back to, "why can't we do things quickly? Why can't we just shift to electric cars?" It's like, yeah, because if we don't shift to electric cars, we then need to acknowledge that we probably should have built denser housing next to each other.David RobertsShoulda, coulda, woulda.Warren LoganRight. And I think the other part too, though, kind of to your point about Barcelona and a number of other places, is that they did that when we had time.And I think that one of the parts that I'm actively, and I think a lot of other climate resilient folks are on the same bandwagon, is that we don't have time anymore to keep having these debates. We don't have time anymore to just keep talking about what the future could be like if we all got our act together. Because the science has proven time and again and just like literally look outside, that we have run out of time on this issue, and so we got to start making big moves yesterday.David RobertsYeah, well, let me ask about that, because this is a tangled and contentious topic in urbanism, but one of the reasons that things tend to move slowly in big affluent cities when you're trying to free up road space — or get rid of parking, or rezone or whatever — is that the mechanisms of democracy in a city basically end up empowering a relatively narrow set of affluent homeowners.Warren LoganAbsolutely.David RobertsSo to the extent there's democracy or what looks like democracy, it's all pushing in the wrong direction. And so when you talk about going faster, when you talk about let's just do things, it's hard to avoid at least the impression of let's have less democracy, let's have less public feedback, let's run roughshod over people. How do you navigate that?Warren LoganSo, great question. I think that what's interesting, and I got that pushback and continue to, but that what was interesting about, let's say, like "tactical urbanism". I'm going to just zoom out slightly from slow streets themselves.David RobertsDefine that for our listeners.Warren LoganAbsolutely. So, dear listener, "tactical urbanism" is when you use kind of not found objects but materials like jersey barriers, water walls, paint, signs to affect the type of right of way change that then hopefully you'll come back and literally and figuratively cement later on.David RobertsRight, but that doesn't involve really infrastructure change. It's really jury rigged, cobbled together urbanism.Warren LoganExactly. It's like style on a dime kind of thing over here.David RobertsTo return to Barcelona, the first superblock they implemented, the first time they actually tried to close the streets and hand them over to people, that's what they did. They parachuted in over one weekend and just put like orange cones and plant pots on the streets and then got the neighbors together the following week and like, "hey, look, you have a superblock. What would you like to do with it?" Not, "should we do this? But now that it's here ..."Warren Logan"What now?"David Roberts"What would you like to do with it?"Warren LoganWell, and that's what's so interesting about to your point about if by going fast, do we lose democracy? And I don't think we do. And let me kind of play out a bit of the ways that all of these different, again, tactical urbanist projects programs that we launched during COVID actually had more engagement. I met with community groups twice a week for half a year just on slow streets.David RobertsOh, my God, you poor man.Warren LoganNo, but don't get me wrong. I like engagement. I like people. And like well, I don't necessarily enjoy getting yelled at all time. It is actually helpful because once we've really got to the heart of the matter, we found out so many different issues that people had with a lot of the other programs we were running that we would have never found out had we not been engaging with them on such a regular clip. And this gets us back to my point about the trust, or really distrust in government issue, is that you don't build trust by talking about something for ten years and then not doing anything.David RobertsWait, that's Seattle city government's central strategy. What do you mean it doesn't work?Warren LoganWell, I'll give them a call. No, I can't help you there. But I lived down here. But I think that that's the other really critical element that multiple people, I think begrudgingly shared with me was that they're like, "listen, we may not like the Slow Streets Program all that much, and we really hate that you didn't call us the day you did it, but it sure is nice to have all of the senior leaders of one department on a regular phone call with us so we can air our grievances on a regular basis. And then, better yet, see the next week that you've made changes that we ask for."And that that is the seminal thing that I want people to take away from these programs, is that you have to expect that level of service from your government, and that anything short of that is not democracy. And that this whole system that we've built so far really only benefits a few people, and they're really good at making sure it stays that way.David RobertsYeah, a side question related to that. One of the things I heard from city administrators about kind of the COVID thing is, in a sense, by not being able to have meetings in person, they had to have them online. And a lot of them said that actually brought a lot more people into the process and a much more diverse array of people into the process. Like, if you're having a meeting on a Tuesday evening, it's all the old white people in coordinating T-shirts who ...Warren LoganOh, I love coordinating T-shirts, though.David RobertsWho have show up. But if you have it online, then, like, normal people can come. Did you find that too?Warren LoganYes, absolutely. And frankly, just from a time standpoint, it was much easier to jump from ... now, granted, this is where my mental health probably suffered ... is jumping from one meeting to another over, and over, and over again. But you cannot discount, just your point. The fact that I could then meet with way more people because I didn't need to travel from one side of the city to the other. The other bit was and again, this kind of goes to, like, boundary setting that I'm working on, of course, is that it's also easy to have meetings with people at night or in the mornings at times that are not the best meeting times.But if you want to have a 30 minutes phone call with me, that's easier if I can also be cooking dinner for my family at the same time. And that is true not only for myself, but also for the people I'm engaging with that are like, "I don't have time to come down to City Hall and talk to you about this. I'd rather tweet at you and get a response, right?" Like, God forbid any of your listeners go look at any of my tweets. I apologize in advance, but there are plenty of instances where someone or lots of people asked a question, and I took the time to really spell out, "here's how we got here, and if you want to talk more, give me a call, right?"That type of engagement via zoom, but also digital in the form of social media, can really support a lot of transportation engagement.David RobertsAnd it seems also, I mean, this is slightly speculative on my part, but just psychologically, I feel like a lot of the things people bring up as objections to these kind of projects, like, I'm not telling you anything, but just listeners. Like, if you go watch the CSPAN or read the transcripts from some of these community meetings, the things people cite as objections to bike lanes and apartment buildings are so ...Warren LoganThey're comical, if not homicidal. It's crazy.David RobertsThey defy parity. But I feel like a lot of that is a little bit of displaced, like, "you're not listening to me, like I'm not being listened to," and that maybe if people got the sense like, "oh, I do have an open channel, there is someone listening and responsive," that some of that might fade. Is that too optimistic?Warren LoganI think that's true, kind of. And here's the important part that I really I must stress this, is that you cannot equate me listening to you getting what you want.David RobertsYes.Warren LoganI could have heard you, and the answer might be no.David RobertsIt could be that you said something, and I did decide it was wrong.Warren LoganRight. We're not just like, right and wrong, but that if we use that as the barometer for my listening to everyone, we wouldn't actually which is kind of how government works. We wouldn't get anything done because we'd be going left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right. And that's, I think, kind of to the very end. That's why government is slow, because if you truly listen to everybody, you're like, "okay, I got to hold on. I got to take a tiny little step, did the sky fall?" I think the other bit, though, and this is really important, about, again, like tactical urbanism and big moves, et cetera, is that there are lots of activities that cities engage in every single day, every week, every month, every year, that if you called them something else, you would think that they were actually tactical urbanism.So I just want to give you and your listeners, like, a couple of examples and hopefully that will elicit ... but like, "yes, it's possible, and we don't have to fight over this so much." One is every single time that someone like a municipal utility does construction on your street, they file for an encroachment permit. It usually doesn't take very long to get that, maybe less than 30 days. So we are, in fact, capable of doing these plans quickly. The next bit is that they go set up a bunch of orange cones and traffic signs and say, "merge left", "road close", "detour", whatever.And we all accept that on a daily basis in our neighborhoods, on our freeways, on our site, whatever. That's just like, "okay, that's a change, and we'll see what happens," right? And we kind of adapt to it pretty much immediately. That happens all the time. But instead of it being construction for a gas line, take that out and put kids playing in the street. Which in fact brings me to special event activities. It is not uncommon that cities in my own city, and I'm sure Seattle does this too, because I've been there and I've done it, also permits special events, right?So let's say that there's a concert in downtown, and they've closed some of the streets so that people can walk around more easily. Just take those instances. And then instead of it being once a year, it's every weekend, it's every month, and maybe every day. And that's the kind of thing that we also really kind of encourage through our second program. So, like, we had slow streets and we had flex streets, and for a lot of cities, you probably know these as like, parklets or outdoor eateries. But that's the same concept where instead of saying, "well, this is for COVID," it's like, "maybe it's just nice to sit outside and drink a beer."David RobertsThis gets to another enduring mystery of the of the kind of sociology of this, which is you do those things, you close down a couple of streets downtown for a farmer's market, or a concert, or just a festival, or whatever, an event. People love it.Warren LoganPeople love it.David RobertsAnd yet it never occurs to them to think ..."What if we did more of this?""What if we did this like, twice a year, right? Hey, what if we did it every week?" Like, why doesn't it translate? Or they're just not channels for people to express that positive feeling.Warren LoganOr I think it's scale, and it's ... going all the way back to our engagement, right ... like, we never asked you what I mean. So embedded in Oakland's Flex Street Program was actually the sort of Easter egg that I left that was like, "we should think about this for long-term special events. That what if we didn't say slow streets are for people biking and walking," which I think is a net positive, but people have some feelings about that. "What if we said if you want a festival in your neighborhood or if you want a farmers market?"Those are things that people say, "oh, yeah, I'd like having a weekly farmers market nearby. Okay, well, we got to close the street for that." And suddenly when you start to identify the activity that people are willing to give up their cars for, effectively, that's where you really get the special sauce. And it's funny because in Oakland, it turns out one of those special activities that I did not expect is rollerblading. Yeah. All of a sudden we have full blown roller discos that popped up across the city, and now there are clubs of people who show up.And I don't want to say it's like a flash mob situation because it's planned, but it's amazing, right? And I think that that's the part. That ...David RobertsThese are the car free streets.Warren LoganYeah. So they're not only on car free streets, but they've since taken them to parks. There's like a weekly ... like this is so Oakland, but once a month there's a drag show on wheels called "Rolling with the Homos". And it's fabulous, but it is also an outgrowth of like a bunch of people rollerblading more because of COVID. And that tapping into, like, what activity do you enjoy more than driving? Which, by the way, lots of activities.David RobertsYes, almost all of them.Warren LoganThat's the trade off that we need to make. And it can't just be, "oh, I want to make the street safer," which don't get me wrong should be enough, but I want to make the street safer for kids to play in, which would be awesome on its own, but that people are selfish, and that's great. Like, I love that people are selfish — and I don't love that, but I'm being facetious. But finding out what they value from like a social activity standpoint is often a really winning strategy, for then having conversations about whether it be tactical or urbanism changes to your streets or long-term capital improvements to a highway, for example.But I will share even just kind of a similar example is that in Oakland there is a street, I won't name names because then people will be mad. But there is a street that the city planned a protected bikeway on, and a very large number of the businesses were like, "you're going to take away parking spaces, and that's going to spell the end of this district. So hell no, we won't go."David RobertsLet me just insert here. This is one of many areas in urbanism where the research question has been answered. It is settled. You do not lose business when you lose parking spaces. When you increase bike and pedestrian flow, you get more business. And yet that evidence never seems to play any role in the next round of argument over this thing. This is one of the mysterious things about urbanism, is like, we learn things, but they never seem to ...Warren LoganThey never seem to stick.And I think let me touch on that for just a second, because having helped manage a parking program in the city of Berkeley, I can tell you what's really happening. I felt like such a varied experience in transportation. Like, "wait, I have the answer to that." It turns out, and this is the people are selfish discussion, is that when business owners and employees say, "you're going to remove parking," I think that everybody else hears, "oh, for your customers." Of course you're worried about your customers. That's not true. I mean, they might be worried about their customers, but truly, if you get down to it, what they're actually saying is," I depend on driving to work," for whatever reason.There's plenty of very good reasons why that happens. We're not going to go into that. But what they're really saying is, I get here via a specific mode, and your restriction on that mode then means that you might be compromising my ability to work and to feed my family. And I've met a number of women, for example, who are like, "I get off work at midnight, I work at a bar, I work at a restaurant, whatever, and you're not going to tell me that I need to walk a quarter of a mile to the bus stop at one in the morning. That's just not happening."Without diving too far into this, I just want to kind of give air to why people land where they do. That being said, circling back to the sort of tacticle urbanism bit, a lot of these same businesses said, "well, we don't want to live with our parking spaces. Yada, yada." And then when we opened up the Parklet Program, the Flex Street Parklets, suddenly all of them had outdoor eateries. And so I asked them, like, "well, you got rid of 'your parking,' for this dining experience. I thought the sky was going to fall down if you lost your parking."And like, "oh, well, the trade off was that I got more business. I can guarantee that I will get more business with more space," and there's a lot of things to unpack there. But the salient point that I keep coming back to is that we need to start asking questions in a very different way, other than, "how do you feel about the ways I want to address climate change? How do you feel about a bike lane?" Because that's not working. And what is working is all of these other tools that we don't mean to be using for this strategy, but I genuinely believe that if we started by saying, "hey, this neighborhood has a monthly eatery stroll, they close off the main street for all the restaurants and you take the kids out or whatever.""What if we did that every weekend?" I bet you most people would be like, "that sounds kind of nice. Yeah, let's do that, right?" And then suddenly you might say, "this has been so lovely, maybe we should extend it to Friday, Saturday, and Sunday." Which is in fact what some, I think it's in Toronto, there's a business district, and forgive me if I have the wrong city. So dear listener, if you have the right city, call me. But that they close their bar district to cars a. because then the businesses really enjoy it, because they have way more people, and it's actually safer.But the other side of it is that it also means probably fewer emissions because people are like, "well, let's carpool or let's take a Lyft, or let's take the bus, or whatever," because the streets are restricted in a certain way.David RobertsDid you ever feel that you had enough of these positive examples under your belt? Like, "look, we closed this every so often here, and it went well. And like, the now the businesses are on board." Did you ever feel like you were able to build momentum off those, such that the next one was easier? Because, like, part of what seems maddening about urbanism to me is that every one of these fights seems to start ...Warren LoganAll over again.David RobertsFrom friggin ground zero and cover all the same ground again. Did you ever feel like there was momentum, like you were getting ahead of steam?Warren LoganI think that we did a little bit. And I kind of want to use an example of "a tale of two different bikeways" as a way that, I think, we are starting to break through some of this ice. So there's Telegraph Avenue in Oakland that spans, it goes from downtown Oakland, like City Hall, basically, to the foot of UC Berkeley, funny enough, and the portion that runs from downtown through uptown Koreatown Northgate, and then through a district called Temescal all has, what was the time, a tactical urbanist paint and post protected bikeway. And that pilot taught us a lot of things, and most importantly, taught us that we we can't do those types of pilots anymore because they took too long.And people were like ... it just got really messy.David RobertsPeople objected to the bike lane when it was there. Like, it was controversial, impractical.Warren LoganYeah, like super controversial and still remains controversial for a whole host of reasons. I'll kind of break apart in a second. So as we were engaging on 14th street, which is actually like, it starts just where Telegraph begins in downtown that goes East/West instead of North/South, we said, "hey, we want to put a protected bike lane here as well." And this is the business district that was like, "you're going to take away our parking. This is going to kill our neighborhood. And we don't want what you did to Telegraph," right? "We don't want to have that."And that's like a totally fair statement. That pilot had some really big issues, and pilots shouldn't last five years, they should last five months.David RobertsAt a certain point. You're making mockery of the idea of tactical urbanism when you're ...Warren LoganThat's right.David RobertsWhen your flimsy little posts are five years old.Warren LoganBut what we did learn, and this is where I hope that we have some momentum, is that when we injected the parklet part of all of this because, like insert COVID and this timeline, watching all of these business owners happily, gleefully take away, in some cases, half of the parking on their block, if not more, for outdoor dining, and not a peep from many of them, saying, "well, you took my..." because they're the ones taking it away, right.We got to realizing that the space allocation, again is a matter of programming, where if you just say, "well, I'm making this space, instead of for your car, I'm making it for someone else's bike," that's a really difficult place to start the conversation. But if you said, "hey, can I make more space for your business on this street," and by extension for more just like vital, vibrant activity of people walking around, they might say, "yeah, that sounds great. That's going to be good for me.""Oh, well, are you sure? Because that might require taking some of these parking spaces.""Well, if I get to use that space for myself as well, then that might work."And that's one of the things that we did see in the 14th street design that just went to council. I want to say two weeks ago, that they passed unanimously was that some of the major changes were based on lessons learned from this Parklet Program, where we actually took away even more parking to make these mega, bulb-out plazas, that suddenly make the street more of a destination.But it's that type of creative thinking that a. it's just difficult, and b. is the type of thinking that we need to be using to really tackle our obsession with cars.David RobertsOh, my God, are there reforms? I mean, some of this obviously is just psychology, and sociology, and how you approach it, and how you communicate, and all that kind of stuff, and how you think about it. But there are also mechanisms of government, and mechanisms of review, and laws and stuff gumming up the works, in some sense. So are there city government reforms that are relatively simple that you could think of that would just ...Warren LoganFix all of this?David RobertsWell, at the very least, ease the flow, at least move things along more quickly.Warren LoganSo there are a couple, and I have actually written like little mini essays on my Twitter about this, because I genuinely like, I don't want to gatekeep ideas that I have. I want people to be thinking about them too and saying, "wait, no, I don't like this. Let's switch it to this."I will give you two different ideas that I've come up with so far. One is in the traditional, capital improvement process. And let me kind of just zoom out for a second and explain that. Dear listener, whenever there is a multimillion dollar capital improvement, which is just an infrastructure project on a road in your city, there is a planning and engineering phase, which is both, like, the engagement component, there's design, and then just literally like, the engineering component of, like, "will this stand up? Am I going to dig into a pipe?" Like, all of the very specific minutiae that make sure that your street doesn't completely fall apart. And then there's the actual construction phase, and then you get to use the thing that we built.That takes a really long time. And let's say, for example, that you're like, "gee, this is a really dangerous street, and we need to fix it right now. Great. Let's spend two years trying to go get $20 million, then let's spend five more years planning and engaging about this street, and then two more years to construct it."So we're a damn near a decade in before you've actually fixed the problem. And that's not great. That's bad. And in fact, that's really shitty.David RobertsThose are injuries and accidents piling up ...Warren LoganPiling up.David RobertsWhile you're missing about.Warren LoganAnd so the pivot that I want us to make is to insert at the very beginning of this conversation a tactical urbanism adjustment or adjustments, for that matter. And it serves two main purposes. One, is that you get some of the benefits you need early, much earlier, so that people just stop dying from getting hit by cars, which is a very serious issue. And by implementing a something in front of people, like, just a physical change to the right of way, helps people talk about the concept that you're proposing as a physical thing in front of them instead of in the abstract.Most people have different types of imagination. And it turns out, I just learned this recently, that some people don't even have inner monologues. They don't think.David RobertsOh my God.Warren LoganLike, that there's no picture or anything. When I found that, I was like, "that's fascinating."David RobertsI know the amount of envy I feel. Imagine it being quiet in there.Oh my God, I'm right there with you. Just shut up in there.Anyway, my point is that not everybody is a city player. Duh. And that if I were to describe a parking protected cycle track to you, like, I can imagine most of your listeners faces are kind of glossing over at this point. But if I were to go out there tomorrow and just put some cones out there and say, "park over here, don't park here, and let's let people bicycle here, and let's just watch what happens for a few minutes." That is a much easier way for people to give feedback that is at least based on reality, instead of based on their impression of what might or might not happen.And people have very faulty intuitions. Let's just throw that out there too, even whatever. Well educated city people, just human beings have some very ... things that happen in urbanism are very counterintuitive. The results are very counter ... And it's not something that people, even though, as I'm sure you're aware, every citizen is absolutely convinced that they are an urbanism expert. But in fact, there are lots of weird and counterintuitive results. And you do kind of need to know, you do kind of need to see things before you have a good sense of how they work out. But I'm assuming one reason city governments aren't just like, "while we're contemplating this $20 million capital improvement, we're going to slap together some orange cone type of arrangements here and do like a 60% 70% fix while we talk about it."I assume the reason they're not doing that is that they're paranoid about legal liability of some kind.Warren LoganWell, and that's the part that, again, I'm kind of calling BS. Because part of the structure of the emergency team that I worked in wasn't just planners. We actually had an economic development person, and we had a city administrator, and perhaps most importantly, we had one of the city attorneys. And his voice at the table was so important because I was just like, you thinking, "oh, hold on, we can't do that because we're going to get sued." He's like, "who told you that, that's not going to get us sued." Like, don't worry about that. Like, we have, for better or for worse, a lot of immunity when it comes to changing the rights of way, as long as we've done our homework.But again, and this kind of gets me to the next, second proposal here is in the same way that we allow all of these private companies and municipal utilities to adjust the right of way regularly for construction.David RobertsRight.Warren LoganThe mechanism by which we do that has all the checks and balances necessary for us to approve that. So why can't we open up that same avenue so to speak for ...David RobertsGood one.Warren LoganEveryday people, I'm trying here, everyday people to make those types of suggestions so that we can talk about them. Because I've met lots of people who are like, "well, why don't you just try ____?"David RobertsRight?Warren LoganAnd what's interesting is that, I tried this with my own staff where I, I don't say bribed, but breakfast burritos will get you a long way, let's put it that way. I asked two of our staff and the DOT to grab, like, I think they had like 30 orange cones and vests, safety vests, safety first. To meet me in downtown and I just wanted to see, you know, as part of our, like, dialogue around 14th street if it was possible to narrow one of the cross streets to make like a really big plaza.And I'd had the same conversation with them like a year prior and it was like, "well, we could kind of design it, and then we'd have to throw it in the model, and see how that would work." I was like, "or we could go have breakfast, and you grab the cones, and we'd just put up a sign, and say see what happens."David RobertsThis should be the new slogan for the tactical urbanism movement grab the cones.Warren LoganGrab the cones and breakfast burritos.David RobertsForget the model, grab the cones.Warren LoganTrue. But the funny thing though is that in the short, maybe 2 hours we were out there, at prime time, really, or what would be prime time, but people aren't driving it downtown very much anymore. We took one lane away, and we're like yeah, this is nice. Nothing's happening instead of light. So the queue was clearing every single time. So if there was green, all the cars that were waiting got through the light. Then we tried another lane and still the same effect. And it was interesting to watch how traffic flow was actually slowing a bit instead of speeding on through, and that suddenly people were easily walking across the street.And the last bit of course, was that we had a couple of business owners come over to us and like, "hey, what are you doing?" We're like, "oh, we just want to see how far we can build a plaza." One of them was like, "well, can I get one on my side of the street?" And we're like, "this this is how we should be having this conversation."David RobertsI want a plaza.Warren LoganWe all want plazas. So I lift up those two examples that both rely on this sort of like, "let's just try it for a second and see if the sky falls down." Because what we are failing to recognize, and I think this is so important, is that the existing condition is not an ideal scenario that we are having to negotiate away from. It's actually a s**t sandwich that we have sort of convinced ourselves is the best thing we can ever have, and that anytime someone says "I'd like to change what you're eating," like "no, I have to keep this," like really?David RobertsI mean, the modal situation in a prosperous US city is that it's getting worse, right? Is that traffic is getting worse. Not just that we're defending some wonderful status quo, it's that just the natural flow of things makes things worse and worse. If you're car dependant, and you got more and more people coming in, it's just math.Warren LoganBut you know, David, sometimes math is difficult.David RobertsMath is hard.Warren LoganBut you know, that's the thing is that, and this gets us all the way back to your original question, "what if we just had more electric vehicles?" It's like, yeah, partly, but even if you just swapped all of the cars for electric cars, you'd still be stuck in traffic all day. You'd still have all these traffic deaths, probably more, right. It doesn't put us in the best situation we could get to. It certainly would address air quality issues. Absolutely. I'm not going to pretend like it doesn't, but that can't be the only solution because then you have cemented once again all of these other problems that become stickier and stickier.Because if I just bought a $70,000 electric car, the last thing I'm going to hear is somebody telling me, "sorry, you can't drive anymore because you're going to hit somebody." Like, no. You know what I mean?David RobertsIt's slight addendum to the previous question, and I feel like it's often used in a somewhat glib way. But one of the things people like to say now is, "oh, it's the environmental rules. Like all the environmentalists are telling us they want walkability and et cetera," but at the same time it's the environmental rules that they put in place that are slowing things down, right. Environmental review, et cetera, et cetera. Was that your experience? Was that a big piece of the puzzle in your experience? Or is that more just a Twitter thing?Warren LoganIt kind of depends on the subject. So yes, environmental review can be a major source of delay for certain types of projects. And I think that it is up to the states, sorry this sounds very like states rightsy and I don't mean for to — it is up to your local representative — to streamline those. That each time we identify something that we know is a good right, like, yeah, it's a good thing that we, you know, encourage more infill development or we encourage, you know, more people to ride bicycles. If the first issue, if the first barrier is, "hold on, I got to do, in our case CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act.""I got to do two years worth of CEQA." That's when you got to say, "hold on, time to streamline," at least that exemption, which we now have for a lot of things. The issue that we've now run into in California, and I think this is probably true for a lot of other places too, but it's especially true for California, is that we use CEQA, again or California Environmental Quality Act, to appeal infill development projects near transit. And that is the most blatant abuse and frankly, like misuse of a set of regulations that truly were there to protect us.You have to remember that we put in all this environmental review because you had a bunch of companies throwing sewage in the water. So it's not like it came from nowhere. And I won't go into federal politics right now, but we're about to remind ourselves why we have these rules, is my point.Oh good.Hip hip hooray, right. But my point is though, that if we are running into that as a barrier, we can't just say, "oh, well, I guess we got to slow it down." It's like, "well, maybe we should fix this upstream issue so that we no longer have to have this problem later on."David RobertsThat brings about another thing. You often hear from city people and city planners. And maybe it's not as true in California as it is in some other cities, but lots of times, city administrations find themselves at odds with state government. Because in a lot of states, what you have is, like your one urban blue area surrounded by the red sticks, and you have a red governor and a red state government and a blue city, and the red state government just wants to stick it to the blue city at every opportunity. But even in California where it's blue top to bottom, did you find that the interaction of city and state is a point of friction for you?Warren LoganNot since I've been working, it's not as of late. And I'm sure plenty of your listeners have come up with arguments about exactly why that's wrong. But I think that at least for many of the CEQA abuses that we have been running into over the last decade, I would say, we have very fortunately, or it's no fortune, it's very astutely elected people who have gone in and adjusted those rules. I'm very happy and quite proud of our state legislators who are like, "oh, are you having trouble narrowing your street because of traffic safety in the environment because of CEQA? Okay, let's fix that."And now there's a fix to it, right? Like we even had. One of the things we noticed with slow streets, was that we depended on an emergency authority to do those programs. And someone kind of mentioned it to some state folks and said, "maybe these aren't perfect, but if cities want to make their streets safer, they probably shouldn't run into this very arcane set of rules. Can you fix that for us"? And now we have a law that says, "yeah, you can totally do that." So I've been really happy to see some pretty strong proactive movement at the state level to try and limit city discretion and kind of like abuse of these types of rules, which is sort of the opposite but exact issue that you're talking about.The other thing I want to highlight though is that, and this is a genuine question, I don't fully understand how it is that bicycling has to be like a blue state thing, or that electric cars has to be a blue state thing.David RobertsWell, I mean, why are hamburgers, why are trucks, why are, you know, like the NFL, it's everything now.Warren LoganBut God forbid everybody just has clean air. You know what I mean? Okay.David RobertsWell, I think it's a big part of the answer to me, and it's not just for red states, but for the US. Generally is just that ... as we've said several times, lots of things about urbanism are not necessarily intuitive, and lots of times you just need to see something to understand what it means or how it's going to work. And there just are not a lot of good examples in the US to look to anywhere. Anywhere. Even in the blue states, it's very difficult to go into a community and say, "look, we would like to be more like that."You go over to Europe throw a rock, you hit a cute public plaza, they're just standard.Warren LoganBut David, that's Europe and we're not Europe. Okay?David RobertsThis is what I mean. If you could just get like one or two in some mid-size US city, so you could at least say, "look, like Pikipsee has this great walkable public plaza served by transit," you could just point somewhere. But we've done it so wrong so long, we're so deep in the hole.Warren LoganWell, the tough part is that we're kind of stuck on this, "well, that's New York. That's Amsterdam. That's Barcelona." And what's odd to me is when you really get at the heart of, even to some degree, our worst sides of American culture, they're like, "we can do anything." Where did that go?David RobertsYeah, where's our exceptionalism?Warren LoganYeah, like, our American exceptionalism. Like, why is it that we can't apply that to really big thinking around our cities? Right? Like, it wasn't even that long ago that someone well, not someone, Eisenhower was like, we should really have freeways everywhere. And then we just did it with plenty of impacts, primarily to Black and Brown neighborhoods and low income communities. But my point is that what happened to all the folks who said, "we're Americans," if we want to change our cities tomorrow to be walkable, safe, vibrant, lovely places that are better than Paris, that are better than Barcelona, that are better than Amsterdam?Like, what happened to that?David RobertsYeah, it's wild that nobody's even aspiring or talking about that. It does sound like a very American thing, like, "we're going to make our city better than Paris." We seemed really Stockholm Syndromed into thinking that we can't have nice things, we can't live in nice places.Warren LoganWhich are also the same people who've gone to Europe and experienced, "well, we can't have that."David RobertsIt's like, "yes, we're going to Disney World or going to LA, and going to the Grove," whatever they call them. These horrific sort of simulacra of small towns that they're building now, but with only the retail in it. Yeah. So creepy. Yeah. I don't fully get it. Well, I've kept you too long. Let's just say, as a final note, as a final question, I would just like to hear about a project you were involved in that you felt like worked. People are happy with it. It happened on a reasonably rapid rate of speed. It stuck and still exists. It improved things.Is there a project you were involved in that you think of as like "yes, I'd love to have more of that."Warren LoganAbsolutely. I would say the Parklet Program, the fact that all of them are still up.David RobertsOh, yeah. Is that true in Oakland? All the parklets?Warren LoganYeah, in Oakland, same with San Francisco. Not that I implemented that program, but it has been really exciting to see that they're all still up. I've even seen businesses upgrade them. I'm getting calls from people who are like, "oh, hey, let me get your opinion on this, because I'm working with this other group, and we're going to upgrade all over parklets next year, and have them all kind of look the same." And the important part here is that Oakland used to, had a Parklet Program before COVID. And what I did with our team was rewrite that program to a. make it free, b. provide technical support, and c. to self certify a bunch of the different requirements, that otherwise the city would have to go through and check over the course of like five years.And what that has done is it's not only unlocked all this amazing public space, right, all these parking spaces that are now beautiful areas to sit, and eat, and drink, and hang out. It has also showcased just how creative Oaklanders are, that many of our parklets are wrapped in like beautiful murals that folks paid local artists to do. And so you can't tell me that we can't just overnight change our mind about at least this strip of land that we call a parking space, because that's exactly what we did. We just said, "oh, I want to use this for literally anything else."And they're everywhere. And that's awesome.David RobertsAnd this is another reason it's so important to do early in the process, rather than talk, talk, talk, is first, you just have to convey to people that streets and parking spaces are public space. That alone, I feel like, is wildly counterintuitive and new to most Americans. Just the idea that we collectively own this space. We don't have to have ... cars on it, right. It doesn't have to be for cars. And two is just and this is of course what Barcelona learned, what everybody learns when they do this, is just when you create the public space, when you give people a place to come together, they will do things that you could never, ever predict in advance.Warren LoganAbsolutely.David RobertsThat they would do. They're so creative and so interesting. And people will do the cutest, coolest, most interesting things like walk around Barcelona to these superblocks. They just basically handed the neighborhood. They're like, "we're going to close off traffic to the streets in this neighborhood. Go for it." And so they've done just an amazing array of things like parks, and cafes, and little sculptures, and just everything you could imagine, you could never have predicted at all.Warren LoganYes, all of that is so true. And I think the exciting part about parklets, this sounds so silly because it's like I'm so ecstatic about them and probably ... but that the questions we started getting were very much like as if we had planted a seed and suddenly people saw the world in a totally different way for people to say, well, here's one question. Originally we'd opened up the program to businesses that had storefronts, and then the next group said, "well, I don't have a storefront, but this business owner here that does have a storefront said, 'wouldn't it be nice if my bar had a food truck outside and tables to sit and eat?'" Like, "oh yeah, okay, let's expand the program."So actually our Parklet Program includes a brand new kind of Food Truck Program alongside it. Then another group of people said, "well, I don't own a business, but why can't I have a parklet in front of my house? Like, I'm not using the park space in front of my house, and maybe I don't want to put a coffee shop there, but like, could I put some plants there? Could I ..."David RobertsA couple of benches?Warren LoganYeah, I put some benches, and that was like the final Easter egg. I left right ... when I left the mayor's office was like, there's actually no functional reason why business owners are allowed to take over the parking spaces in front of their brick-and-mortars, but that residential properties can't do the same thing. And that has a, you know, I haven't seen a residential Parklet Program yet. If you're listeners, if you know one, tweet at me immediately because I want to know. Famous last words. I'm going to get a lot of tweets now. But that to me was like watching people unlock the like, "well, if we could do that, why can't we do this?""And if we can do that, then why can we do this?" And I'm like, that type of thinking is exactly how we should be approaching our city.David RobertsExactly. You look at a road for cars or a parking space for cars, it's just that forever. It's never going to get better. It's almost inevitably going to get worse, but it's never going to be any different. But if you just think of it as space, if you take the cars out, and it's just space, there's millions of things you could do to it. The sky is the limit. Your imagination is the limit. And people will find more of those as there are more public spaces. You just hope, as I said before, you just hope at some point that there's like a collective tipping point.Even if it's only just in Oakland. I's just like enough people see enough public spaces to have the light go on. Like, "oh, public spaces are cool, and fun, and great, and space for cars sucks and is ugly. Like, let's switch the one for the other."Warren LoganI love my city, and I'm very happy I live here. And in some ways, it's not a big city. We don't have a big budget. And so, in such a weird way, if people look at us and say, "well, if Oakland can do it, so can I," so be it. If that's the way that we start this kind of, like, big change of changing our roads and changing our travel behavior.David RobertsExactly. Any seed will do. Well, thanks so much for taking all this time. Thanks for all your, I'm sure, what was often thankless work, beating back the cars.Warren LoganThanks.David RobertsThanks for coming on, WarrenWarren LoganAbsolutely. Thank you for having me.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

A 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 of those bookends.David RobertsWith the electricity industry changing so quickly to even imagine 20 years out, there's some element of absurdity to it, like we have no idea. So as I was reading MISO's futures, they got "Future 1", where everybody sort of meets their stated plans and goals, and then they range up to a future where there's super aggressive decarbonization and super aggressive electrification, which raises demands. And my thought was, "that range between those two possible futures is so vast." How on earth do you plan a transmission system that even plausibly could answer the needs of both?Lauren AzarFirst of all, let me just say that the portfolio that was approved last week, unfortunately, was only based on "Future 1", which in my mind was a disappointment. But whenever you're dealing with plausible bookends, one of the things that you can think about, and I think MISO is thinking about, is how can one plan build on another plan? So for these long-range transmission planning processes, and I'm going to refer to this as the LRTP process, MISO has already indicated that it's going to involve four different steps. In other words, four different plans are going to come out, and the next one is going to come out and be approved in December 2023. Tranche 3 in December 2024, and we hope December 25 will result in Tranche 4.David RobertsAnd these different tranches will be divided up by time period or by region, by area.Lauren AzarThe first three are divided by region. Tranches 1 and 2 are all in what was MISO Classic. So the states in Central MISO and Northern MISO. Tranche 3 is going to be in MISO South. And then Tranche 4 is going to increase the capacity exchange between MISO North and MISO South.David RobertsInteresting. So some exchange between regions.Lauren AzarYes.David RobertsAnd so, as I think about the process of transmission planning and why it's so vexed in the US, one thing is just this wide array of stakeholders who tend to want different things. So I'm wondering when MISO held all these meetings, lots and lots of meetings. Tell me a little bit about the array of stakeholders involved and who wants what. We don't have to identify specific people or companies, but sort of in terms of their interests, who's pulling which direction here.Lauren AzarSure. And let me just say that MISO has their stakeholder process set up so that there are eleven different sectors. Each sector member is aligned with the other members of its sector. And for instance, I've been working with the environmental sector. But let me just give you a sense as to who would be against larger transmission lines, the interstate transmission lines that are designed for the LRTP.David RobertsI mean, this is what confuses people, I think, in my world, is transmission seems so great. Other than sort of like a landowner who doesn't want a power line on their property, it's really hard for me to imagine who else is pushing back against these things. But it must be somebody because they're not getting billed. So who are those people?Lauren AzarYeah, let me put them into four buckets. The first buckets are the "vertically integrated" utilities. And those are utilities that own transmission but also own generators. And the reason they don't want new transmission coming into their service territory is if they have inefficient generators, those generators do not run because lower cost, as an example, renewables will be selected in the energy market and will be delivering electricity to their customers. And so they're more expensive generators, like coal and natural gas, will sit idle, and they're going to lose money.David RobertsSo you have an entity here which is financially invested in power plants that wouldn't run if there were a broader transmission interconnection. They're not competitive on a regional basis. So you have to keep your little area insular to keep running those plants, basically.Lauren AzarExactly.David RobertsThat doesn't seem very public-spirited, Lauren. It seems like a perverse incentive, let's just say.Lauren AzarWell, and that's one of the reasons that RTOs were created, was to try to chip away at this misaligned interest between the consumer and the utility. So that was bucket one. Bucket number two would be ... it's also, unfortunately, misaligned interest between utilities and customers. Some utilities are wonderful, and they absolutely look out for the consumer's interest. Other utilities, however, really are more interested in increasing their stock prices and their revenues. It is much more expensive to build generators than transmission. And, as you may know, and hopefully your listeners know.David RobertsOh yes, I beat this point to death, so I hope to God they know it by now.Lauren AzarOkay, well utilities make profits off rate base.David RobertsYes. They make money by spending money. They want to spend money.Lauren AzarWell, they want to spend specific kinds of money. They want to spend "steal on the ground" money.David RobertsRight.Lauren AzarIt is depreciated assets, or I should say undepreciated assets. So they want to build the expensive generators. They don't want the cheap transmission.David RobertsAnd the more regional interconnection you have, the fewer big generators you're going to have to build.Lauren AzarExactly. And your regulators are going to be looking at, when I say your, the utilities regulator is going to be looking at ensuring that a utility is not overbuilding. In other words, not building too much capacity. So if they are able to access capacity elsewhere, they're not going to be allowed to build their own generators and their own footprint.David RobertsAgain, that's so perverse. So perverse that an entity is involved in this process that has that interest. It's just wild. Okay, that's bucket two.Lauren AzarYes, bucket three. I'm going to call the "end users". And those are usually large consumers who are mostly interested in ensuring costs stay low today, even if it's going to save the money tomorrow. And so they really don't necessarily even like the shift that's happening in the industry. They just want to stay right where they are. And so they often come back and say, "we don't need any changes, we don't want new transmission, or we want minimum transmission."David RobertsBecause they just don't want to make the initial outlay, the initial investment.Lauren AzarYeah. And I was thinking about this. I'd be interested in taking a look at that and what the impact, for instance, of mutual funds and needing immediate profits is on that position.David RobertsYeah, quarterly profits.Lauren AzarExactly. Versus understanding that I'm going to make an investment today that's going to save money, when this line is built in ten years.David RobertsWhich used to be, like, I guess, in an old-fashioned world, used to be sort of what business thinking was, "how do you make investments for long-term success?" But now it's like we got three months to show the numbers.Lauren AzarYeah. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that trend impacts their positions in this.David RobertsOkay, that's bucket three.Lauren AzarAnd bucket four, it's politics. Some people just don't like renewables, and they see this as a renewables play, which I completely disagree with. I mean we are seeing a transformation in the industry. A lot of this is being driven by cost. A lot is being driven by customer preferences, and frankly, a lot of it is being driven by extreme weather.David RobertsWell, it amounts to the same thing, right? I mean, if you follow low cost, if you follow resilience, pull those strings, you end up with renewables. There's not a lot of you can do to get around that.Lauren AzarYeah.David RobertsWell, that's a daunting amount of resistance. So maybe up against that, who are the sort of entities who are pushing for sensible regional, long-term thinking about this? The environmental communities, I assume.Lauren AzarYeah, I mean, let me just start with there are plenty of transmission owners that actually want to build transmission, and so they are leading this effort at MISO, which is fantastic. We do have two independent transmission owners in MISO, which means they're not "vertically integrated" utilities. And so they don't have that misalignment of interests. We also have the environmental sector, as you indicated. We've got the renewable generator developers and frankly, any developers of generation, whether it's renewables or natural gas, are interested in more transmission.David RobertsThey're waiting in the queue, presumably.Lauren AzarExactly. And then we've got independent transmission developers that are interested in developing transmission under the competitive transmission development process. So they're pro-transmission. The regulators, generally, it really depends on their state, and their state's position, and whether or not their states' have goals, and frankly, how their utilities are performing as to what their position is. But the state regulators in this situation supported the LRTP portfolio.David RobertsSo these lines they're talking about building here up in the sort of upper Midwest. One of the, I guess, you call it a friendly critique of these results, is saying almost all of these lines that you're talking about in this plan are going to be built by these "vertically integrated" utilities. Which means they will not ... because if they're built by independent transmission operators, there's a bidding process, right? You put up a project, and then transmission developers can come bid on it. And the thought is that competitive process will end up with better results, cheaper results. But there's very little auction here. There's very little independent transmission development. Is that something ... do you agree that that's a flaw here, or are they doing the best they could do? What's your take on the relative dearth of competitive process in here?Lauren AzarWell, first of all, I just want to clarify that in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, and it may extend into other states, there are independent transmission companies that all they do is own transmission. They don't own any generators. And those are not the kind of developers that you're talking about, that have to use the competitive process. These are public utilities within the state.And I'm just going to give an example in Wisconsin here, back in 2000, the legislature decided that they were going to disaggregate the utilities. Well, they were going to give an incentive to disaggregate the utilities and allowed the utilities to create the American Transmission Company. And so ATC owns and operates the transmission grid in about two-thirds of the state of Wisconsin. So that's an example. They're an incumbent utility here. They don't have to go through the competitive process.David RobertsBut, presumably, are governed by regulators, just like public generation utilities are. So, ideally, you would think the regulators would push them toward lower costs in the same way that competition would, although I gather maybe that doesn't always happen.Lauren AzarWell, for the two independent transmission companies in MISO, I think there are only two: it's ITC and ATC. Yes, they are regulated both by the federal government as well as the state government, but they do not have that misalignment of interest, that we had talked about earlier, because all they're doing is transmission. They don't have any generation to protect.But let's get back to your first question, with regards to competitive transmission development. And these are companies that essentially aren't necessarily incumbent utilities that would compete for proposals that MISO would put out for transmission. And my understanding, I'd have to go back and look David, but my understanding is that about $1 billion of the $10 billion in costs for the LRTP Tranche 1 would be put out to competitive bid.David RobertsWould it be, in your mind, better if there were more of these independent operators and more competitive process? Like, how much weight do you put on that in terms of ensuring quality and cost competitiveness of the results?Lauren AzarThe folks out there right now that are competing to do the development are pretty well-known entities. So I'm less worried about ... and I've got my former commissioner hat on, because early on when I was a commissioner, we didn't have any history with them, so we didn't know if they were actually going to build quality stuff. And I think there's enough comfort now that they are in it for the long haul, which is a good thing.Would it be better if everything was competitively built? Given the urgency with which this industry is changing and how quickly we need to get things done, if we could competitively bid and still get everything done quickly, sure. But I think there is a bit of a trade-off here with how quickly we would get the build out if everything was competitively built. So I think MISO tried to come up with a middle road, where there still was a nice chunk for the developers to come in and bid for, but opted for 9/10th of it to be done with due speed.David RobertsThe term "quickly" is not often used in this context. It's funny, like it seems to be just conventional wisdom now. Like the time from announcing a line, to having a line, is ten years, which just seems, I guess, a little crazy to me. But is that standard in other countries? Is that, you know, should I sort of, like view that as an artifact of bureaucratic, you know, misalignment and whatnot. Could it go faster? Or is that just the nature of the beast?Lauren AzarThat's the nature of the beast in the United States. It's the regulatory framework that we set up, and it involves the amount of regulatory approvals that are required. How the land acquisition process happens. Once you get all the approvals you needed and all the land that you need, it takes two to three years to build these lines. And so the vast majority of the time spent is on getting to the point where you're putting your first shovel in the ground.David RobertsRight. That just seems like there's some fat that could be trimmed there. So MISO has this "Future 1", and we should mention that the "Future 1" is just utilities meet their stated goals, and the states they're within meet their stated carbon goals, which there are a bunch of utilities and states in MISO that have pretty aggressive carbon goals. So it's a pretty aggressive future. They have this future they're building toward. They come up with these 2000 miles of lines, $10 billion. So who pays that $10 billion? And to back up a step, who decides who pays that $10 billion? And how does that get divided up? Because my understanding is figuring out who pays, tends to be one of the worst tangles here and one of the most difficult sort of barriers to overcome.Lauren AzarYes, and in the transmission world, it's called the "cost allocation for the transmission lines". Ultimately, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is the one that approves the cost allocation rules for the RTOs. And each RTO puts together proposals on how it wants to pay for lines. The project type depends on under what bucket of cost allocation rules, essentially, get triggered. And when we started the LRTP process back in 2020, we knew that the cost allocation was going to be an issue. So there was a concomitant process going on to try to figure out how to pay for these lines, knowing that they were very similar to the Multi-Value Projects that I was ... I headed up the cost allocation process for that back in 2009, in 2010.So we went through a lot of different iterations at MISO, through the stakeholder process, on whether or not LRTP needed to have a different kind of cost allocation than the original Multi-Value Projects. And in the end, it was decided. And MISO got approval from FERC to apply the MVP tariff, so those are the MVP rules, to the new LRTP projects with one change. So originally when we did the projects back in 2010, 2009 to 2011, MISO only had a footprint of MISO North and Central, and I'll just call that MISO Classic.It was only after that that we added MISO South. And MISO South really doesn't like the cost allocation for the MVPs.David RobertsMISO South, by the way, includes Louisiana, just to give listeners a sense of.Lauren AzarYeah, so it includes Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, as well as, the city of New Orleans.David RobertsVery different in character, let's say, than MISO Classic, in a bunch of different ways. So what is the Multi-Value Project? These are transmission projects that MISO planned ten years ago, which were also, I think, held up as sort of exemplars of how to do things well. So what was that "cost allocation process" in the MVP?Lauren AzarYeah, the "cost allocation" is essentially all of the beneficiaries sharing the cost based on their pro rata share of customers. So if you've got a lot of customers, you pay more because you're sucking out more electricity from the grid. And if you have fewer customers, you're paying less because you're using the grid less.David RobertsWhen you say "you", we mean "you utilities".Lauren AzarIt's called a "postage stamp allocation". And so the costs are spread broadly based on usage. That's the easiest way to describe it.David RobertsWe should say here as background, the overall process MISO found would be investment of around $10 billion and net benefits. At the end of it all, more than double that. I forget the exact number, something like $26 billion in benefits. So on a macro level, it seems like this ought to be easy to do, right, because the benefits so outweigh the costs that whoever is paying the costs ought to receive enough benefits to more than compensate for it. But of course, it's never that simple.Lauren AzarCan I emphasize that point? So the costs are spread by zone, and there are seven different zones receiving benefits here. The lowest cost savings is $2.1. So for every $1 spent in that zone, they will save $2.1. The highest every dollar spent will save $4.4. And that is only over 20 years.David RobertsRight.Lauren AzarAnd these transmission lines last for 60 to 80 years. So we're talking massive savings for every dollar spent.David RobertsThis is like the "tearing your hair out" aspect of all this. On the broad level, these are just complete no-brainer projects. The benefits vastly outweigh the cost. But again, you get up in that, it's like who gets what, who pays what, and who gets what always ends up complicated. But dividing up cost based on usage seems quite intuitive and sensible. So what is Louisiana's..what's their problem with that?Lauren AzarLouisiana, MISO South doesn't like a "postage stamp" because they think that rather than just everybody sharing on their load ratio, that we should look at the very, very specific benefits being received by customers and allocating the costs based on those specific benefits. So if one area, for instance, is receiving benefits based on having to use less fuel, they would then be allocated the costs related specifically to using that amount of less fuel.David RobertsIt seems more complicated.Lauren AzarIt is much more complicated.David RobertsAlmost as though the intent is just to muck everything up and slow everything down. I don't want to cast any aspersions.Lauren AzarWell, for smaller lines that are designed for very specific reasons, like relieving, just call it economic congestion, that sort of approach makes sense. But when you're talking about these large regional lines that are intended to bring regional reliability, I agree 100%. I think going more granular in your cost allocation actually leads to less accurate cost allocation.David RobertsYeah, you're missing a lot of these sort of macro-benefits. Like resilience of the larger grid, benefits to everyone who's on the grid, and even people who are adjacent to the grid. And it's fuzzy where to draw the exact lines on those, but you can't pretend those benefits don't exist.So the first round is a bunch of lines, more or less for the upper MISO. You got 2,000 miles of lines here, $10 billion of investments. Presumably, this is all going to trigger a process. Things are going to start moving now. So forgetting the subsequent tranches, which I want to talk about in a second, just in terms of this, like now they've released this plan, this document, this roadmap, what happens now? Presumably, all those, you know, all that whatever, seven years of approval seeking that gets started now, what actually happens in response to this?Lauren AzarSo a few things. Number one, you're absolutely right. What the utilities decide is which lines they're going to be building first, and they're going to be preparing applications to submit to their state commissions, as well as any federal agency approvals that they need, and they will start that regulatory process. What's interesting, there are 18 different lines here, and I suspect there is going to be a rational sequence in which these lines are built. And so part of that I think is probably also going to happen very early on is MISO will be working with the transmission owners to determine which of the lines need to hurry up and which ones can wait a year or two before they start their regulatory process.David RobertsOne of the things about transmission in the US is how many veto points there are over these things. So I would like to get a sense of how certain we are that this is going to result in these lines being built, or do we still face a bunch of process where say, a random landowner in Michigan can come in and just refuse and stop the whole thing cold? Like how assured are we that there are going to be results from this? Are there still more veto points ahead?Lauren AzarThere are many veto points and that is one of the weaknesses in our ability to build transmission infrastructure. I mean, if you think about building the national highway system, as an example, if any specific municipality could have just said no.David RobertsThere were a lot of them.Lauren AzarWhat our highway system would look like right now.David RobertsYes.Lauren AzarAnd that's not true for all states. It's really state specific as to how land is acquired for these transmission projects. But for instance, a state like Iowa, indeed, it's very much dependent on local approvals. In Wisconsin, you only have to get the state approval in order to obtain the land that you need. So it's state by state. I can tell you, for the MVPs that were approved in 2011, those, believe there were 17 lines if I remember correctly, all but one of them are already in service, and the one that's not in service is under construction but is in litigation. So there are lots of veto points. But so far, at least if you look at the MVPs, we have a pretty good success record in MISO Classic.David RobertsI see. So this is not certain that all these lines laid out in this report will be built, but we feel pretty good about their chances.Lauren AzarAbsolutely. I have some strong confidence that we'll get these done.David RobertsAnd reading around, I've been given to believe that maybe this first round, this first tranche dealing with sort of the upper regions of MISO, might kind of be the easiest. So there are three more to go. Are they all are all of the tranches going to take two years of process? What's next? And do you agree that this first round was was the easiest?Lauren AzarI can't say the first round was the easiest. I think Tranche 2, which is also going to be in MISO Classic, the rumor is that it's going to be as big as Tranche 1. So that's a large investment also in MISO Classic. But you have states and MISO Classic, and regulators in MISO Classic, that have worked together over more than a decade on developing transmission. So will we have ... continue to have the squabbles and the brawls? We absolutely will. The cost allocation is set for Tranche 2 as well. The same MVP tariff will be applied.David RobertsAnd then you get to Tranche 3, the southern part. What's the what?Lauren AzarYeah.David RobertsHow new are these southern states to MISO? I'm wondering sort of how much the, like, shared history has a role to play here.Lauren AzarI think it was around 2013, but do not quote me on that one.David RobertsSo they've been in MISO awhile?Lauren AzarYes, they've been in MISO awhile. And as a general rule, MISO South stakeholders have not been all that excited about developing transmission, period.David RobertsAnd is that mainly because there's these "vertically integrated" utilities that have these sort of perverse interests we were discussing earlier? Is that mostly the explanation or is there more to it than that?Lauren AzarI think it's that, and I think it's politics.David RobertsBecause of renewable.Lauren AzarYes.David RobertsThey fear you coming in and forcing a bunch of renewables on them, thus, weakening their manhood, or I don't know what they think is going to happen. So do you think that's going to be, I mean, is that process underway at all? Have those talks begun at all? Do you have any idea what to anticipate when ... because presumably the problems that are prompting this process in the first place, congestion, and rising costs, and all this kind of stuff, also face the southern states in MISO. So inaction doesn't seem like a possibility here. So how do you —do you anticipate more difficulty there working through that?Lauren AzarWell, first of all, I just want to point out that the South has very unique challenges as well, with regards to extreme weather, and more than the rest of MISO, they need transmission in order to provide the resilience in those extreme weather events. I mean, Winter Storm Uri was catastrophic, and if they had more transmission, they would not have lost as many lives. So the actual planning process in MISO South, I can't say how easy or hard that's going to be. What I can say is historically, again, they have pushed back against regional transmission in the South.As far as cost allocation goes, it is MISO South that wants to have a more granular cost allocation. And we have already started that process to start discussing whether or not there will be a new cost allocation developed that would likely apply not only to MISO South but then also to MISO North.David RobertsOh really? So yeah, I'm wondering, is there anything in the rules that says you have to have the same cost allocation process for all these tranches?Lauren AzarYeah, FERC, in one of its orders, indicated that for any specific single project type, you can only have the same cost allocation. And so we already have an approved cost allocation for this LRTP project type. The question is whether or not MISO is going to be able to come up with an agreement with MISO South that then could be applied to MISO North, for this LRTP project type.David RobertsAnd it also strikes me intuitively that the fourth tranche, which is the connecting the regions to one another with power lines, might be the stickiest of all because all the sort of perverse incentives we were discussing earlier — if you have your little territory, and all of a sudden a high voltage power line comes into it that can share power from all the way down to Louisiana and all the way up to Canada, it's going to lower your costs. It's going to lower your need to build new generation. Which is all, again, as we discussed, very pro-consumer, very good thing from a social point of view, but very bad if your financial viability relies on investing a bunch of money in infrastructure. So do you have any sort of thoughts about whether that might be unique, the sort of interconnecting of regions, uniquely difficult, or what do you anticipate in that piece?Lauren AzarThere will certainly be some stakeholders that will want to slow-roll that. What I can say is I do know that some of the southern regulators recognize that their development of solar in MISO South will be nicely balanced by the wind in MISO North. And so having that kind of enlarged interconnection between the two regions is going to allow for the balancing of those renewable resources. So there's, I think, a growing appreciation for the need for that.David RobertsLooking a little bit beyond even that, beyond MISO, one of the longstanding critiques of transmission is now the way the utility sector has changed, the way the electricity sector, the way electricity technology has changed, we need to be thinking about this on the broadest possible scale. Like, there's constantly calls for a national grid for these regions to be interconnected, one to another, for the US's three big separate grids to be interconnected. So is there anything in this process that could accommodate lines not just within MISO, but connecting MISO to adjacent regions? It seems like if you do that, you get a) even more social and economic benefits, but b) you drag even more of these stakeholders with perverse interest to the table. So is that part of this process at all, or is there such a process?Lauren AzarIt is not part of the LRTP process, but MISO has been working with SPP on doing just that.David RobertsSPP is the southern Power?Lauren AzarI think it's the Southwest Power Pool.David RobertsThere you go, another RTO, another regional transmission.Lauren AzarExactly. It's directly to the west of MISO. And so they, for the first time, and I believe this started last year, started doing serious interregional transmission planning based on their interconnection queue delays. So the line between SPP and MISO, the seam there, goes right through some of the strongest and best wind resources in the United States. And so a lot of queue projects are being held up by delays between the processes of SPP and MISO, and they are working hard to resolve those.David RobertsSo they're working ... there's some sort of inter-RTO process, or at least discussions underway?Lauren AzarA plan actually has already come out. So, yeah, I'd have to go back and look at the map. But there is a plan of lines. They are developing a cost allocation right now for those lines, and the two RTOs have agreed to do that joint planning process, at least at a minimum every two years. So this is a fantastic development.David RobertsYeah, that's really cool. Are they out ahead of the other RTOs in the country? Is that happening anywhere else? Is anybody else? It seems, like, whenever I look into transmission processes, and thinking, and long-term planning, MISO keeps sort of popping up as, like, the leader, the exemplar, in the US. Why is that? Why is MISO so much better at this than the other RTOs? Is there a simple explanation?Lauren AzarI do not know the answer to that question. What I can say is other RTOs do have strengths that MISO doesn't have, but MISO is, with regards to transmission planning and cost allocation, is one of the leaders nationally. I wouldn't be surprised at the fact that we do have some of the best renewable resources. So in other words.David RobertsTons of wind.Lauren AzarRight. Our industry is changing so dramatically in MISO that they have to be on the forefront.David RobertsRight. So I want to wrap up with two questions. One is just from the sort of baseline US transmission perspective. This is somewhat miraculous. It's amazing, since more transmission announced at once than ever before, and it looks like it's actually going to happen. So obviously the process was successful in some terms. But I just wonder, looking back on it now, or, I guess, you're still in the middle of it. I assume you're going to be involved in these subsequent tranches as well?Lauren AzarI expect to be, yes.David RobertsI'm wondering if you have any thoughts on how the process could be improved, whether there are sort of particular roadblocks or tangles that you think could be improved, when they come back and do this again in 2030, or whatever.Lauren AzarWell, first of all, let me just stop right there. One of the improvements is this needs to happen every few years. So the fact that the MVPs were originally approved in 2011, and the next tranche was not really approved until 2022, that by itself is a problem. David, I didn't expect this question, so I would have loved to think about it in advance. There are other things that I think could be improved. The "Futures", I know you identified them. The "Future 3" is being pretty aggressive. We think it could even be more aggressive than it currently is, just given how quickly the changes are happening in the US.There were also, and this gets really geeky, with regards to Tranche 1, there I think could be some improvements made, as far as where MISO cited some of the renewable resources in the process. That's off the top of my head.David RobertsAnd what about, this is a related question, but what could other RTOs take away from this? And as far as you're aware, are the other RTOs and ISOs watching this, interested, inquiring about it, trying to learn from it? Like is there, is there any reason to expect that MISO having sort of had this notable success, or notable progress, is going to inspire change in other regions, or are they all just sort of so bespoke they all do their own thing?Lauren AzarMost importantly, FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is essentially going to be requiring RTOs, and ISOs, and other planning areas to do this kind of strategic foresight. So they issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, and that will probably be finalized I think by the end of this year. But it requires scenario planning. It requires planning 20 years out. It requires using specific benefit metrics. Actually, it gives discretion on the benefit metrics at this point. They're requesting comments on that. But the good news is MISO successes have led to the federal government recognizing that this works and is going to require it of everybody.David RobertsAnd this just being regional transmission planning, which you'd think like of course it works. Of course it doesn't work if you don't do it, more to the point.Lauren AzarIronically, regional transmission planning was already required by FERC, but some areas weren't doing it using scenarios, some areas weren't doing it using a 20-year planning horizon.David RobertsRight.Lauren AzarSo FERC is getting a lot more specific in what's required.David RobertsRight. And just as a very final thing, is there any change on the way from FERC, or anything in the infrastructure bill, or anything in this new reconciliation bill? Because there are transmission reforms, I know, being talked about all the time, being talked about at FERC, and there's, I think, some transmission reforms in the infrastructure bill and some money in the infrastructure bill. Is any of that sort of legislative and regulatory activity at the national level going to affect what you do at MISO in any particular way?Lauren AzarThere are certainly components of it that will improve, for instance, potentially development of some of the projects that are being identified between SPP and MISO. My frustration with where we are from a regulatory framework perspective is it just continues to be a patchwork, and we just continue to put new patches on it.David RobertsSounds like us.Lauren AzarYeah. We have a national problem, and it needs a national solution. And we aren't getting it with these one-offs.David RobertsYeah. So what is that? Let's conclude with that then, because this is ... like anybody who sort of studies transmission, or just the logic of the grid, you're led inevitably to the need for planning at the highest possible level, right? Because there are all these sort of synergies and interactive effects, especially now with renewables. They're concentrated some places, and loads are concentrated other places in the country. So the need for national planning is quite obvious, I think, just from the logic of how the grid works. But as you say, all these states involved, and regulatory commissions involved, and FERCs involved, and it's a soup of bits and pieces.What would a solution to that look like in your mind? This is a huge question to end on, but I mean, are we talking about a bill in Congress? Something like that? Or like taking some authority away from states and putting it at the national level, or sort of like? I mean, this is obviously well beyond your remit, but I'm curious to your thoughts. It's just sort of like what would a kind of, if we just wanted to cut this Gordian knot, what would a national solution look like?Lauren AzarWell, first of all, it will take congressional action.David RobertsRight.Lauren AzarThere's no question. And one of the difficulties, unless Congress is willing to put a lot of money into the solution as well, I think what you're going to have to look at is the economic development implications for each state. So as the state commissioner, you're always wanting to ensure that you have sufficient electricity to serve your customers, and at a lower cost so that you can attract potentially new businesses into your state. So unless the United States wants to put a lot of money into the national solution, I do believe that the states are going to need to be at the table as well.So it is going to need to be a collaborative process. But I agree. I think, if not a national plan, at least we need interconnection-wide plans. That is going to be the cheapest way, overall, to enable the transformation that we're already experiencing.David RobertsYeah, it's real difficult to look at current political situation and imagine that happening, but who knows?Lauren AzarAnd I think that's why we end up with one-off new patches coming in because that's all we can get.David RobertsYeah, well, maybe, as is the case in renewable energy, it's just sort of the brute force of renewables becoming facts on the ground, becoming cheap and built, kind of forces change. Maybe just getting a bunch of transmission built will, in itself, loosen things up and create a virtuous cycle. We can always hope.Lauren AzarHopefully.David RobertsWell, thank you so much for coming on and explaining this. This is super interesting. I had no idea this was going on. So it was like a little gift in the middle of otherwise difficult political times.Lauren AzarWonderful. Thank you so much, David.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. 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 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 ice cream festival. Come and eat all ice cream for three days." I mean, I like ice cream.Zale SchoenbornExactly. You really get sick of music you love, if that's all you hear. So it was interesting because the response from the pre-program crowds was very negative to that. They did not endorse it. There's like a hardcore following in these kind of genre circuits, and if you were there, they're going to come see the genre that they kind of support. But if you mixed it up, you are off in Never Never Land. And it wasn't until the really big festivals like Bonnaroo and other folks started mixing it up some, that that became a thing. So now it's pretty common, but we stretch it a little farther. And that's kind of like the early days. We were just kind of having a party. Let's potluck party. And we said, "jeez, what can we do with all this energy? Well, let's support our community radio station." So we were just like raising money for KBOO, a local radio station here. And that kind of happened for like six, seven years in that mode.David RobertsThis was in Portland, though.Zale SchoenbornIt did start ... we were out in Portland. We've been in three different sites. So the first site we were out at is Horning's Hideout. So in this KBOO phase, we were out in a place a little bit out in the west side of Portland, and beautiful little kind of reserved acreage in the coastal mountains. We didn't survive there because there was just a lot of neighbor turmoil, and we were the little festival. We were having awesome acts. I think we had one of the last Holy Modal Rounders, true performances by them. Kelly Joe Phelps.It was awesome, but it was just not ... it takes a while. Pickathon is one of those things that we could tell everyone it was going to be awesome. And we, basically, had to have people come and grow by like 10% a year because that's the only way folks would get it. We just didn't do a lot of what we do now because this site we were at, the Horning's Hideout, had a venue, it had power, it had water. It wasn't like an open farm, it was like a pre-set site. But when we got kicked out of there about six years into that, we kind of found a temporary home for a year down in Pudding River, and then eventually found the Pendarvis Farm. And it's in those years where we really grew up.David RobertsAnd what year was that? What was the first Pendarvis Farm year?Zale SchoenbornI think it was 2006.David RobertsSo tell listeners, because this is one of the, I think everyone who's been to Pickathon would agree is one of the most striking features of the festival, is the grounds, itself, Pendarvis Farm itself. So tell us a little bit about how you found that because my understanding is that that area, that farm, is not used for other festivals or gatherings. It's a once a year for Pickathon kind of thing. So how did that come about?Zale SchoenbornThrough friends. So we had somebody that had gotten married there, and they said, "well, you should check this place out." And it was a friend that's married. They weren't doing like weddings at that time. They just had kind of a friend's wedding. And I did. I went to, actually went to one of the ceremonies there and checked it out, the little party they had. And I didn't really know the scale of the property because they hadn't really maintained the back, even right behind their farmhouse. So maybe the first two acres, three acres of it, five acres, I could see, but I didn't know went back a half mileAnd right when we figured out the scale of this and met Scott and Sherry Pendarvis, who are definitely special people in the universe, we hit it off, and the energy Scott and Sherry throw out into the universe is kind of both inviting kind of creativity, but also they want their property to have this place for wildlife and fauna. And so not doing something all the time was, kind of like, part of where they were coming from because they weren't looking at it from, "let's just turn this thing in and turn it around every week." They were like, "let's do something special, and then we don't want it to do because we're going to wreck the wilderness."David RobertsOne event a year, and sort of the rest of the year is like restoration and growing. So I've always wondered, how is there not like a line of people at their door saying, "I love this, I love this area, I love this venue, let us do this too. At least have two festivals a year, or three." It's amazing to me that they've resisted that for all these years.Zale SchoenbornIt's not a business equation for them. They want to live and be sustainable, but it's different than if you were running a business and trying to maximize it. It's just not where they're coming from. And there's a lot of logistics that you have to run through. You have to get permits with the city. So it's a bit of just like the amount of tension you want to try to fight with, like, "how much, what kind of permit do you want to actually run your events?" There's a lot of overhead in that, and I think just us being so large, so impactful, really kind of felt like the right balance for them. And yeah, it's been great.David RobertsSo what do you do? You find this, I mean, basically, huge wildland. It's like pasture and woodland, and you're looking at it, and you're like, "how do I impose a festival on this?" Like, you have to create every path, every stage, every sort of venue. Like, every little bit of the festival has to be imported onto that site because there's nothing pre-existing there. So when you first looked at it, how did your mind not just short circuit? How do you go from nothing to festival accommodations?Zale SchoenbornWell, desperation definitely helps. That is the kind of starter pack for willing to take anything because we didn't have a spot, so we didn't know really what we could do there, how big it could be. And you're 100% right. When you went beyond kind of the main field they had their horses in, it was ten feet rolling, four-inch thick blackberries, choking everything. I mean, it was the craziest amount of blackberries, and they just haven't been tended to for a long time. So it was more than just wild. It was just choked.And there were a couple of roads. There was like an old, there is a second grove forest that was logged, a couple of times, but they logged in the so that road existed. And Scott and Sherry had a couple of other trails that they had already, kind of, throughout the land. But, yeah, about 80% of those trails, Sherry and Scott kind of rolled up their sleeves, and we made, like, a trail system, and we slowly, surely cleared out the forest over, I would say six ... You've been coming for a long time. So were you there when the "Wood Stage"?David RobertsI was trying to figure this out the other day. 2011 was my first year.Zale SchoenbornOkay. So we might have been kind of fully baked, close to it on the trail side, but we were still probably adding trails when you came. It's been a slow process. There's only so much you can do every year.David RobertsYeah. And this is one of the things, I think, that's really striking about the festival when people get there and see it, is that there's now this network of trails through the woods. And not only a network of trails but these campsites have been used now once a year, every year for whatever, decades now. So it's like a little city. It's like a little city in the woods, of little roads and campsites. There's nothing quite like it anywhere else.Zale SchoenbornThat is the truth. When it's all assembled together, we like to call it Big Rock Candy Mountain, where you don't see rough edges, and it just kind of feels like magic. But underneath it, yeah, there's power, there's water, there's security, there's fire, there's dishwashing, there's a site maintenance. There's so much. Everything you would need in the city, you're right on task, right on point. And that took a while to kind of build too, a long while. We had epic mistakes that were so hard to deal with in the festival year, we hit them, and then next year, we would try to address them. So the system looks kind of well-oiled, but it's really a series of just major gas, that are probably really custom to the site. You probably wouldn't make sense everywhere else.David RobertsRight. What were some of the biggest mistakes?Zale SchoenbornThere are so many. I mean, so many. For a while, we just let folks go into the woods and find campsites. And I don't know, actually, if this existed any other festival, but we have this idea now. And the consequences of that was fine when we were small, but as we started to get a little bit more people not familiar with the grounds. There was a situation where people would just go in 100 feet. They wouldn't even try to find a spot that was open, and they'd camp on the side of a hill. And then they tied their tent or something to a tree, and, boy, were they mad. I mean, we just got so many people just having these horrible experiences, or they took them forever to find a spot, and we just felt so bad.David RobertsIt was a little stressful too. There's an anarchy element to it, when everybody's just sort of heads for the woods. You're like, "oh, my God."Zale SchoenbornYeah. What can you do? What can you do? We came up with this idea, and it's really developed pretty significantly into what we call the "front desk for camping, the camp-host." And now they are a crack crew of firefighters now, pretty much, that are amazing. And their job is to kind of like show you on a dry-erase map, they're talking to the crew out in the field, and they're kind of telling you where there's availability and where you should go look. And if you have too much stuff, or you have some trouble carrying your gear, we have like a gear drop service where we kind of put it in a bin, one through five, and it will show up, and you can exchange a tag and get it out in the woods, right? It's actually delivered to you. And that whole experience of getting everyone in comfortably meant to be like a little thing, but it's a humongously important thing.David RobertsI've lived through it a couple of times, and yeah, it's so, so crucial, and it's so amazing how well it works. The very first time I did it, as we were wandering back into the woods looking for a camp spot, the number one thing I thought was, "my God, there are so many ways this could go wrong."Zale SchoenbornYeah.David RobertsThere are so many ways you can f**k this up.Zale SchoenbornYeah. And people get mad when that's happened. That crew is like well-oiled machines. The first year you do any crew, it's kind of clunky, and it kind of works. And then those people stick around, and didn't hate it and liked it, they kind of create their own community, and all of a sudden, before you know, it's like it's always been there. And it works like a charm. And that's where we're at now with that. Some of the big sustainability stories for us, like having so much plastic, it was just crushing to us. We're like, "this is awful. What are we doing?"David RobertsOh, this is great. Well, this was my next question anyway, so this is a perfect segue. So let's jump into this because from the first time I went, the cleanliness, relative to other music festivals I've been to — I think people who go to music festivals at this point are just used to giant, trash cans overflowing with crap everywhere, and like, paper plates, and Styrofoam cups, and just junk everywhere — And this is remarkably absent at Pickathon. But I assume that you didn't start out that way. So I'm sort of wondering, in terms of sustainability, how central was that from the beginning? Or is that something you brought in more over the years?Zale SchoenbornWe always cared, and so we were always thinking about it, but it was as we started to really grow, you start to lose control of telling your friends, "just bring potluck dishes." At some point, to service that many people, you have to start bringing in pallets of water bottles. And everyone likes to charge for water in our world, which was just abhorrent to us, which is I'm like, "how can you charge basic necessities?" Like charging for the bathroom or something?We just kind of grew into it from wanting to do the right thing, but it was just really kind of broke for us in 2009. We're just like, "this is crazy, there's got to be a better way." And there were some festivals in Canada that were trying to do some stuff, like reusable. But we kind of had some very hardcore friends in the recycling world, and we just came up with just a really grand prognosis, "well, what if we do no plastic? Let's do none." And then we're like, "yeah, let's do that."David RobertsIs that why water is free or was water always free?Zale SchoenbornWater is always free, but you had a lot of it we couldn't service. We found some tanks around that time too. We had water tanks, but we still had to have water bottles a lot, everywhere. Or people brought cans. But it was mainly just the spirit, like just having the sense of, "we're going to have like a quarter million cups that we're going to throw away."I think actually in that preceding years, we had this dream of compost, right? So we're compostable cups. We were in there, but Portland being such a sustainable, kind-of-minded, hardcore town, people were calling us out. They're like, "yeah, you guys are not going to compost cups. Nobody wants cups. Yeah, they say they're compostable, but you're going to have to go find a special spot to do that." And we're like, "really?"All of that led to that design. Thinking of, "well, let's just get rid of it." And we had some very good friends that were working for Klean Kanteen at the time, and they were kind of into this idea, and we kind of made up this idea of, "well, what if we have a stainless steel cup, and everybody has to hold on to their cup? And what if we make a silicone ring that you could put around the cup, and a carabiner, and you could clip that cup to your belt so it's not such a pain in the booty to walk around all weekend with it."And we really thought through it, and we ended up kind of really checking with the health department. And we decided, "yeah, let's do this." And all the advice was "make it optional". And we're like, "oh my God. Well, then what's the point? And nobody's going to like this." And sure enough, we kind of threw it out to our crowd, and they loved it. They're like, "should we get rid of plastic?" And it kind of went early days of going viral, but it went viral.David RobertsSo it was the cups first.Zale SchoenbornOh, yeah, that was the big first step. But it worked so well. And it just seemed like, "duh". We were just like kind of like, "of course you should do this. It kind of pays for itself."David RobertsI know. Well, this is the thing. You go to the festival, and you walk around for three days with your cup attached to your belt, filling up free water from all these faucets around you. And you just cannot ever go back to a normal festival, where every time you get thirsty, you have to find somewhere to pay $8 for a small bottle of water. You're just like, "I could never go back to that." It's absolutely primitive. It's one of the many things that seems so obvious once you do it.Zale SchoenbornYes. In Portland, we ruined the ability to charge for water. It was such a blowback for years. I remember MusicFest Northwest was charging for water in those years, right after we started giving it away. And there were people just couldn't, were just up in arms. They're like, "what are you doing?" We're like, "we're sorry. I guess we ruined it. We didn't mean to, but we're going to give it away again. Can't help it."David RobertsAnd so then comes the food. And of course, everybody who goes to Pickathon is very struck by the food system and ends up talking and talking about it. I remember my first year that I experienced it. I went through, what I'm sure everybody goes through the first time they encounter it, which is sort of initially presented with this idea of like, you have a token, you exchange it for a bowl. When you're done with the bowl, you exchange it back for your token. Sounds a little bit complicated. You do it once or twice, and once again you're like, "holy s**t, how does the whole world not work like this? This makes so much sense."So explain kind of the bowl-token system, and who thought of that? And when was the first year that you attempted that?Zale SchoenbornSo 2010 was when we did cups, and that cut our waste stream down by a third. Just that one thing. And we were like, "yeah", but what we kind of noticed is we still had a ton of single-use dishes, and forks, and all kinds of things that were related to just throwing it away. And you couldn't really compost a lot of that. You could say you're going to compost, but a lot of it ended up going to the trash because these compostable things at the time just are not truly, like, just trash compatible.And we just said, "well, God darn it, what can we do? Can we actually go further and have this goal of getting rid of single-use?" And it's still kind of like a North Star because it's almost impossible. But I do believe, from the festival side, we were pretty successful. We said, "you're going to have one bowl, so what is that going to be? And you're going to have one utensil." So we came up with the perfect food bowl being a nine-inch pasta bowl.David RobertsOh, man, I love your freaking bowls. I am not kidding. Me and everyone I know who's been to this festival has at least like a dozen of these bowls, that I've used for years and years. I mean, the bowls that I got the first year I was there are still in my house holding up somehow.Zale SchoenbornAnd the cups. And they're so easy. Going back to your point, these also just pay for themselves. Like, you buy a token, which costs you basically the amount of the bowl. You give that token every time you want to eat to a vendor. They give you food in the bowl. You finish it, you give it to the dishwasher. We wash those dishes all weekend. And then when you're leaving for the weekend, well, you get your token back from the dishwasher. And so you're not carrying your bowl.It's not like the cup was. Like we said, "you can carry the cup. It would be a lot more awkward to carry your own bowl and wash your own food." At the same time, we kind of created a do-your-own washing station, in case people didn't want to use ours. But we weren't going to give you any plates, so you have to bring your own or use ours. And almost everybody uses our token system. And then you're carrying around a token. It's really easy. But the cincher, and the way it kind of really works for everyone, is at the end of the weekend, you'd give that token to the dishwash station, and they give you a clean dish to take home, right? That's it, closes the loop.David RobertsIt also serves as a souvenir, and it's incredibly useful. It is like the Platonic ideal of a dish. It works for everything.Zale SchoenbornSoup? Salad? Really nothing doesn't work in a nine-inch pasta bowl. It's kind of the spork of dishes.David RobertsExactly. So then you eliminated single-use cups in 2010. So maybe 2011, the first year I came, was the first year of the bowl tokens?Zale SchoenbornYeah, you experienced the very first year. And I mean, we had a lot of hiccups in that dishwash system. We engineered a very low-flow special dishwasher, that can run off of water that we had from the farm. And there was a ton of engineering, by a local dishwashing company, to figure out how you could do this and do it on a farm at enough volume to keep up. And it was rough, but I think to the most people, it was a great experience. And it was another just, "Aha", we got another third of our waste stream down in just one year. It was incredible. There's just so much being thrown away.David RobertsWas there any blowback at all? Was there any complaints at all from the attendees?Zale SchoenbornMaybe one or two over like ten years, but it really isn't. It's incredible. And that's what's so astonishing to me is, like, we've been trying to, like, give this away to festivals. Like, "look, it doesn't cost you any money. This actually pays for itself. You should just do it. It's so great."David RobertsBut to your knowledge, like, you've been doing this system now, which has eliminated, or almost eliminated, single-use bowls, and plates, and stuff for over a decade now. Has anyone else picked it up? Has anyone else?Zale SchoenbornI think there's some people trying the cups. There are some spin-off, but I don't think anybody's doing it. There's a lot of optional stuff, a lot of, like, "oh, if you want to do it." And that doesn't work, and you can't predict on how many to buy. And it basically feels like a disaster to the festival organizer because they spend money, and nobody did it, and then nobody really actually, you didn't get any benefit. But the only way this works, and we've told it to everyone, is like: you know how many people are coming, you buy that many plates and dishes, it's not optional.David RobertsWhat's left in the physical waste stream bucket that you're going after?Zale SchoenbornYeah, there is trying to get all of your vendors to bring kegs of things, right, not to bring packaged goods. So we've pushed wineries to put stuff into kegs, and that's now a very common thing people are doing, and it's cheaper for them. So we've been pushing a lot of the people that want to bring us cases of glass and cases of packaged things, that we want to get these things in bulk from you in reusable containers.That took a while to really say "no" to people if they wouldn't do it. They're like, "really, you don't want this free stuff?" We're like, "no, we can get it from somebody else. And we really want to. I think it's good for you too. Like, you can start delivering to bars in this way." And sure enough, Portland, you do see a lot of reusable stuff and things in kegs. And for us, going back to why other festivals aren't doing it, I don't really know. And I think there's a really kind of American sense that you don't want to force people to do something. It would be so inconvenient to have a reusable dish or carry a cup. It's just terrible experience.David RobertsBut it's crazy, like, the audience loves it. It feels like you're doing something. It feels like you're helping, right? It feels like you're involved in something with other people, where you're out of the ordinary.Zale SchoenbornIt doesn't feel bad. That doesn't feel weird, does it?David RobertsNo, it doesn't feel like an imposition. It feels like a fun thing you're doing together. How much physical waste is left?Zale SchoenbornThere's compost from food mostly. So what we still have is people don't eat all their food, and our vendors have some compost waste in our kitchen. So then I think that most of our waste, though, comes from our campers, as much as we ask them to try to. Like, I would say 80% of our waste is people in the campground, and it's hard to police that. So we talk about it, we get folks to kind of be into it. But we are very generous on people being able to come because a lot of families come. A lot of people need to bring a lot of stuff. And what a pain in the butt if we were just policing every little thing.But we've made it so that the festival side, when everybody gets up with a blanket at the end of the night, right, the only thing that's on the ground is blankets that people leave.David RobertsYes, I remember. I mean, I don't know. I keep going on about this. My first year there, it took me a couple of days to even pinpoint it. What is different here? Why does this feel ... and it wasn't until the second or third day, I was like, "oh, there's just no trash. There's just no trash everywhere. I'm so used to trash everywhere."Zale SchoenbornYes.David RobertsIt's really mind-blowing.Zale SchoenbornYeah.David RobertsSo let's talk about some other sustainability aspects then.Zale SchoenbornYeah.David RobertsAnd as you say, one of the other striking things about the festival experience, when you go. is just that it's not mobbed, it's not crowded. Like, you can get food, you can get water, you can see the band. There's never been a band at Pickathon that I've wanted to see that I've not been able to go and get a pretty good view of, just because there's not that many people there. So tell me about sort of, like, the capacity of the space versus the sort of number of people you let in, and kind of what is that calculation, that balance? And how has that evolved over the years?Zale SchoenbornWell, it goes back to as we were starting to grow, and it wasn't just me supporting it off of my day job. And we really started to need to kind of, like, couldn't be just volunteer. The hardest part of a really dreamy idea, a concept, is probably the first couple of years, right? You're doing it off of just vapors. Your family is involved. Everyone's just willing to work for free. No one's like, "it's a dream." The third or fourth year, it's like, "I can't do that. I can't take off two weeks to work. I'm sorry, I can't do it."Things get in the way in life. And so you start to fall back more and more on having to kind of pay for things. And that's usually the place where most of these kind of community events die. Is that kind of hard transition?David RobertsRight? Some professionalization is inevitable.Zale SchoenbornAnd we were hitting it hard. We were hitting it hard. We were like, "what are we going to do?" And we knew from other festivals that our path was going to take us to kind of grow in the capacity. And we just kind of like, deep down, we're like, "god, we don't want to go to that festival." But we didn't have any choice. So we really just threw it out to our audience, and asked them, "we're like, okay, here's what we can do. Do you want us to just keep our ticket prices low and just grow this thing and get it to be like a normal festival you've always been to, or?"David RobertsLet's just pause and make a note here. You could, the space, acreage is huge and could accommodate lots more.Zale SchoenbornAbout 5X, yeah.David RobertsFive times. So what is the ticket sales capped at now?Zale SchoenbornThey're capped at $5,000. Just one of our main fields could probably hold 50,000, right? That's how big our main field is. So it's kind of ridiculous, but it's really awesome.David RobertsThey couldn't all camp, right, though?Zale SchoenbornThey couldn't all camp. But you could run like a day festival. Lots of things about Pickathon wouldn't — the more people would have really ruined camping, too, in terms of being a universal thing you just get for free. People forget that. Most times you pay for camping. But yeah, that was a conscious choice.David RobertsSo you asked the audience, you said, "our expenses are growing. We can either let in a bunch more people or raise ticket prices." When was the first time you sort of presented that to the audience?Zale SchoenbornI think about 2007, somewhere around that Avett Brothers kind of time frame. It was somewhere in that range because we just knew we had to kind of make a choice. We were kind of outgrowing our own infrastructure at the time. The whole farm wasn't there, but we just really needed to know how we were going to do this.And we kind of also had the idea of, way too early it turns out, David, that we should scale by being a filmmaker in digital content. That was part of our sustainability plan. We're like, "okay, we're going to stay small, charge a little bit more, but we're going to create this beautiful film. And we're going to export and infect the world, we're going to bend the arc of pop culture in some weird way." And those are all kind of, like, they were all interconnected at the time, those same ideas.David RobertsSo you first presented that question to the audience in 2007. The audience responds, "please keep it small. We will pay more."Zale Schoenborn100%. 100%. Yes.David RobertsHave you returned to them with that same question, again, since?Zale SchoenbornIt's kind of new. I mean, we have ... people know that about us. We have to often explain it more to people because at this point we are actually moderately priced. There was a point where we were pretty high priced compared to where festivals were. Now, festivals are pretty expensive, so we have a lot less of those questions. And we didn't grow our ticket prices in the same way, that our major ... we play Coachella on TV, right? We are like 1/200th of the size, but we're in the top ten festivals. But it's only by playing that on TV. We're really like 1/100th of the size, or something goofy, right?David RobertsI wonder the equation there, the sort of balance there. At a certain point, making the tickets more expensive will kind of start to make it feel exclusive, right? It will kind of start to price out some families and stuff. I know this is not a science, but is there a point at which you would consider letting in more people, or sort of how do you think about that balance ongoing?Zale SchoenbornWell, we definitely think about it on multiple levels. One, is we don't charge for kids under 13, so they're free.David RobertsAnd there are a bunch, I should say. There are lots of kids.Zale SchoenbornOh yeah, there's like 1,500 kids under twelve and like 1,500 teenagers under 18. It's a lot, and we kind of made that, "Okay, these guys don't count." And it's hard for families to come. So like if you, yes, the tickets are more expensive, and if you want to come as a family, and you're paying that much for your kid to come, it becomes really proactive. So that was some of the equation. We're like, "okay, we're going to charge for the adults. People can bring families. It feels a little more economical." And I don't know where the balance there is. It's still a tough one for us. We keep our prices as aggressively low as we can, but we think about it every year. We're like, "is this too much? Where are we at in this equation?"David RobertsIs the video stuff? I mean, I assume part of the motivation of getting into video and streaming, and all this kind of stuff was to open up a new revenue stream. Has it brought in much money?Zale SchoenbornWell, not really. The most money we ever made is ... we did a concert a day with the Recording Academy right after COVID hit, and we raised several hundred thousand dollars for Music Cares. We were right there with the Grateful Dead, raising money. Pretty hilarious. And that was like a great time. But as you might know, being in the business, things like YouTube and stuff just don't pay that much. And monetization has been off and on. In the balance, it's been a positive because that ability for us to scale and kind of reach the world through our content has worked. 100%. People know us. Some early video of Mac DeMarco peaked before he was ever known.David RobertsReally great video too, I should say. Like, really incredibly, good-looking video.Zale SchoenbornWe care a lot. Yeah. That crew is like 700 people at Pickathon, believe it or not. It's like a movie set, right? The whole thing. And we still believe in it. I mean, I definitely look at it from a sustainability point of view. I am happy keeping it at this scale. We really do want to figure that out. I think the timing is getting more, right, at some point in the future, there is some way that this is going to be scalable. And we spun off a company named FRQNCY to try to make it better. And we've had some success. That stuff is slow, so slow. But we think of it as a sustainable plank, if this is a good way to kind of scale, versus just trying to ruin the land and do other things.David RobertsRight. So, final sustainability thing I want to ask you about, and this, I guess, is probably the other big piece of impact for any festival, is just people coming and going to it, driving to and from it. So what were your first, I mean, I assume you wanted to tackle that from early on. So sort of what's the history of your efforts to reduce that? Just the sort of gas, and traffic, and everything else impact of people driving to and from.Zale SchoenbornWell, a lot of parts of that. So you incentivize it. For us, we knew that people driving to Pickathon was just, "how can we get less cars?" And we've been thinking of this and pushing on it. And for us, where we are kind of now, in 2022, we're like, "okay, it's all about kind of like carbon taxing, right?" Bikes are free. We're committed to that. You don't have to pay a cent ride a bike. It's only 12 miles from Portland. Anybody could ride a bike to Pickathon, like, just do it.David RobertsI should say you organize these sort of bike trains, these bike groups, so people can ride.Zale SchoenbornWe throw your stuff in a moving van, and we go out together, right? And the average biker is pretty sophisticated in Portland. They have their own system, and they can carry a lot of stuff. And there's over, I don't know, I bet you there's 1,500 bikes at Pickathon. I think that's a huge number. And that's level one. And then take a shuttle, take transportation. The max is 5 miles away. So we kind of price that the next level of cost. Like, it's cheap. You can just jump on back and forth, and you're able to come and go anytime you want.And above that ends up being cars. So you want to bring your car for the day or the weekend, you should carpool. We set up carpools. And you just kind of go up the food chain there. Then people want to camp, and there's some car camping, and there's a little bit of RVs. But we just have just a little, and those are kind of like the level of taxing people. We really have been pretty successful at getting folks on bikes.David RobertsOn a big-picture level, do you feel like your efforts in this area have been as successful as your efforts in, like, the solid waste area? I mean, it's really, talk to any urban planner, anybody, anywhere, like, this is the hardest nut to crack of them all. Are you satisfied with how well you've ... ?Zale SchoenbornHonestly, I want to push more. We were toying with no cars, but the American psyche, right? Maybe we'd be just fine. We didn't find it so funny, just like you got kind of like the cups and the plates, but people are traveling from far away, and we just know that it is a tough nut. I think you just nailed it. It's not really something that we can just do and make it an easy experience for everyone. Like plates and cups.David RobertsYeah.Zale SchoenbornBut there is one really big thing we're doing this year, that I don't know if you know about, that is kind of like going to probably have the same level of impact, sustainability-wise, as all the things we've done. We've been talking about. We redesigned the festival in a way that I'm we're really excited about. I don't know if you know much about that.David RobertsOnly what's come out on the emails, and I haven't looked that closely. Just to help listeners, sort of the way it was, and has been for the last decade, is there's sort of these two big fields with big stages, and then there's like a barn and a little shack here. And then there's a stage off in the woods, the "Wood Stage". Just legendary, amazing place. Little sort of stages scattered here and there that have people playing in sort of staggered timing. But before we get to this year, let's just briefly talk about the last few years, which have been difficult for literally everyone in the world, but for you as well.So the worst thing was in 2019, Pickathon was very well known for a long time for having these big sails, kind of big pieces of fabric hovering up in the sky, kind of blowing in the wind, sheltering you from the sun. Very visually striking. In 2019, there was an accident. Two people died trying to take those down. And that was traumatic and involved some fines, and some scrutiny. And then the next year got canceled, I think. And then the year after that got canceled because of the pandemic. So it's been a real turbulent last few years.Talk a little bit about how you got through that because I, around this sort of 2020 years, was hearing rumors that it might be over that Pickathon might be over, that Pendarvis' farm might not be open to having it anymore. So just, I'm sure you could talk for hours about this.Zale SchoenbornYou forgot that thousands of houses have moved into our parking lot too, right?David RobertsYes. And development is sort of encroaching on the farm. So give us a sort of capsule summary of the last few years, kind of the turbulence, how you've gotten through it, and how you're feeling about this year being kind of a renewal.Zale SchoenbornYeah, it was a lot of grief and trauma. So our accident was kind of, like, it happened in a way that was just really tragic. Total accident. Just one of those things that experienced people with very little, ten minutes left in the last day, and an accident happened, and it was just awful. And basically, we were in a place where we were just rallying around our community, trying to understand how to do grief and trauma. And that was like a very kind of, in a weird way, brought a lot of people together, in a good way, even though we were really just kind of having this moment.And it made us think. We didn't know exactly what, we were trying to, kind of thought, "okay, we're going to again eliminate a lot of this risk. We're just not going to build the kind of things that are here." We've been doing this for twelve years, and we kind of felt really good about our systems, and we just decided ... and that was like a pretty major thing for us. But we didn't quite get to the point of being able to execute on it because of COVID. COVID hit. And that just really felt like a gut punch not just to us, but to the entire creative world. And we were just ... "how in the world are we going to survive?"And that's when we pivoted to the kind of concert today, helping Music Cares. Because we're like, "okay, we got these people," and then some of the PvP. And then we started doing a lot of advocacy work with NIVA, National Independent Venue Association, and became kind of a really force to be reckoned with. And generally, that lobbying effort to support kind of independent venues was one of the best things that happened out of, in terms of organizing in the pandemic. It saved the entire industry, including us.David RobertsWere the rumors I was hearing just rumors or was there a time when you seriously had doubt about whether the whole thing would move forward?Zale SchoenbornThey never really know ... the combination ... We're not in a solid ground because of — not because of the farm. I mean, the farm is great. It's parking, and there's a lot of challenges. The farm is more valuable to become into houses. If it was a normal set of landowners, they would flip this thing, and the whole farm would be mowed down for houses, like every tree. That's what 95% of the universe would do in their situation. Because it totally is ready to go. Shovel ready to be giant, giant development.David RobertsSo it's just the Pendarvis' themselves, really, their personage.Zale SchoenbornYeah, it's them and us willing to kind of try to adapt. We could also kind of throw in the towel, like, "no way, we are not up for another 'figure it out year'." Because it's like doing it over every time, and you're like, "wow, it's a lot of energy, it's a lot of work." And we knew that in these kind of last several years. If we came back after 2020, it's going to be a lot of work. Okay, "well, let's come back in 2021. It's going to be a lot of work. Okay, I can't do that.""Let's go back in 2022." And so here we are. And it's even more work because some of the plans that we built for the parking lots, now they have houses in them, and we have a different lot for parking. And we're surveying it, and mapping it, and doing all kinds of things that are kind of ridiculous for a weekend event. But we're restoring and removing blackberries. Eventually, this whole thing is going to be mowed down and turned into houses. It's the last remnants of a golf course that we're using this year.David RobertsIs this a long-term worry? I mean, are you going to get closed out of parking entirely? Eventually?Zale SchoenbornWe have some plans, hopefully, for the next three to five years, I think is our hope. That's good news, but I can't promise. I think all we know is we're on this year, and the intention is there. Pickathon, I think is strong enough. It should be able to last. We don't know if our future will be there, but I think there's a path for at least three to five more years. And we're looking to try to come up with something even longer. But it would really be nice, David, if it was just, like, set, and we could just operationally get better.David RobertsYes, it would be nice if the fundamentals weren't constantly shifting.Zale SchoenbornYes, I had little joke with people. I was like, "man, wouldn't it be great if we just had our businesses just running and not reinventing itself every time?" Maybe it wouldn't be as much fun, but sometimes you just think about that.David RobertsWell, all that said, then you're coming back here in 2022, August 5th-7th, approaching this year, you sort of had a little bit of a blank slate because you had a couple of years off. So what's the new thinking this year in terms of kind of the grounds itself, and rearranging, you're rearranging the physical space itself into what you're calling neighborhoods. So a) what does that mean? And b) what does it mean for sustainability? In what way is it more sustainable?Zale SchoenbornThe big takeaway for us was, "Okay, this 2020 hindsight, here," when we were just sitting around talking with kids, in the music, and thinking about it, you start wandering. You're like, "well, if you were going to redo it, how would you do it?" And so one of the big things you mentioned, you said you really love the "Wood Stage". And that "Wood Stage" was kind of a big part of how we came to an "aha". There's this stage that David mentioned. "Wood Stage" is essentially a permaculture artist town Mark Lakeman built. We harvest sticks from the forest, and we make a sculptural stage.David RobertsIt's like a natural amphitheater that it's sitting in. And it looks, to all appearances, like a stage grew out of the woods there.Zale SchoenbornYes, and we're rebuilding this year in a really very awesome, sculptural way. But yeah, that stage wasn't a big lift for us. We built that every couple of years. We had to clean it up and repair it. But in essence, the other stages we built, which were impressive. I mean, the Mount Hood stage you mentioned, which was one of the larger temporary tension fabric structures in the world. And the "Tree Line Stage", which is a very kind of elaborate project where we try to reuse materials, and they have to go somewhere else. Diversion architecture, we call it. It's a whole nother sustainability part of Pickathon.And they're wonderful. But no matter how much placemaking, I call it placemaking, people love the "Wood Stage", no matter how grand, no matter how big it was. And the "aha" was like, "nature kicks your butt, kicks everyone's ass, you just can't beat nature. So like, well, why try? Why don't we go the opposite way, and rethink about this entire property, and say there's so many beautiful places on this farm? Why don't we just think about those beautiful places as settings, and then kind of come in, and vibe, and add things to those places? And what if we go a little bit further? What if we think about times of day and places? What if you, in the daytime, when it's 100 degrees in Oregon, in the summer, what if we're in the woods, and there's not as many people in the morning?"So we can be a little more intimate and kind of keep the energy up, and we can migrate back and forth between spaces that are shaded in the woods. And then as the day goes on and the sun starts to set, we can kind of move out into bigger fields. And as it sets a little further, we can move out into the, finally, the biggest fields. And that's what we did. We're like, "oh my God. Aha! This is how you should build a festival." And if you think about it, it's like a bunch of wood stages. That's kind of the vibe we're trying to create this year.David RobertsThere so there are several brand-new stages, areas, places this yearZale SchoenbornThis year neighborhoods we're calling them. And they are kind of zones that are natural zones, like they're a bowl or a hill. There's some geographical thing on the farm, and we, basically, are kind of connecting those all together. And the carbon footprint result of that is, we haven't done the math, but it's many, many factors lower because you're now not needing all this incredible heavy equipment. You're not trucking tons and tons of materials across the universe to give them to you. You're not spending all of this energy and gas to kind of build things that have to be quickly torn down. You're just dramatically reducing what it takes to put on something, even at the scale of Pickathon.David RobertsSo some of these new stages are going to be like the wood stage, in that they just stay there?Zale SchoenbornNo, mostly in the shade side. So, like, when we built the "Tree Line Stage" or the "Main Stage", the "Main Stage", we built a lot of that sales for shade. We don't need shade because we're using nature. We don't need to use giant settings. The way we oriented the "Tree Line Stage", which was a stage that's built by grad students at the Portland state every year, they built it out of pallets, out of concrete tubes, out of 2x4s. And after they were done.David RobertsVery visually striking.Zale SchoenbornYeah, after the festival, it went back to become 2x4s.One year, it was built out of a kit of parts that became a homeless village for veterans in Clackamas County. So pretty cool ideas there, too. But the scale of those kind of settings, we built because behind them, there really wasn't anything to look at. So you're building these kind of places. We're flipping that, and now you're looking at trees like you said, or the farm setting. And I think it's just better. Like nature kicks butt. Like it kicks ass. Like, why, you try to, why fight it? Just lean into it.David RobertsYou got, what, like a week and a half, a week and a half to go? Are neighborhoods in place? Have you had a chance to sort of walk around and experience these yet? Because this will be brand new to the audience.Zale SchoenbornYeah, I mean, there's another whole factor we're doing that's new as part of that because we knew we couldn't pull all this off, so we kind of divided all of these neighborhoods and went out to the community and kind of presented like, "okay, each of these neighborhoods is a design-build challenge." And we went out and tried to recruit kind of a combination of architects, designers, project managers, builders.David RobertsOh, interesting.Zale SchoenbornFor each one of these teams, and then kind of treat it like their own little Burning Man. Not just because people build these elaborate things in Burning Man, I'm kind of using that. But it's like the PSU idea, where we found a community that could, every year, design and build. And those grad students, it works because it's a class and because those grad students actually get amazing jobs after they do this project because everyone — they've won National Architecture Awards. We're like, "well, we can figure out other sustainable models for communities on why they'd want to do a design-build." And it turns out there are many. So we have like 15 of these incredible collections of design-build teams, and they are all spinning things up that are to die for.David RobertsSo each neighborhood has a team in charge of it? A team that owns it?Zale SchoenbornYes. It's going to be incredible.David RobertsOh man, I can't wait to see that.Zale SchoenbornI think it'll be awesome. A lot of people have been manufacturing and building, and a lot of this material is going to be reused again somewhere else. So it's very awesome. I know that this approach to kind of doing festivals, and kind of involving community, and kind of creating all these other tie-ins. How can you do this in a way that all these teams, it's a sustainable process, they'll do it year after year? There's a lot to be mine there, and maybe we can talk about on your next podcast.David RobertsOne thing that's striking about this, and all the other things you talk about, is just how bespoke it is, and, thus, how much care and investment it requires. This is not something — this is not something a big company could buy, and scale up, and make lots of money off, right? This is just a high touch ... and that's just not something that makes pure business sense. It just doesn't.Zale SchoenbornYes, it doesn't. We like to call it — the whole thing is completely irrational. Absolutely.David RobertsBut it's commensurately beloved.Zale SchoenbornYeah, well, it is that kind of underlying dream sandbox. We often say, like, "the Olympics of what everyone does," come do something at Pickathon. It's probably like, what, "you do what you do, but do the Olympic version of what you do," and that works. And you kind of like, getting folks to kind of have that break in life where they do something very much what they do, whether carpenter or something, but they're doing something in this context where it just has such a big impact. It's just a really rewarding thing for everyone.David RobertsYeah, and you can see people enjoying it, and using it, and loving it. It's a very direct feedback loop there.Zale SchoenbornAnd in many cases, it furthers their professional life, too. So that's where it all ties back together. Like sometimes they show off, and they're recognized, and their connections are made, and businesses grow. And so we take a small band that ... Pickathon is known for discovery. We are known for kind of taking bands to the next level. And we've been saying that this is great music, and having faith, and you should just book good music, and that's all that matters. It doesn't need to be known.David RobertsI will say, and this is not true of many festivals, I have discovered lots of new bands through Pickathon. Like, it's genuinely the "not quite, just about to break" bands, you know what I mean?Zale SchoenbornIf you lived here, David, we'd be hanging out playing cornhole, and joking, and debating music. I could tell, It's a very open source idea where you just kind of dig into communities of music, and whatever is like the hot red, red hot, like, Elvis kind of movement of that scene, probably isn't well known yet to a lot of people, but the people who really care, this is it. And you listen to those people. Typically, you don't even have to be a fan of that style. You literally put that next to ... When you experience it, you'll be like, "oh my God, that's amazing."David RobertsYes, I've had many of those experiences over the years, and I've kept you for too long. But the one final thing to say about the music, too, is I think Pickathon has become somewhat legendary in that bands love it. And you can tell, by the time they play, they've usually been there for a day or two, and they're like, "man". They love the bamboo bowls, and they've just been, like, wandering around, chilling out. It's hard to put into words, but I've been to a lot of music shows, a lot of music festivals. I've seen a lot of live music. And you can tell when a band is, like, relaxed and into it.Zale SchoenbornThey're on vacation. We get a lot of bands who just know that they're going to come and chill out or be fans of other ones. It's really easy for us now. The music is really easy. We are sought out by musicians and by agents.David RobertsI'm sure in the grind of touring life, like, going to Pickathon for two or three days is like, feels like a vacation from work.Zale SchoenbornAnd, like, again, that sustainable thing. We hope to kind of bend pop culture in a weird way with good music. I mean, artists that play Pickathon, immediately, their lives change. They bump up several places in what they can do. And that's so awesome, right? We can take all this energy that's been focused back to kind of making them not only have a good time but actually their life changed, right after.David RobertsAnd so this year, the big, I guess the big two artists, insofar as you'd called them, headliners, are Valerie June and Wet Leg, which I feel like is a good snapshot of kind of.Zale SchoenbornOh, and JGZA. Don't forget GZA.David RobertsRight. The the diversity involved. Alright, well, I've kept you forever. I mean, it's probably obvious that I'm a fanboy in this.Zale SchoenbornAre you coming this year, David?David RobertsI actually am.Zale SchoenbornOkay, good. We will continue this conversation in person.David RobertsYeah, exactly. I'd love to hang out once we get there, but sort of the final question. Obviously, your priority in the years going forward is just to help things survive and fight to preserve a little bit of parking against the incoming development. But in terms of sustainability, in particular, is there a next big item on the list, or is it mostly at this point just about kind of buffing and dialing in the pieces that are in place?Zale SchoenbornI can't think past this year. We have to land this ginormous spaceship on a dime. Where we leave ... the ambition we have this year is kind of staggering, in terms of like taking all these teams. So something will go wrong, and then that will be the kind of ... or some things will go really right, and we'll build on them. I don't know. I hope what we are thinking about is, "this is amazing," and I think it is. And it's going to be the first year a lot of teams kind of hit their mark. If you remember way back when, when the PSU started, they had a pretty moderate pallet stage. You remember that stage?David RobertsYeah, I remember the first one.Zale SchoenbornAnd it grew and grew in ambition. I think if we get this right, all of these teams are going to kind of have that same arc. Whatever they do this year is just a tiny taste of what is to come.David RobertsAnd we should say that for listeners who can't attend the festival, which I assume is probably most of them at this point, that the whole thing is live-streamed.Zale SchoenbornYeah.David RobertsYou can buy a live-stream ticket? How does that work?Zale SchoenbornYou can go to FRQNCY.live. There's no vowels in that F-R-Q-N-C-Y-.live, or go to Pickathon, and you'll see a Pickathon livestream. You can basically get access to every show or kind of like a curated broadcast, where we kind of pick and move around different stages. There's a couple of ways you can do it, and it's great that you can kind of see the 700 people working hard in person on the Internet. We take it very seriously. As you know, David, we're big film buffs.David RobertsAwesome. So people can at least, maybe, drop in and see a little bit, see what these neighborhoods look like, even if they can't make it out.Zale SchoenbornIt'll be a wonderful experience.David RobertsAwesome, Zale. Well, thanks for taking all this time, and I will see you in a couple of weeks. Maybe we can play some cornhole.Zale SchoenbornOkay, take care.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. 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, 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 true on legislation, and we hope and pray, best wishes, for that legislation because we need prayers. Thoughts and prayers. So I think one of the things, when people have talked about the Climate Emergency in the last few days, is this fear that it is to the exclusion of everything else. And that is absolutely, from our point of view, not true. We would want every single agency, every single executive power within President Biden's quiver to essentially be utilized.And this also is not something that we advocate only at this moment in time when legislation is a question mark. It is something that we have always felt every single presidency should begin with, in concert, working as hard as possible because we have truly the emergency of our planet on our hands right now. So every single tool available to us should be at least considered and considered wisely, thoughtfully, with the understanding that we need kind of everything that we can get right now and everything to fight this thing. So giving kind of that overview of our standpoint on all of this. So a Climate Emergency Declaration would have two different uses. On a very broad level, a Climate Emergency Declaration, that's paired with bold actions, would be a clarion call that we need right now for climate leadership.I think the picture that you painted is absolutely a picture of despair, and that is where so many people are right now. And I think there is a real need for the president to not only acknowledge that we are in a Climate Emergency, but really to seize that mantle of leadership right now and say, "hey, we're in a Climate Emergency, and I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that, within my administration, we combat this as hard as possible. Because it is unacceptable that there are 100 million people in this country right now on high heat alert, that the world is literally burning with 80 wildfires, and that so many communities in this country are experiencing this not just today, but from the fossil fuel economy violence of the past decades."So that, on a leadership, level is so important to unlock and unleash the momentum of everybody, to put out what they can to fight this, whether it is state' local governments, as well as other global leaders. Which is something we can totally talk about from an international standpoint, and that's a lot of what we work on as well. Separately, the Climate Emergency Declaration would potentially unlock emergency powers. Emergency powers are a whole subset of executive powers that are just part of the greater suite of executive powers that we have been advocating for decades, essentially, at the Center.But to unpack the subset of emergency powers, Maya and I went through the emergency power statutes, which include four different statutes: the first is a National Emergencies Act, the second would be the Defense Production Act, the third is the Stafford Act, and the fourth is the Public Health and Services Act.David RobertsThe "declaration of emergency", itself, is the power to do that under one of those particular laws. Like what is the authorizing sort of statute to the declaration, itself?Jean SuYeah, I think when people say, "declaration of a Climate Emergency," that could be interpreted in different ways, but one of them is the National Emergencies Act. So under the National Emergencies Act, the President would declare an emergency, and that essentially triggers 130 some statutory authorities. But he has to actually pull something specific when he declares the emergency if he wants it to actually have some type of action. So under that framework of 130 so statutory authorities, we've identified some of the most climate-progressive ones that he could potentially think about when he would pull the National Emergencies Act. And so the top ones of that, for us, would be looking at reinstating the Crude Oil Export Ban, that was basically overturned after 40 years in 2015. That would be the equivalent of shuttering 42 coal plants.David RobertsTo bring in the devil's advocate thing, the sort of traditional, I think, conventional wisdom here is if you cut off crude exports from the US, you're going to suppress US production a little bit, but other countries will just ramp up their production to make it up. And other countries often have dirtier production than we do, so wouldn't that reduction in greenhouse gases be a little bit of an illusion? I mean, wouldn't that just be a reduction of our greenhouse gases but not overall greenhouse gases? How do you address that common argument?Jean SuYeah, so that argument has been countered by folks at SEI, Stockholm Economics Institute, and it's not the case. They find that if you do shut down oil production here in the United States, or other parts of the world, it won't necessarily mean that it will pop up somewhere else. And so the analysis that we've seen, with the 42 coal plants analysis, takes that into account, and that's that. So I think the other part of this though is looking at, I think, that gets into greater supply-side arguments, which we can totally go into right now because that is a common break and debate.David RobertsA lot of these executive moves you're talking about have to do with ...Jean Susupply-side work.David Robertssupply-side, slowing or cutting off either domestic production or exporting. So might as well get into it now. Why should we think that the US cutting back on production or exporting would have this global effect?Maya Golden-KrasnerWell, first of all, as Jean says, there's been significant research that shows that ending production or slowing down production, actually results in a net global reduction of use of fossil fuels. So it's not actually true that for every barrel that we stop producing, we import another barrel from somewhere else, or we need another barrel from somewhere else. That's not actually how it works. Fossil fuel supply actually helps drive demand. So from our perspective, climate policy has to address both. And we've really spent decades trying to reduce fossil demand, and, really, our policies have focused on that critically but not supply.And here we are in today's climate crisis, and it's a policy failure that we can avoid by reducing supply and demand at the same time. On top of that, we have enough oil, in our existing leases right now, to meet demand. And at the same time, there's already way more fossil fuels under production and planned, and the fossil fuel industry is planning huge projects going way into the future, that can safely be burned to stay under 1.5 degrees Celsius.David RobertsYes, this is a crucial background fact. I just want to put an exclamation point next to it. I feel like listeners to this podcast probably know this by now, but at this point, it's been analyzed up and down a million ways. If current oil and gas fields produce to their capacity, we're going to shoot past 1.5, never mind exploiting new oil and gas fields, right? So when it comes to oil and gas, there's no margin left, really.Maya Golden-KrasnerExactly. So climate science is showing us that 40% of already producing deposits have to stay in the ground to avoid the catastrophes of 1.5, just as you said. But at the same time, we've got fossil fuel companies who, there's a new study out showing they make $3 billion a day and pure profit. And so they're looking at undeveloped reserves of up to, according to the study, $100 trillion. And so they're not giving up. They're going to push, and push, and push, and push. So we we can't ignore that they've got money to, you know, buy politicians, to file lawsuits. They're constantly pushing and pushing. And so our climate policy can't just focus on renewables, without pushing back on what the fossil fuel industry is doing.David RobertsBut let me toss in here, and we're getting ahead of ourselves again into the international stuff, but it seems notable that there are other sort of analogous wealthy democracies, like Norway or whatever, that are doing a lot on climate change, on the demand-side, but they aren't particularly cutting back on production. Would we be the first to really grab onto this? Or is there an example of another country that is attacking both demand and supply?Jean SuYeah, so there's a new — I think you've nailed whatever the expression is. But that is essentially the problem that we face, right? There are hypocritical policies. Saudi Arabia actually exports a ton of their oil because they profiteer more from that and also are electrifying themselves using solar.David RobertsYou say it's hypocritical, but it's the standard. I mean, that's the standard among oil and gas-producing countries.Jean SuAbsolutely. And it is the standard that has gotten us to the Climate Emergency and the climate catastrophe that we are here right now. The US has an "exceptionalism" reputation, that it feels and fuels itself with. And I think we have been so furious at urging these movers, and these oil and gas producers, to change their tune. We absolutely have to because that is what science is telling us to do.And so, yes. Would the US be one of the first to do it? Absolutely. Would that be a game changer and a signal to the rest of the world? Absolutely. Is that what we need to actually keep our emissions down? Absolutely. And so these are the hard choices that need to be made in a political atmosphere where fossil fuel companies really have such deep, deep influence on every single part of our government in these choices.Maya Golden-KrasnerThere's no world in which we are safe, in which the US continues to produce oil, and then it exports it like the other, like Australia. We can't continue to extract fossil fuels and send it away to be burned elsewhere or to be turned into petrochemicals or plastics, which are very toxic processes, themselves, that also pollute the planet.David RobertsWell I mean the conventional wisdom, the conventional approach, is just all the countries of the world join hands and reduce their demand in concert, and that is what ends up reducing supply because there's no demand for the supply. You just don't buy that model.Jean SuWell, I mean, we've been going to the Climate Change Negotiations for the last 17 years, and that was the initial idea about the treaty right now. When the Paris Agreement, and all of its predecessors, were crafted, none of them had the word fossil fuels in them, and that is purposeful. It is purposeful that all of those "climate change cops" have been sponsored by fossil fuel companies. It was only last year, for the first time, that we finally got fossil fuels into the decision that came out of last year, and that is after decades of this type of agreement system.But one thing I did want to get back to you Dave is that there is a new alliance called the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, and this actually is set up to get first movers on their way. It is led by Costa Rica and Denmark. So small countries, but these are countries actually trying to deal with both supply and demand at the same time. And they are pushing different states, like California, et cetera, to basically get on that same train. And that's the type of leadership that we need right now. And, yes, would it be unprecedented if the American government did that? Absolutely, and that would be the shining star of what we need right now for the climate catastrophe.David RobertsAll right, well we're going to return to the political economy questions later. I feel like I jumped ahead too much. We had the whole discussion about supply side, but let's return to the power. So the first thing Biden could do, that would be enabled by the emergency declaration, is reimpose the Crude Oil Export Ban. So let's go down the list again. What's number two?Jean SuSo number two, well, it depends on where you want to go, whether you want to go finance or renewables, but let's go for finance because a lot of people are interested in this one. There is another power that is the most frequently invoked NEA power, and that is with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which we belovedly call IEEPA. And IEEPA is evoked every single year by a president at least once. We've seen it this year already with the ban on Russian imports of oil, by President Biden, and it essentially allows the president to control commerce when it's necessary to deal with a threat, with an outstanding threat.So one way that we think that he could use this on fossil fuels, or climate in general, is that he could actually stop the hundreds of billions of dollars every year that leave from the United States private institutions towards fossil fuel projects abroad. And the single analysis that has — basically, this is as much as public organizations have been able to garner, is that in 2020, 16 American financial institutions shipped out $470 billion to fund twelve fossil fuel expansions, that are going to be emitting 175 gigatons of additional CO2, which is actually almost half of our remaining carbon budget.David RobertsSo this would be literally, like, if he did this, that would render those loans, like, literally illegal? I guess I'm wondering about sort of the enforcement or the legal regime around them. If he just declares it a Climate Emergency, declares this, you know, no more financing of international fossil fuel projects. And then, you know, some bank sends a loan somewhere. Like, do you send the police to the to the bank? How does that work?Jean SuYes, correct. So they are sanctions. And it has been done on individuals in the United States. It has been done on companies during the Apartheid era in South Africa if anybody was sending finance goods over to South Africa. Yes, if you do that, you will be sought after. That is against the law.Right now, it's in place for financing Russian businesses, for example. And it's under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.David RobertsRight. And so has there been a case of that being enforced? You have a case of like a company getting dinged for doing that? Or is it mostly obeyed?Jean SuIt is obeyed, and there are sanctions on those who violate it. And when I say this is normal, this is the most normal emergency power that is used every single year. So there are violations, and there's general compliance as well.David RobertsSo there's an infrastructure set up to enforce it.Jean SuThere is a very robust infrastructure with IEEPA to set this up.Maya Golden-KrasnerIt's been in place for, also, for transactions with Iran and fossil fuel financing as well. So often it's used for particular countries, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.David RobertsIs it fair to say that this would be the most sweeping use of it? Because no financing fossil fuels is pretty big sweeping prohibition. Is this notably more ambitious than those previous uses of it? Or do you think it's sort of in keeping?Jean SuI think it's in keeping to a certain extent because it's just, in terms of the amount of dollars, I think that we've, for certain countries that are sanctioned, for example, I think there are billions of dollars involved with that. But I do think this is keeping consistent with the Biden administration's own view on finance towards fossil fuels. They themselves, last year at the Climate Change Conference, did a historical pledge to stop putting public finance into fossil fuel. That was laudatory, and that was a great thing that Secretary Kerry has committed to do. So this would be an extension of that principle towards our private financial institutions.And I think, given our different discussions that we've had with people on the Hill, this one is also politically savory, and it's definitely pulling finance from fossil fuel projects. Really kind of looking into our own footprint, into the tremendous and dirty emissions that are happening abroad, is just common sense. And so I think that this one, in particular, is a powerful and important tool under the NEA.David RobertsGot it. Let's turn to boosting domestic production, which you have enabled by the Defense Production Act. So maybe just tell us a little bit, like, what is the Defense Production Act? And I know that Biden has invoked that, he's done some stuff under that act. So maybe just tell us like what he's done and then sort of like the further steps you would like to see.Jean SuSo the Defense Production Act is my favorite statute of all time. I have a very sweet spot in my heart for the Defense Production Act.So the Defense Production Act. It was made during wartime, during the Korean War. And what it essentially allows it to do is it tells the president, allows the president to identify those materials and goods that we need right now for our national defense. And it allows him to marshal industry, as well as other important stakeholders, bring them to a table and say, "this is what we're missing, this is what we need to produce, can you produce it? And we will buy it from you or figure out other ways for it to basically come to fruition."So in a wartime setting, it has been used for, "we need to manufacture tanks, so vehicle makers please start making tanks. We need to manufacture artillery, so hunting gun makers start making that. And we will give you grants, loans, loan guarantees, and/or purchase agreements from the government to make sure that you feel secure as a company to make those types of moves." And the other thing it does is that industry, therefore, is working together, so it shields all of these players from working together, from antitrust laws. So it is really an all-hands-on approach to critical materials.And one of the most incredible parts about the Defense Production Act, if you read it from front to end, is that there is a whole section about energy, and there's a particular section about solar, wind, and geothermal as critical materials for our energy security.David RobertsNo kidding. When was it written?Jean Su50s.David RobertsNo kidding. Quite a bit of foresight there.Jean SuThere is incredible foresight with this act. The way that we've thought about it through the climate lens is through the "clean energy and electric vehicle" lens. The US does not have the manufacturing base, right now, for those types of technologies. And in fact, we're seeing those technologies be made, in some instances, with Uyghur slave labor and other slave labor around the world. So what the Biden administration did, which was such a sea change in how it is approaching climate change, is that it invoked the Defense Production Act to manufacture clean energy technologies. And these included solar, it includes heat pumps, insulation, and transformers. And these are all critical technologies that we need for our national defense against the Climate Emergency. And we were also particularly heartened to see some justice aspects, that we had outlined in our blueprint, that were also picked up.So when we talk about manufacturing, well, the question is where, where should it be manufactured?David RobertsRight.Jean SuThis is a place where the Biden administration can intentionally choose areas that have been economically blighted. They can with economic and environmental justice kind of communities as well, so that they are filling their J40 aspects and really choose — and also with Midterms coming up — choose places that may be helpful in terms of making sure that Democrats stay in power. So where manufacturing occurs actually can have incredible benefits, especially from a justice lens of where it needs to go and generate jobs.David RobertsSo there are factories producing solar panels now in response to this and receiving government grants in response? Is this happening?Maya Golden-KrasnerSoon, hopefully.Jean SuThis was just passed in June, and they are just getting their roundtables together now. It's already the end of July. And so we would say, "Biden administration, please act with more haste, and speed it up." But there is a limiting factor here, and the limiting factor is finance. And there is a DPA fund out there, $10 billion just got injected for COVID purposes for the Defense Production Act to use. So we actually have seen Congress, this Congress actually, like exact Congress give $10 billion to the Defense Production Act when Biden has pulled it for COVID.We would obviously are trying to get as much from this Congress, now, for these new clean energy funds. We were successful recently in getting $105 million extra from the House, and that is now being considered by the Senate. But that certainly isn't enough.David RobertsSo to be clear, so the money that the government would use to incentivize the people doing the manufacturing in response to this has to be appropriated by Congress.Jean SuSo, traditionally, it has been appropriated by Congress. There are other ways though, with existing budgets out there in the federal government, that you could actually achieve the same effect. So for example, we have a $650 billion federal procurement fund every year, and the Biden administration has put out an executive order saying, "please buy clean energy when you can." One way that manufacturers can actually feel more secure right now in making this transition, is if we use those federal dollars and say, "hey, we commit to buying your goods as part of these Defense Production Act clean energy orders." That is one way that you compare an existing budgetary amount with these DPA clean energy orders.And there are other programs as well like WAP, the Weatherization Assistance Program, the LIHEAP Program. And we would argue there's other kind of interesting ways to also leverage FEMA funds towards buying and purchasing, and deploying renewable energy as well as climate funds. We actually have technical assistance commitments that we've made abroad, where we could actually purchase American-made pieces and ship them abroad as well.David RobertsIntuitively, it seems to me that the amount of money necessary to create a domestic manufacturing industry, or several actually, is just huge. I guess, just intuitively, that's a huge amount of money. And it's hard for me to believe that the government, even if it scrapes together all these piles of money, is really going to have just kind of the brute force cash to do that. Is this more of like a seeding or instigating kind of thing, like trying to channel private funds?Jean SuAbsolutely. So the Defense Production Act is just a jump-starter. We cannot afford to pay for every single solar panel out there. Absolutely. So what we're looking for with the Defense Production Act is just that amount of investment that is enough to make manufacturers change, expand their factories, and actually start on new pieces of technology that are necessary. We already have fledgling pieces of this all over the country, and right now, it's just about boosting it and making them understand that this market is burgeoning. And so we're not looking for the full. I mean, we can't even get what we need for BBBA. So we just need that seed funding and that investment funding. And it doesn't have to just come from the federal government.We have state government surpluses. My gosh, California government is as a huge surplus right now. We have state governments, we have private companies, first movers like Apple and Google, et cetera, who also may be interested in putting their private capital and committing to purchasing non-Uyghur labor clean energy goods. So there's a lot of potential in what the DPA can do, and we're really heartened to see that in the clean energy orders. He can also further expand that to other technologies that we would need. For example, in the transportation sector with electric vehicles, E-buses, and charging stations.Maya Golden-KrasnerOne of the other helpful things, too, is that it can bring together industry all along the supply chain. So if there are supply chain disruptions or things that are also blocking the ability of companies to manufacture things here, it's a way to bring everybody together to figure out, "how can we coordinate, how can we unblock that issue too?" And there's also other financing mechanisms, like Jean was saying, and there's like public-private partnerships and loan programs through various departments of the federal government, too. So it's just really a great way to coordinate and be creative, in terms of coming up with funding.David RobertsOkay, so far we have halting crude oil exports, cutting off private funding for international fossil fuel projects. We have marshalling domestic manufacturing industries for clean energy technologies. Maya, is there a number four that you want to get in a mention of here.Maya Golden-KrasnerWell, we can get into some of the production side issues. So, for example, we can suspend production on fossil fuel leases in our oceans, especially the Gulf and the Arctic under OCSLA.David RobertsUnder which now?Jean SuIt's the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.Maya Golden-KrasnerExactly. And so that's kind of a major one for fossil fuel production.David RobertsYou mean that would stop all — what does that mean? How big of a piece is that? How much on the Outer Continental Shelf is going on now? And how much would be cut off by that?Maya Golden-KrasnerWell, there's a significant amount that is going on, especially in the Gulf, and they're trying to open up more in Alaska. So the idea would be to suspend that production, probably, while they come up with a plan for kind of a managed decline of all production in our federal waters and our public land. So our Emergency Report is actually a companion piece, as Jean was mentioning at the beginning, to an original report from 2019 that was about Biden's ordinary executive powers. So the idea would be to suspend the leases offshore, and then come up with a plan for a kind of managed, thoughtful, intentional ramp down of our production and public lands and waters.David RobertsBut didn't Biden just recently, notably, not do that?Maya Golden-KrasnerHe did recently, notably, not do that, which has been really frustrating because one of the reasons that we'd like to see him do this Climate Emergency Declaration is to really focus his policy. So he came into office saying, "no new leases, no new leases." And then Russia invaded Ukraine, and gas prices went up. He's like, "oh wait, whoops, maybe I'll do some leases. Maybe we should probably start doing this."First of all, offering new leases for production is not going to affect gas prices. Oil companies right now are sitting on huge numbers of leases and not producing anything on those. So they don't actually need new leases. And secondly, we just need him to really focus on the Climate Emergency at hand and phase out production.David RobertsThere's this sort of generic argument about supply-side versus demand-side policy. But then there's also a more specific argument, which is right now, specifically, there's this situation with Russia invading Ukraine. Russia is cutting off gas supply to some people, and there's this crisis, like, Europe is supposedly heading for shortages, and natural gas prices are spiking. So what about the argument that cutting back US production at this particular moment, while the crisis of Russian gas is going on, is just going to make that crisis worse, make those gas prices even higher, make European shortages even worse? Like, how do all these supply-side things you're talking about interact, in your mind, with the Russia situation?Maya Golden-KrasnerSo, first of all, I think it's important to note that we're not saying end all production tomorrow. What we're saying is, first of all, you don't need new leases. You have plenty of land, you have plenty of production going on right now. We're asking for an intentional, managed decline while we ramp up renewable energy at the same time. And secondly, the oil industry is always going to have price spikes, economic pain, and price gouging. As we said, they are making huge profits right now, $3 billion a day, and that's expected to be even higher this year while gas prices are up, while people are hurting.So the solution to both the climate crisis and gas prices is really just to get off of oil and transition as fast as possible to renewables, creating jobs in the process. The other thing for, domestically, oil prices are controlled by refineries too, that also manipulate the market to keep prices high. So you'd see that the price of a barrel of oil went down long before gas prices went down, here, because the refiners were artificially manipulating how much they want to manufacture in order to maximize their profits.David RobertsYeah, I'm not sure people appreciate that when Biden goes to oil companies and says, "please produce more, so that we can lower the price of your product." Companies don't generally want to reduce the price of their product. Companies generally like when the price of their product is high. It's serving the oil industry quite well for these sort of temporary shortages to be jacking prices up. They're not super incentivized to ramp up production.Maya Golden-KrasnerBiden really doesn't have any leverage there.David RobertsYes.Jean SuSo much of the inflation issues that we're seeing right now is purposeful price gouging by oil and gas companies. Mayor Pete was talking about this the other day, and his explainer of all of this, and how he doesn't understand why oil prices fell a bit, but gas prices are still artificially up there. So I think it is important for us to recognize the very thoughtful and intentional way that oil and gas companies are controlling what is happening right now, and that the supply issues going on, in the long run, for us to really deal with inflation and fossil fuel price volatility. The one way to actually get out of that is to get off of oil and gas, and that is completely antithetical to any new leases. Any new leases that are allowed right now are basically locking us into decades more of that type of dependence. And that is the opposite way we need to go for energy independence.Maya Golden-KrasnerAnd if you think about it, every dollar that we're spending right now to push fossil fuels is a dollar that is not going to renewable investment. And so we just really need to be pumping everything we can to make that transition as fast as possible. And we're not saying it's going to be painless, but we have no choice at this point.David RobertsAnd that power that you're just discussing Maya, is not an emergency power. That's just something the president can do, something that is within presidential authority. The continental shelf thing, or is that an emergency thing?Maya Golden-KrasnerSo in order to suspend production on leases in our oceans, that's an emergency power.David RobertsWhat about on public lands?Maya Golden-KrasnerOn public lands. So what he can do is every time they kind of update their resource management plans — which are sort of their overarching plans on what lands are going to be open for leasing, where they're going to be production — they can say, "these lands are not going to be open for leasing. We're not going to lease these anymore," for example. So that's from ordinary powers, the Department of Interior can also withdraw leases if they were issued illegally or as a result of fraud. And there's an argument there that the oil companies have been operating on the fraudulent basis for years and have been deceiving.David RobertsBecause of hiding their knowledge of climate change? Because of that or something?Maya Golden-KrasnerYeah. And as I said, areas that haven't been leased yet can be withdrawn from consideration under ordinary powers, under OCSLA, or through the resource management plans for public lands. And then for places that are legally producing right now, they wouldn't be shut down tomorrow, but they would be sort of thoughtfully ramped down. And actually, whenever oil companies sign leases, in their leases, they come with clear language that says that the leases are subject to restrictions, including the possibility of lease suspensions or limitations on rate production. So they've already signed that they understand that that sort of comes with the deal of having a leasing our public resources.David RobertsGot it. Alright. We've covered quite a bit of power that Biden has, although I should emphasize here to a listener that we have barely scratched the surface. I would encourage him to go check out your 2019 report. It is capacious, in its detailing of sort of his powers to do various things on the supply and on the demand side.But before we use up all our time, I want to get to a couple of, I guess, political questions, what you call political questions. To begin with, the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is cartoonishly bad at the moment and looks to be bad, jeez, for the rest of our lifetimes. So to what extent is Biden executive action constrained by the Supreme Court? Like, my assumption is anything he does, somebody's going to sue, and it may or may not end up at the Supreme Court. So I guess my question is, how confident are we in the legal case for these things? And are you nervous about the Supreme Court's jurisdiction over this stuff?Maya Golden-KrasnerBeing nervous about it, I guess, isn't really the issue, because it is what it is. So all of the actions that we recommend are solidly grounded in existing law. We want Biden's actions to be upheld in court, and we crafted the recommendations, we think, to achieve that. But that said, the unfortunate current reality is that the fossil fuel industry and red states are going to sue over anything that Biden does. Like you said, it could be minor and incremental. And unfortunately, a lot of the times, we're seeing the outcome of the cases decided not on the strength of the legal claim, but the identity of the judge who decides it, including at the Supreme Court.Some setbacks are inevitable, but there's going to be some cases that are brought before fair judges who are going to uphold them. And so we don't see the Supreme Court as a reason for inaction, but more as a reason for Biden to act even more urgently. I think one example of what you're saying, that they're going to challenge anything, is that when Obama's EPA first adopted the Clean Power Plan. It and some big environmental groups said, "Okay, this is the way to go, not a bolder move under the Clean Air Act," because it saw it as this small, incremental step that the Supreme Court would definitely uphold. And look what happened.We think that it's important to take emergency actions that are going to save lives, make the world a better place, and just have Biden enact them. And if the Supreme Court strikes it down, then Biden should get up and use his bully pulpit to explain why it's such a problem, explain what's so important about enacting bold climate measures.David RobertsAlso in the Supreme Court, I mean, you could see them ruling against this or that specific executive order for this or that specific technical legal reason. But is there anything, like when it comes to the EPA case, there's this major questions doctrine which, depending on what side of the bed John Roberts gets up on, could theoretically cripple the EPA's ability to do almost anything. It's so vague, you could use it for almost any reason. You could take away a huge swath of the EPA's power. Is there something similarly sort of legally radical that the Supreme Court could do to constrain the executive powers of the presidency in general? Or is this more of a battle-by-battle kind of thing?Maya Golden-KrasnerI mean, I think it's a battle by battle thing. The Supreme Court is going to strike down whatever they feel like striking down. For example, "I don't want abortion anymore. I'm striking this down. I'll make up a reason based on what people in the 15th century thought about abortion, that's fine. I'll just make it that," you know. And so our hope is that if Biden takes these really bold actions, and and people see that they're life-saving, and they kind of start down the path, they're going to be harder to reverse. So that's one hope.Jean SuAnd I would say many of, Maya had said this, but the powers that we have elucidated, especially for the emergency powers, those are actually quite straightforward powers. Literally. The Crude Oil Export Ban says, "if the president declares a national emergency, he can reinstate the Cude Oil Export Ban." There's not much interpretation there. The interpretation there that people are arguing now, that you see a little bit in the news, is this question about emergency. What is an emergency? And that can have be debated about. That in fact, was litigated on during the Border Wall Case, which I personally litigated.David RobertsOh, interesting because Trump declared an emergency. Right. How did that go?Jean SuHe did. Yeah, really heartbreakingly. That border wall has been built, and that case, and the litany of cases — there were cases brought in three different jurisdictions across the country to challenge this. The lower courts actually found really good things. They found that his total Trumping of Congress's bid to, "say you are not allowed to get over 1.2 billion," but he went around their backs anyway to do it. They found that was illegal. That was great. They also found that the way he was using the particular emergency power that he invoked, which is redirecting military funds towards military purposes, was also statutorily not correct because the border wall has nothing to do with the military.So those, those were good findings under, you know, in the district courts. It eventually trickled up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court vacated everything, and the Biden administration mooted it out. But in our case, in the DC district, one very good thing actually came out of that decision, and it was the fact that the term "emergency" is a political question, and that courts cannot ... yeah.David RobertsOh, interesting. I was going to ask about that.Jean SuAbsolutely.David RobertsThe president's ability to decide what is and isn't an emergency, that's not within the Court's. Like the Court can't come in and say, "we disagree that this is an emergency."Jean SuWell, the District Court, at the very least on this set of cases, said, "that's a political question." And in fact, that is a political question. The way that the National Emergencies Act was written is that it does not define the term "emergency". It purposefully did not define that because it gives the president discretion to do that. In statutory language, what that means is that we rely on what is a common understanding, what is the dictionary definition of emergency. And so there are going to be arguments about whether a Climate Emergency is an emergency. I think for, I don't know how you feel, but with the world burning, literally burning right now, I actually think that it does qualify as an emergency that one should act on.And so we're going to have those types of cases, I believe, if this comes up, and it's up to the courts to figure out whether the Climate Emergency is indeed an emergency. And so those are the types of cases I think that will come up.But one of the things that's really important from all of this is, "should you not try then just because it's going to be litigated?" And I think that is a common retort to many types of proposed new ideas and actions. "Well, it's going to be litigated. Well, if this was a Republican administration" — I was litigating every day against Trump. Absolutely, these things are going to be litigated, but that is not the excuse to not try. And the other kind of thing about it is, "oh well, it's going to be reversed by the other side." And that's an argument.David RobertsThat was my next question because we lived through this, right? We lived through Obama having legislation taken away, basically resorting to executive action, and then just having either courts or the subsequent administration, shoot down almost all of it.Jean SuAnd we also have seen gains at the same time. The things that we are asking for, with respect to climate, are jump-starting things, that can actually start transforming the market. We can actually use as much time as possible to get these actions jump-started. And at that point, if and when they do get strucken down, there will be movement that would have been made. There will be less barrels of oil being extracted and poisoning communities. And for every day that we can stop a child, right now, who is suffering from the climate crisis because of that fossil fuel pollution, otherwise, if we can just have a few more days at that, that works.And that helps. And I think perversely, we have seen the border wall. The border wall was challenged. It was eventually mooted. But guess what? That border wall is still there.David RobertsYeah, facts on the ground, as they.Jean SuSay, that is in the ground. That is an executive action that was essentially mooted out. But it is there, and it is a monstrosity, and it is still in its destructive mode. If we think about it that way, in a perverse way, executive action actually does a lot, and even if it gets reversed later, it will have impacts. And hopefully, on the pieces we are talking about, good impacts that will last and trigger something much greater for the transition.David RobertsAnd also, if Biden doesn't have Congress, what else is he going to spend his time doing?Maya Golden-KrasnerHe has things that he should have been doing since day one, not even emergency powers. I mean, he really could have been doing a lot of these things starting from the moment he took office. But he chose to wait Joe Manchin out and look where that's gotten us. And so now we're even further behind.Jean SuAnd Dave, I think the point here is that this is not an either/or decision. Absolutely, we need legislation, and absolutely, we need an executive action. I think that bifurcation is just false. We need both/and, and we have needed that from day one. From day one, he could have stopped all new oil and gas leases. He actually went in the wrong direction. From day one, he actually could have started producing less and less oil from existing leases. He could have also increased the standards of our car emissions, which he has not raised, to even back to what the Obama administration had.So these are pieces in his pocket that he has had. And if he declares a Climate Emergency, I would hope that, at the very least, it gets rid of these inconsistencies, and it puts the fire under every single agency to really look at every single power that they have and go for it, because we just don't have time to diddle-daddle anymore.David RobertsWell, as a final question then, let's talk about politics. Because I think it's fair to say that Biden himself is probably sort of small "C" conservative, institutionalist, doesn't like to .. ...Maya Golden-KrasnerHe's a senator.David Roberts... radical. Yes, he was a senator for whatever, 107 years. So that's very deeply in his, in his bones. And I think the administration, probably as a whole, if you, if you look at it, is pretty small "C" conservative, has not really been willing to do things radical. I mean, one of the reasons, as you mentioned, is they're scared. Anything they do that's sort of bold, or out of the ordinary, or that goes against fossil fuels is going to, absolutely, put the final stake in the heart of any chance of legislation.But as I think we've discussed, it looks like that ship is basically sailed at this point. But let's just talk about the politics of it because it's not clear at all, to me, that this would be good politics for Biden. I mean, it would look like — and it would be characterized by the right, and probably a bunch of jerks in the mainstream media — as, basically, Biden couldn't get legislation, he couldn't get people together to sign off on legislation. So now he's being a dictator, and he's just ramming through the far left agenda, and he's going to cut off our energy production that makes America great, and he's going to raise energy prices.And you don't have to guess at the kind of attacks that this would bring. And like Biden doing a bunch of stuff that's unpopular, and then Democrats losing in 2024, and Republicans gaining a trifecta would be worse than anything you could imagine. So aren't you all a little nervous, at least about counseling this kind of thing? Do you think about the political implications? Do you worry about the political implications? Do you think I'm wrong about the political implications?Maya Golden-KrasnerWell, there's a recent poll that shows that 58% of Americans actually say they would support a Climate Emergency Declaration if BBBA doesn't pass, which it looks like it's not going to. And 80% of Americans think the government should be doing more to support climate. And we're seeing huge percentages, 100 million Americans under a heat warning. We have fires raging across the country, across Europe. I'm in the South in California. People in the Southwest were, basically, facing a permanent humongous drought right now. And so I think huge percentages of Americans are feeling the Climate Emergency in these palpable ways, and it's getting to a breaking point for people calling for change and urgency of transformation.David RobertsBut it sure seems like freaking out about gas prices ... they're like, "oh, we're very concerned about climate change. Whoa, what gas prices? Never mind all that. Never mind all that. Bring my gas prices down." I'm not sure that the support for climate has the endurance, or the depth, that just the general American aversion to taxes and high prices has.Jean SuTo answer that question, yes, we think a lot about politics, and how this would affect people, and what they're thinking. I think a National Climate Emergency and the powers that he chooses to pull from there, have to be extremely intentional. At the end of the day here, we're trying to protect the American public, and what they need to know right now is that they will have some safety in the face of the burning wildfires and heatwaves that they have right now, as well as the hole that's being burned in their budget because of this inflation. So there has to be absolutely an intentional plan for phasing out existing fossil fuels.That's not something that is particularly controversial in any way. It's just we need to get off this. And at the same time, we are seeing so many people in the public really put those two together, that climate, and everything that's happening, and vulnerability to oil and gas really means getting off of it. We are seeing better understanding that solar, and clean energy, and E-vehicles, if they can actually be penetrated down to low-income communities, that people are very excited to get it. We work with communities on the ground. I think there's this polling out there, and elites sitting in their desks and doing that.We get to talk to people on the ground who are suffering every day from this. And they're not big "d"s, little "d"s, whatever. They're just normal, everyday people, who are really so scared about what is going to happen. And they know that the only way to get it out of this issue is to stop fossil fuels. And so whatever the president does, it's about getting to that end but doing it in a way that is safe and that, essentially, protects our most vulnerable communities first. And I think there are absolutely ways that we can do that by using the many different executive powers that he has, to map out that plan super intentionally.Maya Golden-KrasnerMaybe he should just call the plan "Making America Great Again". Maybe that'll work.David RobertsWell, this has been super illuminating. There's been so much vague talk about executive action lately. It's really nice to get some concretes and some specifics, and hash through them. So, Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner, thank you so much for coming and spending all this time.Maya Golden-KrasnerThank you. It's been fun.Jean SuThank you, Dave. It's been an honor and pleasure.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. 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, 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 that's kind of the folk story of air pollution. But the recent research, it's almost qualitative difference.I wrote about this for Vox a few years ago, just looking at this new research that's basically like, "it turns out the effects are about double what we thought they were." I'm like, "damn." It seemed like it should have been bigger news then, I kind of wrote a little table-pounding story about it. So just talk about kind of what scientists have concluded in these last few years about air pollution and its effects.David Wallace-WellsWell, there's sort of two stories running in parallel, or maybe parallel isn't even the right word. They're kind of running in opposite directions at once. And one is the story that you've summarized as the folk history, which is to say, "in the richer parts of the world, air pollution is getting better."That is true. If people remember 20, 30, 50, 70 years ago, the air in the US and in Europe was a lot worse than it is now. And it is better in part because of policy, but in part because of activism, and for a variety of reasons, but it is better. And the health impacts are significantly smaller today in the US than they used to be. But at the same time, we're learning that the health impacts generally are way worse than we thought than they were. So I touched on this in the story I went for the Times recently about it, but I think this is one of the complications in processing this new data, is that we see things getting better even as the science is giving us a darker and darker picture.What that science says is, "every time we lower the threshold that we want to consider safe for air pollution, we discover that in fact, that new level of air pollution that we thought was safe was not safe."David RobertsYeah, and that's and that story is unbroken. The ratchet never goes in the other direction, as far as I can tell.David Wallace-WellsTotally. And it's it's very much the parallel there is there with lead, where just every few years there's a new standard. And then researchers are like, "actually, let's make it even lower." So the WHO just released last fall a new global standard, in which they said that anything higher than five micrograms per cubic meter of particulate matter is dangerous to your health. The previous level had been ten. In the US, the official standard of safety is twelve, still to this day.David RobertsThat's battled over and battled over. What was Obama trying to make it like? What were we trying to ...?David Wallace-WellsI actually don't know those details. Maybe you'd know them better than I do.David RobertsYeah, I want to say ten or eight.David Wallace-WellsI mean, it would make sense that they were just trying to pull it into line with the WHO standard, which had been ten so that probably makes sense.David RobertsAnd have failed repeatedly.David Wallace-WellsAnd I don't want to overstate what this means for people in the US who are breathing unhealthy air, which is to say, if the who standard is five and we're at, as a country, nine or whatever, or you're in a particular locality where it's seven or eleven, it's not like you're going to be dealing with the same level of health impacts as people living in Delhi, for instance, are. There's a spectrum, and the more of it there is, the worse off you are.But one of the things that's been most interesting to me, at a sort of conceptual level in thinking about all of this, is also that while the effects on an individual life can be relatively small or even invisible, when you unroll the impact or the menace over a large population, the totals really add up. So a big study that came out of Harvard, about a year and a half ago, and the headline there was that 8.7 million people around the world died, and I think it was 2019, just due to the air pollution from the burning of fossil fuel. So 8.7 million a year, globally, just from the burning of fossil fuels. Putting aside all other causes of air pollution, they found that just within the US, the total was 350,000, a year, which is roughly as many Americans as died in the first year of COVID officially.So we are, even here, breathing our relatively clean air and telling ourselves that things are getting better on the pollution front. Even here, 350,000 lives, or so, are being cut short every year due to these impacts.David RobertsThere's a parallel, I think, to the climate discussion, in that you can say climate causes X deaths, but deaths never present themselves as from climate, right? What climate is doing is raising the odds of other bad things happening. And in a sense, it seems like, kind of, conceptually, air pollution is the same way. Like air pollution is not on your death certificate, right? Air pollution just raises the odds of this immense range of other bad things happening.David Wallace-WellsYeah. It basically makes everything about the human body and the human brain worse. And that means that across a large population, there's a much greater mortality risk than there would have been without it. And it's important to keep that in mind. It's not like we're talking about someone dropping a bomb on a city when we say, "10 million people die a year, globally, from air pollution.' The causes are more diffuse, the impacts are more diffuse, and the way that we experience those impacts are also more diffuse in the sense that yeah, like the person, you know, who might have died, given the world as it is, but wouldn't have died in a world without air pollution, you probably attribute their death to cancer, or respiratory disease, or heart disease. But those rates are just much higher in the presence of this environmental contamination.David RobertsYeah. And people think about, I think, air pollution as exacerbating, you know, like asthma and stuff like that, stuff with your lungs, maybe even cancer. But, you know, you cite research that ties air pollution to a wild array of outcomes like health, psychological, social crime, like name it. Just tell us about some of the sort of craziest things you found in those studies.David Wallace-WellsI'll say the crazier stuff in a minute, but I think the most important thing is just, like, it's just everything. So it makes everything worse. So that's — the things that may seem familiar, it's just important to sort of reiterate respiratory disease, pulmonary disease, cancer. Then there's all stuff about cognitive performance, and you can look at like surgeons perform worse when there's more air pollution in the air, umpires and baseball games make worse calls, when there's more air pollution in the air. Crime goes up, domestic violence goes up. And there are these pretty striking findings about mental health, and depression, suicide, self-harm.It really goes, like, all down the list of absolutely everything that you could sort of define as a standard of human flourishing is made worse, at the population level, when there's more of this stuff floating around in the air. And the way that that rolls out, or folds out, or plays out, in a place like the US, is one kind of scale of effect. But in places where there's just a mass amount of pollution, it's really dramatic. So in the US, the estimate is that as a country, even though we're losing 350,000 people a year, on the whole, that only adds up to a loss of about 0.2 years of life expectancy, which is that like a few months on average for every person. But it doesn't change the shape of your life in a truly profound way. In Delhi, it is ten years, which means that — this is a city of 20 million people. They are, on average, losing ten years of life.David RobertsYeah, that's wild. And losing, in some sense, before they're even born, like, that's some of the most kind of depressing research we cite.David Wallace-WellsYeah, the research it's been, like, sort of a second active research for me has been the effect on fetal health, and maternal health, newborn health, which is growing a little bit, but it just also happens to be something I've been focusing on more lately. And I was writing this piece for the Times in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court's decisions on Dobbs in West Virginia versus EPA. And it felt like, "well, God, if only we could show there was some connection between air pollution and the well-being of newborns." So, yeah, globally, 500,000 newborns die every year in ways that are attributable to air pollution.So in South Asia alone, there are 350,000 stillbirths and miscarriages every year attributable to air pollution. And the effects are not just whether fetus lives, or dies, or survives. The pregnancy emerges intact. It's also it affects premature birth, low birth weight, which are strongly correlated with a lot of measures of human well-being later in life. So, again, it's really, no matter where you look, no matter what standard you're trying to apply, or what question you're trying to ask about whether people are flourishing in this world, air pollution is almost certain to give a darker picture than we'd be able to give, or have, or live through without it.David RobertsLet's talk a little bit about kind of what to do about it, where it comes from. People think mostly about burning fossil fuels, which I think is probably the bulk of the problem. But you point out that there are other sources as well, big, large remaining sources, even if you tackle fossil fuels.David Wallace-WellsYeah, well, I would say actually there has been a bit of a shift towards an understanding of the predominance of fossil fuels as the cause over the last few years. I think, you know, rewind five or ten years and people probably would have guessed that a lot of it had to do with bad indoor cooking in the developing world and agricultural burning. And those play a role too. But yeah, at least according to this Harvard study, we're talking about the large bulk of air pollution deaths being attributable to fossil fuels, and that's in particular coal plants and cars.But the natural world produces a fair amount of particulate matter too. We have dust pollution. And so in the piece I mentioned one study, that I actually think this may be slightly pessimistic, but they said that if we entirely eliminated all anthropogenic activity, half of the world would still be breathing unsafe pollution levels.David RobertsNo kidding. Because of dust, or fire, or what?David Wallace-WellsYeah, a combination of dust and fire. And then there's just some other stuff that, like vegetation, just gives off some particular matter, which I didn't even know about before looking at this work. So there's some stuff that we can do to somewhat take control of that. Dust is a problem that can be, to some degree, controlled through agricultural practices, and ecosystem restoration, and that kind of thing. But probably we're going to be living with some amount of this gunk floating around in our air forever, and that's in certain ways dispiriting and despairing. But to bring it back to something I said a few minutes ago, it really is different if you're like, at ten micrograms per cubic meter versus 40.David RobertsRight.David Wallace-WellsAnd we should be able to bring a lot of those really dangerous levels of pollution down if we take control of the things that we are doing as humans. Which is to say, burning stuff. In the LRB piece, I had like a line that was, "everything we burn, we breathe.' And I think that's a pretty good rule for thinking about how to combat air pollution. Anytime you're lighting a match to something, it'd be better if we didn't do that.David RobertsWe light fewer matches. What do you say — I remember this kind of old-school conservative thing, kind of before climate change took over everything when air pollution used to be kind of a bigger thing. I remember kind of the conservative take on it being based on this Kuznets Curve, based on this idea that "the more prosperous a society gets, the less it burns things," basically. And so the solution to this is just to make those developing nations as rich as possible, as fast as possible, rather than focusing on the air pollution itself. What do you make of that argument?David Wallace-WellsI think it's a relatively accurate description of the path of development that most countries in the world have taken to this point. But I find it pretty disingenuous as a guide, or rule, to the way that we should be thinking about the present tense or the future, in the sense that, especially, acknowledging how large a role fossil fuel burning is playing in these issues. If we believe, as the IEA and many other analysts tell us, that solar power is the cheapest electricity in history, and 90% of the world lives in places where renewables are cheaper than dirty energy. There is no longer this trade-off, where living greener and breathing cleaner air is going to come at the cost of economic growth.It's now the case that all else being equal and of course, there are complications, but all else being equal, if we're drawing development trajectories for anybody anywhere in the world at the moment, we would be rapidly downgrading, downsizing, our dependence on fossil fuel in those places and rapidly embracing renewable power, which is going to produce many, many fewer of these impacts. So I think going forward, and thinking about policy, and culture, and economic activity going forward, I think that that old rule is a little bit foolish and, essentially, council's complacency, when, in fact, the landscape as we understand it should push us in the other direction, to move much more quickly to get off these sources.David RobertsIt seems like even if you just take the same cost-benefit analysis, the same equation, and just plug the new information we have about pollution into it, just out of that, you would get counsel for much more aggressive pollution reduction, right?David Wallace-WellsYeah. I mean, this is something that you've written about too when you wrote about the testimony that Drew Chandell gave, and I can't remember if it was Congress or the Senate, during the pandemic, but where he said that "the cost of the green transition in the US would be entirely paid for and then some, just through the public health benefits of the cleaner air that that transition would bring about." So we don't have to worry. You don't even have to put into the equation all the jobs we're going to get. You don't even have to put into the equation the climate benefits we're going to get. You just have to think about the cleaner air, and that immediately pays for the whole project.David RobertsYes, it would pay for everything. And also, now that we know more about the damaged pollution side, it's the same story with lead, right? As you said before, ever since we stopped using it, or even before we stopped using it, we've just been learning, "oh, it's worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and worse than we thought." And we've traced crime waves, tons and tons of stuff to lead, basically, lead in the water. It's amazing how much you can attribute to it.And now the same thing is happening with particulates in air pollution, which means when you look back, a. that the pollution we have had in this country, decades ago, actually did more damage than we knew. And b. something like the Clean Air Act — they keep doing these cost-benefit analyses on it, and every time you get new information about pollution, the overwhelming benefit of the Clean Air Act just grows, and grows, and grows. To the point now, that it's sort of like if it were popularly appreciated, what a wildly successful piece of legislation that was, there would be so much more outrage about what the Supreme Court is doing, right? Like, in retrospect, we know it was even more successful than anyone dared hoped, even until just very recently.David Wallace-WellsYeah. I want to go back to something you said just a minute ago because I think it's really, really important, which is we can talk about the public health impacts. We have talked about a lot of them. But I think it's also important to understand just how much these forces shape our social, and political, and cultural lives through their public health impacts. So when we think about lead, there's a quite plausible account that lead pollution, which was concentrated in poorer, browner, blacker communities in the US.David RobertsAlways.David Wallace-WellsDrove the US crime wave of the 60s and 70s, or at least powered it, gave it some extra push. As a result, we can say that that crime wave was more racialized because of the racialized effects of lead. And the result of that was "white flight" out of American cities, the growth of quasi-reactionary, quote — unquote, "centrist suburban politics" in this country.David RobertsRight. Reaganism in the 80s. I mean, you could spin it out.David Wallace-WellsThe whole story of America over the last 50 years, and especially, the American politics of the last decade or so. You can actually quite neatly draw that line from lead pollution, which is to say, to an environmental contaminant which we knew was bad for you a century and a half ago, and we chose not to worry too much about it because we didn't really appreciate the scale. And there were other reasons not to take action. And so we let the paint companies put lead in their paint, and we let the gasoline companies put lead in their fuel.And that whole time we knew. And the effect wasn't just corrosive to the public health, particularly, of Black and Brown Americans, poor Black and Brown Americans in the middle of the century. But it is one of the driving forces in our entire national narrative over the last five decades. And when you think about air pollution in the same context, again, the impacts are not as dramatic in the US as they are elsewhere, but the whole picture that we have of early-stage industrial development in the late 20th, early 21st century in the Global South, so much of that is tied up in the toxicity of the pollutants that are produced there.And if we could wind back the clock and run those development patterns differently, the whole picture of the future, as it was perceived in places like North India, would be really, really different. And our perspective on those places, looking at it from the Global North, would be really different, too. We wouldn't regard life in the slums of the Global South as nearly as dark and grim as they are, beyond which those, at least implementing what we know now about the economic benefits of clean energy, they may well be moving up the economic ladder much faster than they are today, if they hadn't gone down that path. So all of these stories from the incredibly local, individual lives lost up through the geopolitical and the sort of mythic level that we operate on often in our national politics, all of those are affected by these forces.And that's not to say that, like, "if you walk down the street in Delhi, you're going to peel over and die", although I have walked down the street in Delhi, and it can be hard to breathe. But it's just to say, that when we put even a small-scale effect on a population of 20 million, or in the case of India as a whole, 1.4 billion people, those effects really, really add up. And we are just beginning, I think, to appreciate how much those stories of environmental contamination are shaping all of these bigger narratives that we've treated for so long as, if not quite neatly, "great men theories of history", then stories about national character or whatever.David RobertsRight. And you look back, and it also makes every bit of sort of corporate lobbying, like in the lead story, every bit of corporate lobbying, every backroom deal that let it go on a little bit longer. Those now, knowing what we know about the sort of first, and second, and third-order effects that spun out from that, those just look like monstrous crimes. Like, the amount of human suffering attributable to those decisions, looks enormous now, with the full scope of history, to look at it, and it sort of makes you think now, like, "here we are arguing again in our politics right now over air pollution."Like, do we think we're going to find out in the future? Again, we should be learning prospectively now, from the past, that these are very big decisions, and the benefits of reducing them are so much larger, once you've taken the full picture than anyone imagined like it ought to be transforming politics.David Wallace-WellsYeah. And it's interesting because I come at this from a pretty unusual position. I write about climate, I write about the environment, but I'm such an urban person who does not think about the rights of nature and the bounty of the planet that needs to be protected. Those are not my emotional impulses. My emotional impulses are to think about human suffering, but the more that we learn about not just air pollution, but the effects of pollution of all kinds. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. The more that we bring ourselves back into line with what was that sort of old-timey seeming environmentalist impulse, which is just to say, "we should be protecting natural world at all costs." I wouldn't quite go as far as to say at all costs, but we know so little now about what all these microplastics are going to do to us.David RobertsYes, I know, but we've had enough experience to guess.David Wallace-WellsIt's not going to be good.David RobertsWhich direction the results are going to go, right? That's the thing. At some point it seems like you need to start learning from these things, looking forward, right? And not making the same damn mistakes over and over again.David Wallace-WellsYeah. And I wonder, I mean, I don't know exactly how you'd put those odds, but it does feel like we're more in a position of making the same mistakes all over again than we are really.David RobertsOh, yes, we are in an age of making mistakes all over again. I think that is our era. Well, let's get into maybe what might be kind of a slightly awkward or controversial subject, I guess, depending on how we want to put it. But I'll just put it this way. Knowing what we now know, the current global effects of air pollution are as bad as anything climate models project in terms of deaths and illnesses, even decades in the future, from climate change. Do you think that's fair?David Wallace-WellsWell, I would say that that's my understanding of the science. There are some climate models that are already tallying deaths in the millions, but I tend to think of them as sort of outlier assessments. Now, they may prove to be more prescient, in the same way that alarmist assessments of air pollution have proven to be prescient, too. So I think it's, at a baseline, very safe to say that there are more people dying, as we understand it today, from air pollution. In 2022, and 2023, and 2024, there are going to be more people dying from air pollution than are dying from the whole range of climate impacts.And that, to get to a point where climate death ever overtakes these numbers that we have today, which is to say 10 million people a year, which is 100 million in a decade. To get to that point with climate, would require, perhaps, both a real unraveling of the global climate system, that would require some of the higher-end possibilities to come true, and also probably a much more robust accounting measure beyond that which we have devised, to this point, to tabulate those impacts. Most of the sort of alarming comprehensive assessments of climate mortality suggests that, in this climate scenarios that we can sort of expect in the next 50 to 75 years, we will never reach this level of death on an annual basis from climate.David RobertsRight. And that's just like striking. I really want to put an exclamation point on it, like, the world is mobilizing against climate change. Obviously, not to the degree anybody wants or that is sufficient, but there's immense social upheaval, and mobilization, and political mobilization against a possible future danger that is not as deadly as ones we are living through right now, which are not causing anything like the same mobilization. How do we explain that? What story do we tell ourselves about that? And what story should climate people be telling themselves about it? Like, do you think it makes sense to, just on a utilitarian level, turn your activist attention, and your advocacy attention, away from climate to air pollution?David Wallace-WellsThere are a lot of different questions embedded in there, and, actually, I'd be really curious to know how you think about it. I would say a few things. To begin with, I've never written two big pieces on air pollution, and I actually underwent something of a perspective shift in the interim. Which is to say, when I wrote the first piece, which was just last fall, I put forward the line that activism against air pollution might be, at the very least, useful to include in a more significant way in our climate advocacy.These things are really correlated. If we solve one, we solve the other. And talking about air pollution really makes the cost of inaction really, really clear, in a way that talking about climate change independent of air pollution doesn't make quite so clear.David RobertsAnd much more localizable, right? Much more sort of like traceable to particular communities, right?David Wallace-WellsAnd immediate. So if you cut emissions today, the effect on global temperatures may not be so visible, but the effect on air pollution from your local coal plant will be immediately visible. It's also, like, there's a visual that's really powerful, literally like the ugly gunk in the sky and in the waters, like all that stuff. It lends itself to advocacy and has in the past pushed people, in countries like ours, to take action, in a way that climate has proven a little harder to gain that sort of traction right.David RobertsAnd is mobilizing people in China and India now, I think, in a way that maybe climate isn't.David Wallace-WellsActually, it's an interesting comparison to make. The most dramatic reductions in air pollution over the last decade or two have come in China. India has taken some steps, and there is some advocacy growing, but they haven't meaningfully reduced their pollution levels. In China, they really have. They've cut their pollution by, I think, something like 40% in seven years, and it was from a very high level. I think, one estimate I cited in this piece was that 30 million Chinese people died between 2000 and 2016. 30 million people in a single country.David RobertsThat was the coal binge, right? I mean, that coal binge had so many effects on so many things, but like among them, the mortality of the Chinese.David Wallace-WellsAnd they took large scale policies, they made large scale policy, made a large scale response and to deal with that. They move the coal plants, to begin with. They've also started moving off of coal. They keep building the plants, but they're running them at much lower levels of capacity, as I'm sure all your listeners know. But the question of what produced that, I think, is a complicated one and not — I don't personally feel like I know the answer clearly because everything we know about Chinese environmental policy comes to us through so many layers of ... I don't know exactly what to call it. It's just hard to know the real story there.David RobertsRight.David Wallace-WellsMy understanding is that there has there has been some amount of grassroots activism, and people were upset about the air pollution, in the middle of the last decade. But I also think that there's a pretty strong role being played here from the top-down powers as well, who are looking at the mortality data and are just like, "well, why would we want these people to die if we can not have them die?"David RobertsWell, it seems like the whole point was, "we're going to use coal to grow the economy, bring a bunch of people out of poverty, and then we're going to pivot and start addressing the problems of coal," right? You hate to say that they accepted all those deaths from air pollution on purpose, but they kind of did in exchange for the extraordinary number of people brought out of poverty during that same period, right?David Wallace-WellsYeah. Again, it's another thing I'm not sure that I can attribute that logic to Xi or his advisors. That is the operational revealed logic of their path. For sure.David RobertsRight.David Wallace-WellsSo for all those reasons, I thought like, "yes, making a bigger deal out of pollute," and it poles way better also. Literally, every American you ask is like, "yeah, we should be taking measures to keep our air."David RobertsIt wasn't like everybody switched to climate because climate poles so much better than air pollution.David Wallace-WellsRight. The opposite. And relatedly, it is much less tied up in culture war b******t.David RobertsYes.David Wallace-WellsThan climate is. And theoretically, if the climate movement made air pollution a much bigger deal, maybe that would change, maybe it would become polarized in the same way. But at the moment, it's in a very happy place where basically everybody's excited to sign up for most measures that promise to reduce pollution. Although there are some issues about — it's still the poorest, Brownest, and Blackest communities that are hit hardest, and it's not always the case that other people want to help them. But at the national level, people want to deal with pollution. They want their air to be cleaner.So for all those reasons, I thought this is a strategic win. We've probably left something on the table by focusing on climate, as opposed to pollution. And we don't have to talk about the future, we can focus on the present. We can see it all very clearly. It motivates people. We have a track record of success here.But I've started to think much more that the story of air pollution is less about, yeah, mobilization and more about normalization. We have been living with these impacts in certain parts of the world, really quite dramatic levels, for a very long time. And while there are some success stories — the US Clean Air Act, the equivalent in Europe, and now it's happened in China — it's also the case, as you point out, that there just isn't a global movement around this. And in fact, we've come to regard, I think, in places like the US and Europe at least, we've come to regard the pollution levels that people are dealing with in South Asia, and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and to some degree, East Asia, and China as just like normal. And that's the flip side of the Kuznets Curve story that you told.David RobertsYeah, that's what I was going to say. That kind of falls out of that, right? If you believe that story, then you look at that pollution and say, "well, ah, that's the phase they're in."David Wallace-Wells"And it'll solve itself."David Roberts"And what are you going to do?"David Wallace-WellsTotally. That's really what worries me about climate these days, too. You know, I used to think that if people saw the story clearly, they would take action. And even at the time, I sort of knew that that was, to some degree, naive.David RobertsWe were such a sweet summer children back then, a few years ago.David Wallace-WellsAnd now I think, "oh, most of the stuff that people like you and I have been warning about for a while is probably going to come true." There is going to be a lot more suffering and a lot more disruption. It may not be quite as bad as maybe me in particular has warned, but it'll still be like quite large-scale negative impact on all forms of global flourishing, to have climate change of two and a half degrees, maybe even three degrees of warming. But the response there, I come to think, more and more, is going to be dominated not by, you know, mitigation, to be sure, not by, you know, adaptation and resilience, but just by normalization. We're just going to find ways to treat.David RobertsNot by a global uprising of spontaneous grassroots energy.David Wallace-WellsYeah. Or even technocratic like, "oh, we're going to build a sea wall here, and we're going to regrow the mangroves here, and we're going to ... " Even that kind of thing is, I think, a smaller form, is a smaller part of our sort of adaptation toolkit than normalization whereby we were —— like people living in California. They talk about the fires, they talk about the smoke, but here we are. I don't know exactly. Depending on how you want to count, like, we've quintupled the amount of acreage that is routinely burned in California from wildfire, and everybody's just like, "yeah, it's a little worse."And that coping mechanism, I think, is really quite deep and is the way that we adjust.David RobertsIf we had been talking about this five years ago, it'd be one thing, but now we've seen this illustrated in so many forms now. Basically, people's ability to take what once would have seemed crazy, or out of bounds, or too far, or too bad on board, as long as it's incremental. And it turns out we can normalize things really quickly. Like, we got used to, I mean, COVID is still going on, right? Hundreds of thousands of people are still dying, but we got used to that so fast. As I look back now, the climate idea that climate campaigners had, especially in like the early 2000s or whatever, like, "once it gets really bad, people will mobilize," just seems so wildly naive now. It takes so much to get people to mobilize. And anything that's incremental, even something as fast as, like, democracy falling apart around us, look at what we've taken on board as normal in the last five years, in terms of democracy and the rule of law.David Wallace-WellsAnd that's in the domestic context, which is also something that would have surprised me. It's one thing to say Americans don't care about dictators in the developing world, it's another thing to come to terms with what we've seen here. I totally agree. I think the pandemic, we could have a whole second conversation about the lessons of the pandemic on these questions. I think that normalization has been a huge and underappreciated part of the story.I'm working on a piece now about the sort of the "endgame" that we have apparently, according to the people who really know this stuff, somewhat settled into here, which is to say 100,000 to 250,000 deaths annually from this disease. And I'm now working at the New York Times. When we hit 100,000 deaths in the US from COVID, they put a huge banner headline on the front page, which used the phrase "an incalculable loss". Well, how do you calculate ten times that loss, or having that loss every year, forever after, going forward?David RobertsIt so quickly becomes abstract.David Wallace-WellsBut there's another lesson on the climate, and I have a dog in this fight, just to, like, declare it up front that I think is really interesting from the pandemic, which is to say — the moment of most intense interest and greatest capacity for large scale behavioral and political change, in response to this threat, was at the very beginning, when people were most scared. Now, saying it that way suggests a slightly neater case study version of what we've gone through than I really want to suggest. But it is, I think, important to keep in mind that, actually, the capacity for change was quite dramatic at the beginning of the pandemic.David RobertsYes. And the corollary of what you're saying, which is that it's going to get more and more difficult to address as it gets worse and worse, right? Not easier to address, not the spontaneous global mobilization. It's going to be harder and harder. I mean, this is what we know about chaos, and just general disorder, like, it does not make people more far-seeing, and more concerned about the next generation, and more open to cooperation with other people, right. All the things you need in place for a global solution to this, get more difficult the more climate does that threat multiplication thing it does.David Wallace-WellsWell, I think there are those who might say, "it's a little more complicated than that." I mean, Rebecca Solnit has written a lot about the way in which disorder and disarray can call forward are better impulses. I think the truth is that we can't count on any single narrative pattern emerging and holding in any one direction, through the series of climate disruptions that we're likely to see over the next few decades. And I do think that there is probably some amount of response that will be called forth, more dramatic response. I mean, we've seen it already. The world is moving faster than it was five years ago, even though climate impacts are getting worse.But I also don't think that we can just say that, "well, that's going to take care of things." There are a lot of ugly impulses out there. We need to do what we can to make sure that the responses are targeted and guided towards prosocial, productive goals, rather than zero-sum, competitive scrambling over what we perceive to be limited resources. I think it's just a big mess. That's not to say that no progress is possible in that mess, but the landscape itself is a mess.David RobertsOnce you abandon the idea that accumulated, empirical information is going to spark social change, then you're sort of at sea, right? What will? What does? The one thing your air pollution story illustrates really well, which is something that's been demonstrated to us over, and over, and over again these past few years — which is that humans are terrible at assessing risk. We don't treat all deaths the same. We don't treat all risks the same. Our individual and collective response to risk is not totally disconnected from the scale of the risk, but, you know, 90% disconnected from the true nature and scale of the risk.So it seems like we need something like a study of what does break through? What does cause social mobilization? What does make a threat, in addition to the empirical information that demonstrates it's a threat? What makes it socially sticky and catchy? Do we know anything about that?David Wallace-WellsWell, you might know better than I do, but when I look at the last few years and think about this question on a few different fronts, not just climate, the thing that strikes me is not the question, "does anything work?" It's, "is there anything that can work in an ongoing way, sufficient to really disrupt the established structures of power and authority?"So when I think about climate, I think, "oh wait, we did have an incredible global mobilization around climate change." We had millions of people all around the world marching in the street, mostly young people. We had more aggressive climate activism in the form of, to some degree, Sunrise, certainly XR.And the sum total of those movements, I do believe, really did change the discourse around climate change among the world's most powerful people, both in the private and public sectors. And so you see a lot of this lip service now being paid by presidents and prime ministers, but also by CEOs, and our sainted billionaire class. Nobody is a climate denier anymore. And they all say, they even say when you're to get to net zero by 2050, basically, if you ask them, and many of them make a big deal out of that. But we actually haven't gotten on that track at all.So we've just sort of to the extent that we've forced anything, we've forced a rhetorical shift in people who are interested in making progress, but not interested in making progress quickly enough. And I think that maybe it's the pandemic, maybe it's other political forces, but I look at the climate movement as somewhat exhausted now compared to where it was a few years ago.David RobertsYes.David Wallace-WellsAnd then I think about, okay, so thinking about in the domestic context, the response to Dobbs and the reversal of Roe, and I feel this and I see it among many, you know, like-minded liberal Americans, there's just this sort of exhausted, almost acquiescence. When you compare the response to that decision to the Women's March, which came out of the election of Donald Trump, you can argue about what impact the Women's March had and whether it was sustainable, etc. But you saw over the course of whatever the ... that is like six weeks, between eight weeks, between maybe it's ten weeks, but between the election and the Women's March, the building of a "from scratch" protest infrastructure, which at the very least signal to other Americans, we as a mass are outraged.David RobertsYeah, it just didn't seem like there was the institutional, you know like somebody needs to pick up that ball and run with it on the right. If there's a spark of social uprising, like there's billionaires ready to heap money on it, and bus them around, and put them on TV all day, every day. But it just didn't seem like there's any infrastructure to pick that energy up and carry with it. So it just seemed like it kind of dispersed.David Wallace-WellsYeah, I think that that's definitely part of it and that we would be better off with some more effective, large-scale organizing infrastructure on the Left. I also, although, I've read some things recently about the way in which the Bloomberg gun philanthropy has sort of like hoovered up what was, essentially, grassroots movement into a corporate environment, in ways that may not be all that helpful. But I also just think about, I sort of go back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago about the response to the pandemic and the way in which an initial burst of outrage and commitment can just dissipate on its own. And I worry that we sort of mobilized on the Center-Left and Left against Trump because we understood that to be such a profound threat to a lot of things that we assumed or wanted to assume about the nature of the American Democratic experiment and the public at large — I just worry we sort of spent that energy for a generation, and that we may now be depleted.David RobertsWell, it's kind of the nature ... I mean, I returned again and again. This is a little bit of a cliche, but I return again and again to sort of psychology of abusive relationships, and that's part of how they work, is you can only deal with so many crises at once. The financialization of the economy is a crisis. Like inequality is a crisis. Climate is a crisis. Now, here you are telling me air pollution is also a crisis. Like democracy falling apart. It's a crisis. Any of those I could justify spending my entire energy and passion towards.David Wallace-WellsBut are you familiar with the term "polycrisis" or "permacrisis"?David RobertsYes. And people just can't process it or focus at a certain point. Your phrase is exactly right. Exhausted acquiescence. It just, that seems to be sort of the energy these days, which is disastrous. But I don't know what to what to do about it.David Wallace-WellsWell, on the Dobbs and Roe point, I mean, I do really believe that there is some real failing here on the part of Democratic leadership.David RobertsYes, better leadership would help.David Wallace-WellsIt just seems, like, I don't know, it's a tough hand to play, but people are really furious. They're really outraged, and playing the long game just isn't the right message to give them.David RobertsRight. And it's not even clear they're doing that. It's not clear that if they had a long-term plan, that'd be one thing. They just don't seem to have a plan at all other than sort of this instinctive move to the center attempt, the sort of twitch at this point that establishment Dems have. It's like the only reaction they have left.David Wallace-WellsI don't remember who in the White House said it, but just a couple of the last couple of days, somebody said basically like, "we're not here to appease the activist wing of the Democratic party."David RobertsThe activist, which is like 80 %, 90% of the freaking party.David Wallace-WellsAbsolutely. Like, it's the whole party. Like, what are you talking about?David RobertsIt's nuts.David Wallace-WellsBut I also think that you know ... I also think that there's a failure on the part of the public here, which is to say the protests have been pretty small and uninspiring, and every woman I know, and a lot of men, are really, really upset about it, but it's not actually translating into the same level of public, you know — we're not projecting that outrage, in a visible way, that makes the decision seem untenable. We're just sort of crying privately, and that's ... it's just not ... I mean, you know, we're coming off a pandemic. We've been, as you say, there's one crisis after another.On a personal level, I understand someone being like, "I'm not about to organize a march on this myself to some degree," but when you add up that exhaustion, you're just like, "well, then who's leading the way?"David RobertsYes. My dark story is the exhausted acquiescence after the theft of the 2000 presidential election, basically, was the starting gun, for a century thus far, of exhausted acquiescence to incremental ratcheting up of these authoritarian impulses and the reactionary backlash, just that was where to draw the line, right? And ever since then, it's just been retreat, pulling the lines back, back, and like, look where we are now. There was a freaking coup, and we can barely act collectively like it was a bad thing, much less hold people accountable, or whatever.David Wallace-WellsYeah. I mean, the perspective on the Left, on the hearings is almost like, this is good TV.David RobertsOh, God.David Wallace-WellsWhich I don't mean to, it is good TV. They've been much better at it than previous people doing previous versions of the same thing.David RobertsWell, I feel like we should have learned by now that nobody involved cares about being outed, or shamed, or scolded, or exposed. Like, none of that matters. Consequences matter, and that's it. And there just haven't been any.David Wallace-WellsYeah. I would say I think that the hearings have damaged Trump's chances of the nomination.David RobertsYes, they have helped DeSantis quite a bit, I think.David Wallace-WellsBut they haven't hurt Trumpism.David RobertsOkay. We've wandered so far afield, David, I'm going to bring it back. I'm going to bring it back for the final question then, which is related to this, which is, do you think that ... this air pollution story that you're telling, that you're sort of over there pounding on your table, telling which trying to break through, is very striking, and I think new to people.And so I wonder, and as you say, addressing it and addressing climate change are basically the same damn thing. You're trying to stop burning fossil fuels, right. So do you think that the sort of global climate community, a. ought to or b. can use this new air pollution story as an accelerant in the effort on climate? Or do you think that normalization is such that it's just like the shock pads on the dead body, you just can't get any more juice out of anything? Do you think it's going to help or work?David Wallace-WellsI think it's already helping. I think that global political leaders have a growing understanding that burning fossil fuels has really terrible health effects that are concentrated in their own countries, which is to say, that they can control those effects in the way that they can't control the global climate change dynamics. I think that the climate movement could bring out this imperative a little more clearly, and I think to some more effect. But I also wonder, really, how much more the curve can be bent. The way I see the changing climate dynamics is that we may be moving relatively, already relatively close to a kind of best-case decarbonization pathway.And that's not to say that I think disastrous climate change will be averted. It's just to say that when we start imagining even faster paths of decarbonization that have already been promised, I start to worry and wonder whether those are even technologically feasible. Like, getting the whole world to net zero at 2050, or 2060, is a really gargantuan task. I think it's beyond our capacity. And so one version of the question is like, "if we're already committed to those incredibly fast pathways, what difference does it make to be yelling about air pollution a bit more?" Another version of the answer, though, is to say, "well, the problem is not the commitments we've made, it's how fast we're moving to fulfill them."And I do think that on that point, in some of the ways that we've been talking about, the localness of the effect, localness of the control, and the sort of immediacy that most people feel about like choking on bad air as opposed to breathing clean air. I do think that there there can be some difference made there. I do think that especially people lobbying to close down local coal plants, for instance, can make a difference through appeals from air pollution.David RobertsAny context in which cost-benefit analysis is involved, this swamps it, right? Like, once you bring this new air pollution data in, you're like, you win all those arguments, right? It's ridiculous.David Wallace-WellsYeah, I mean, you know, the US government officially sets the value of human life at something like $7 million, which means that, like, if we have 350,000 lives lost every year, that's a lot of money.David RobertsI can't do that math on the flight deck. I was going to see if you could do it.David Wallace-WellsIt's a couple of trillion dollars a year that should be, in theory, should be spent to clean this up.But I would say in the big picture, it's also, just one little last point on that decarbonization stuff, is like there's a huge difference that's going to be made through EV adoption and electric bikes in other parts of the world too. And we're going to pick up a lot of those gains that way, which is a story that's unfolding. It could be accelerated by policy. But it also seems to be, to me at least, to be unfolding, almost independent of policy pressure, at least in the US right now. And I think that's also useful to keep in mind, that whether or not the climate movement can weaponize air pollution to accelerate the green transition, whether or not they can do that, the air will be cleaner 30, 50 years from now than it is now.David RobertsThe benefits will happen.David Wallace-WellsSome benefits, like we can get there faster, we can get farther along. But to the extent that it can feel oppressive to contemplate the climate future and think that all we're doing is choosing between degrees of disaster, the air pollution story tells us slightly different and more optimistic story, which is to say, it is probably now worse than it will ever be in the future. And in that sense, not to sound too much of a cliche, but there's something we can look forward to there.David RobertsWell, that's a delightfully optimistic place to wrap it up. Thanks for coming on, and thanks for your work bringing attention to this. I feel like it should be talked about a lot more than it is.David Wallace-WellsThanks for having me to talk about it's. Great to schmooze.David RobertsAlright. See you, David.Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. 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, 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 changed demonstrably. But it's not enough to say that you have to prove it to elected officials every single day, and prove to elected officials that you have their back, that there is a political benefit for talking about climate, for running on climate, and then for governing on climate. And that's where we are today.David RobertsI want to ask about that. It does seem like one clear victory of the climate movement between, let's say, 2016 and 2020 and today is that it really does seem like elected Democratic officials have put climate at the center of their agenda for whatever that counts as victory. That does seem like a clear-cut victory, like something activists did, right. It really does seem like the party establishment has swung around behind this full square.Lori LodesIncredibly so, right. This was not a long time ago an issue that people, elected officials, didn't want to talk about except when they had to. And now you have climate being the singular issue that completely united the Democratic Party in Build Back Better, right. When you look at the vote for Build Back Better in the House, and I'm just going to put the Senate aside, I clearly did a little bit of gymnastics to get around Manchin, but if you look at the vote in the House, there was one Democrat who voted against Build Back Better, and, you know, this was the House version of it.So it was big and there was a lot of great policy pieces in it, and that was Jared Golden up in Maine. If you flash back to 2009 when the House passed Waxman-Markey, there were 44, I think, somewhere around there of Democrats who voted against it. And that did not happen by accident. There has been a concerted strategy over the last ten years to really, "how do we move the ball forward, how do we get more people involved?" And a lot of credit where it is due to young people, in particular Sunrise, for really galvanizing, mobilizing people in a new and better way and really giving a voice to young people where candidates felt like they could no longer ignore it.David RobertsWell, let me offer one of the contrarian takes somewhat against that point. There's a certain critique that says, "yes, Democrat elites, democratic elites, democratic politicians and funders are definitely now on board with climate. That's very, very visible. But in some sense they are out ahead of the public in that score. In other words, the public will say, yes, we care about climate, but when they rank issues, it rarely rises to the top of the pile." So what do you say about the critique that in some sense this is more of an elite phenomenon than it is a grassroots phenomenon?Lori LodesI don't believe it. I think yes and right. Yes. It is obviously something that the "elite", the donors, and policy experts, and think tanks, and activists care deeply about and have pushed hard on. At the same time, one in three Americans last year experienced an extreme weather disaster. That tracks with how many people? The Yale communications folks who do their like polling every year?David RobertsThe Six Americas.Lori LodesYeah, the Six Americas, right. Alarmed people who are convinced climate change is happening, that it's human caused, and it's an urgent threat. One out of three are alarmed, and this was in the end of 2021. Compare that, so the one out of three, compare that to just four years ago, and it was one out of five. That is a huge dramatic difference, and I think that is what has changed, in part, like, so put the activism aside, put the work we're doing aside. It is people are living and having their lives at risk, having their livelihoods at risk in a way that they weren't even just a few years ago.Or at the same scale that's happening now.David RobertsWell, let's then talk about how that is or isn't translating to actual political power. So, you know, the polls all said, in 2020, I'm giving myself nightmare flashbacks. No, but the polls all said that Biden was going to come in with a relatively substantial Senate majority. They were talking 52, 53, 54. Didn't turn out that way. And so in the end, the entire fight to pass this grandiose agenda that Biden ran on came down to the 50th vote, i.e. our old friend Joe Manchin. And so I just wonder, from the perspective of climate activists, I mean, one of the notable things about climate activism in the run up to 2020 is that the activist community seemed to very consciously try to get out of its silo, and become more intersectional with other parts of the Left, and to speak up more about police violence, and all this kind of stuff.And we can discuss whether that was the right kind of strategy. But long story short, it's very clear that climate activists now are on the Left. So my question is just basically, in retrospect, this all came down to Manchin and what he was willing to accept. Two questions. One, was there anything that climate activists could have ever done to reach Joe Manchin, or change his mind, or affect the outcome here?Because it's literally just a binary. It's either Manchin says yes or no. Was there ever anything activists could have done to shift that one way or the other? And then secondarily, was there ever anything that Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden could have done?Lori LodesThose are two very different questions.David RobertsVery different questions. Go with the activist one first.Lori LodesThe problem in any sort of negotiation is when one side does not care, and the likelihood is that the party who does not care will win in some way or another, right? They have nothing to lose. They don't care.David RobertsYou think Manchin from the beginning was perfectly willing to let all of this blow up and nothing pass?Lori LodesAbsolutely. Including infrastructure. And I think that's the problem. Like, if you look back at, go in the wayback machine, of what we could have done differently, should we have really been pressuring progressives to stand strong to the nine so-called centrist who were demanding that the bipartisan infrastructure law be voted on before we voted on the Build Back Better law?David RobertsYes.Lori LodesSure. But would it have changed where we are? And I'm not sure the answer is yes. I mentally believe that there is nothing we could have done. And I hate to say this, right, it's all about an after action plan. What could we have done differently? And I just I do not know what would need to have changed for Joe Manchin to have cared more, right? Like his approval rating in 2021 was 40% in the first quarter of 2021, right. Joe Biden comes into office 40%. His approval rating a year later was 57%.David RobertsYeah, that's a bitter pill. But if you're looking at it through narrow, lizard brain, self-interested in politics, he did the right thing. That's how you win in West Virginia is by theatrically humiliating your own party and its leaders. But I guess it just comes down to, like, how much did you think Manchin might be something other or more than just a lizard brain, self-interested politician? And it turns out it was zero more than that.Lori LodesI do not think that anything that we could have done, and we the "big we", we on the outside, we the climate community that was going to outweigh his own priorities and his own interest.Yeah.Right? My job over the past 18 months has been doing everything possible to make the politics as favorable for passing a big, bold piece of climate legislation. And I will be honest, my priority was not on getting Joe Manchin to vote, because that was not going to happen from anything we did. We couldn't spend money in West Virginia, like Climate Power going in.David RobertsHe would love that.Lori LodesRight, exactly. It worked to his benefit to have us really blowing up at him. Now the real question is what should Schumer or Biden, President Biden, done differently?David RobertsThe hot question of Democratic politics right now, was there anything they could have done?Lori LodesI mean, honestly, I want to go back to like February 2021, right, when the decision was made to break off the American Rescue Plan, and to separate it, and to do it by itself because we — understandably COVID bad, need to get money out to states quickly. But the decision was made to split it up, right. That we'll do COVID separately, and then we'll do everything else that the president ran on and that are definitely — I believe President Biden when he says that climate is his next central threat. I believe him. I know it to be true that this is a top priority for him, but I think one of the biggest lessons from health care is that we went too slow.David RobertsYeah.Lori LodesRight.David RobertsOh, my God.Lori LodesWe let the Republican shenanigans, despite the fact that we had 60 Democratic votes at one point, which is just still rattles my brain.David RobertsI know.Lori LodesAnd we took time and that's what it's always been against us. Now we're at the beginning of July, and we are still squeezing to get anything we can just so we can act.David RobertsWell, I mean, one of the most frustrating things is all the Democrats, I mean, the whole party came into Joe Biden's first term saying, "we've learned our lesson. We all know what happened last time. We did too little, we did too slow. We need to go big, we need to go fast, we need to not get stuck getting drawn out and extended negotiations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera," and then just drifted into more or less the exact same friggin dynamic as last time.Lori LodesExactly. And there's always a reason why, right? There's a justification for why this time is different, and why we have to do big rescue package first, and then we'll do it, and we're going to do it immediately, right? I mean, it's like going back to 2009. I was at Service Employees International Union, and we had this unity table, right, with all of the progressive groups, and we were going to pass the four major priorities in the first 100 days of the president's term in office. And it was cap-and-trade, it was healthcare, it was immigration.And, I come from labor, Employee Free Choice Act, right. 100 days, we're going to do it all. And I think this time we still fell into that of like, "okay, they're going to do the American Rescue Plan. But you know what? Before Memorial Day, we'll be able to get this started and moving in, like, pass it by 4 July at the latest. At the latest." Here we are a year later, and I still have a shred of optimism that we will actually get something done.David RobertsBut you think splitting Build Back Better off from the COVID recovery package that lowered the chances of it passing?Lori LodesYes.David RobertsAnd then splitting infrastructure off from the rest of Build Back Better also lowered the chances of it passing? In some sense, it was the same calculation both times. Like, is there advantage? Is there a moral obligation to get something done quickly? And on the COVID recovery, you can see the argument for speed. Like, it's very clear. But on infrastructure, it's so ridiculous. You had some of these Democratic moderates saying, like, we've got to pass it immediately. And you have democratic "moderates" still complaining about the small delay progressives inserted into that process, as though the exact timing of a giant infrastructure bill is politically relevant.It was also ridiculous, but, okay, now we've split off infrastructure. Now we've got the Build Back Better, and Manchin is chopping away at it, and chopping away at it, and chopping away at it. So now here we are, July 1st, midterm train headed our way. I'll ask sort of another version of the same question. From where we're sitting right now, is there anything activists can do or should be doing right now to raise the chances of something passing out of this process before the midterms? Is there anything, I mean, it really seems like a super-inside game now.Lori LodesWell, it is absolutely a super-inside game. When things sort of, there was this moment earlier this year when things sort of hit pause in the White House was very clear. It hasn't worked for us to talk about this publicly. We tried. It didn't work. Everyone sort of needed some cooling off time. Remember that this was coming off of the democracy reform fight of how can we change the filibuster, and Manchin and Sinema we're in those crosshairs as well.David RobertsBiden committed the apparently unforgivable sin of simply mentioning Joe Manchin's name in the context of explaining why this thing wasn't passing, just that. And Joe Manchin got his butt up on his shoulders about that. Such a tantrum his he fit. Good Lord.Lori LodesThat, I think is the perfect example of why this has been such a challenging process right. And why it is so impossible to surmise what we should be doing now, right. What activists can be doing when the president who — the thing that I have held on to, and I will say that it's been shaken a little bit, but the thing that I have held on to is that Senator Manchin may not like us climate activists. He may not like the Democratic Party in many respects.David RobertsHe really doesn't seem to like his own party at all.Lori LodesAnd it's fine. He may not like the folks in the White House, except for one person. I do believe that he has great affinity for Joe Biden. And so that is what I've held on to, like that Biden will be able to get Manchin over the line. And I think there have been extremely productive conversations between Schumer and Manchin. So I think we are on the precipice of well, either way, we are on the precipice of knowing one way or another.David RobertsFinally.I know, and I'm just like, well, thank God, right? I really think by August 4th, August 4th is when the Senate goes home on August recess, or is scheduled to go home on August recess, I should say.Lori LodesAnd that's really also when the elections start in full gear. Nothing else matters. Elections.David RobertsBut if it's true that Manchin has some fondness for Biden, how then do you explain the fact that it looks like, if you look at his behavior over the last two years, it looks like from all appearances, like he has deliberately not just blocked Biden's agenda, but dragged it out and humiliated Biden repeatedly. Like Biden told progressives, I mean, straight out, "I'm in good with Manchin. If you split these two bills up, I promise we're going to vote on them together. I've got Manchin," and then Manchin just very publicly let him say that and then walked out afterwards. It was like, " Blllt, no, he doesn't."It just seems like he could have accomplished his narrow political goals without humiliating Biden so much. There seems like an element of just kind of bullying to it. So what's going on there? If he likes Biden, why is he humiliating Biden? Like kicking sand in his face on a beach or something?Lori LodesI'm just shaking my head. You can't see that I was shaking my head throughout every word of you said. I was about to say that I wish I could get into Joe Manchin's mind, but I'm pretty sure that I don't want to be there. And the simple answer is, like, I don't know. Again, I think at the end of the day he's acting in his own interest, and I think for whatever reason, he has decided that it's been okay to publicly challenge the president of the United States. I'm honestly at a loss.David RobertsAnd the 49 other members ...Lori Lodes49 fellows ...David RobertsOf his caucus just like zero ...Lori LodesRight?David RobertsZero respect for them, zero concern for their political fate. I don't know. I guess the big question at the beginning of all this was how awful is Joe Manchin? And he turned out to be more awful than anyone predicted, which to me remains under-explained. But you're right, none of us are in his head or particularly want to be. So maybe he'll write a freaking memoir or something these days. So here's a slightly more forward looking question. If in the next month this sad, battered process limps over the finish line and something gets passed, I think we can probably expect it not to be the grandiose $550 billion climate package that was going to be in the original Build Back Better.No one, I assume, not you, not anyone outside the room knows what might survive. But I think we can expect an extremely diminished, let's say, climate package to be surviving in that. And it will probably be larded up with a lot of fossil fuel giveaways, because that's basically what Manchin wants. So then what is the right, I mean, this is asking you to speculate since we don't know the specifics of what's in it, but assuming, let's say it's a diminished but still better than nothing climate package, what's the right attitude for the climate movement or climate activists to take?Because we constantly face this question, right? Do we decry how diminished it is? Do we celebrate because Democrats desperately need a win and they desperately need to not let the country slip into one party autocracy in the next couple of years? Just what's the right posture for activists once something plops out of this?Lori LodesFirst, I think it's important to sort of take a look at what could be in it. Most likely, and Senator Manchin has said as much publicly, is a lot of what they're talking about has been around the clean energy tax credits, right. To stipulate at the outset, you are correct, this will not be what passed the House. The world has changed a lot, it turns out in the past six to nine months, the war in Ukraine has really shined a light on just the dangers of our dependence on fossil fuels. But for someone like Joe Manchin, it has shined a light on ...David Robertsthe need for more.Lori LodesWe need more. And so the politics of the moment have made it even more complicated. And again, going back to what I said, he doesn't care. If you don't care if something fails, then your bargaining hand is pretty high. And so the tax credits. I really think, and you know this much better than I do, but if we are able to get the ten-year clean energy tax credits. It will transform. It has the power to transform depending on, again, we need to see it all. It has the power to completely transform the power sector. It has the power to increase, double the amount of clean electricity that is getting generated in this country.And will that be enough? I think we have to see what else will be in it, like what will be included to increase production. But I am of the opinion, and this probably isn't a surprise, considering how hard I fought to pass the Affordable Care Act, that if we can get tax credits for clean electricity, and new technology, and manufacturing that will create jobs, and jump start new businesses, and help lower cost, and put us on a path to doing something about climate change. That's huge. It will be historic. It will be the most historic climate action taken in this country ever, right?David RobertsYeah. Such a low bar.Lori LodesI mean, it is such a low bar, but that's what I was going to say is I do think it will put us up there with major action that other countries have done and it will get us ... You know, we are a laggard, right? It's like us in Australia, and Australia's, elections just sort of upended everything in a good way. And so I think it redefines what our commitment is to climate, and it will spur a lot of additional actions at the state level in local communities, from corporations, from new businesses, and that will be huge.David RobertsWell, how do we avoid, and we talked about this before, the sort of dynamic which bedeviled Waxman-Markey and Obamacare in different ways, which is that there's all this activist momentum going in and that it meets the sort of morass of US politics. And what comes out the other side is a diminished and compromised form of what went in that ends up having sort of no fans, no boosters. And in Waxman-Markey, that resulted in it not passing because it had a bunch of very concerted opponents, and basically, no one loved it. By the end, no one loved it. The Left didn't love it, the center was scared of it, no one but like establishment climate groups, and even then only at the leadership level would even say a good thing about it.Lori LodesRight?David RobertsAnd in a sense that happened to Obamacare too. Like Obamacare got across the finish line, but it was such a sour taste, everybody ended up hating it for different reasons once it passed, and that made it very vulnerable going forward. And it seemed to sap, like for all the work the Democratic Party put into it, got very little political benefit out of it because by the time the thing passed, everyone was sick of the whole thing. So I'm wondering, like, how do we avoid that happening again? How do we avoid some form of diminished form of Build Back Better passing, and everybody in the Democratic base just being like and getting no political boost out of it.Lori LodesI mean, it's a real challenge, right. I do want to go back to Obamacare days, because I think it's an important lesson in how we're approaching this moment, is that you captured it, right. The Left was against it. There wasn't a public option. It did not go far enough. All of the things that we know to be true also helped drag it down. When the law passed, I think the approval of the Affordable Care Act was around 46%.David RobertsYeah, it was grim.Lori LodesIt was grim. And in 2016, the disapproval was near 50%. Today it's back up to 55% approval. Now, the reason why a lot of that happened, yes, it was the Left, but it was also a $450 million campaign spent by the Right over four years, the first four years after it was passed, to define it. And I think the question for us is how are we going to define whatever passes if it does demonstrably bring down emissions, if it puts us on that path to at least have a fighting shot at meeting what we need to do, which is cutting our emissions by half by 2030?I think the reason why I did the poll numbers for the ACA is because I think it's really important to remember nothing happened for ten years because of how hated it was. Nothing happened. We do not have ten years on climate to wait.David RobertsWell, this gets to a question that I touch on quite a bit in my podcast and writing, and I just did a whole pod about it with Dan Pfeiffer a couple of weeks ago, which is the Right has this giant machine. And if it wants to define something in the eyes of conservatives, it can do so more or less overnight, because it's got the whole conservative base wrapped up in this bubble of Fox and Breitbart, and these shady Facebook pages, and all this kind of stuff. So if they want conservatives to think X, Y, or Z about Build Back Better, they can just transmit that to conservative eyeballs boom immediately in a coordinated way.The Democratic Party does not have any such machine, does not have any such media army. We tend to just sort of like, Chuck Schumer wanders out to a press conference and says his talking points to the mainstream media reporters and just hopes. Hopes against experience that those talking points will be conveyed in some sort of relatively accurate way down to Democratic voters. So my point being, even if the Democratic Party wants and needs to define this, whatever comes out of the Build Back Better process in a positive way, do they have the machinery to do that?Lori LodesI think you answered the question already. I mean, the reality is the extreme Right, which now controls the Republican Party, the so called MAGA Republicans, are really good at following what Fox News tells them to think. Like, they have really great followers. One of the things that I pride in being a liberal Democrat is that we have our own ideas, and we're constantly thinking and challenging each other. That's not what the other side does. McConnell can send out a message, McCarthy can send out a message, and all of the members get in line. Their Twitter accounts all say the same thing.David Robertssometimes literally the same thing.Lori LodesLiterally the same thing.They take that message to Fox News, and they have that echo chamber that we do not have. And by the time — when this passes, knock on wood, in a month, we will not have changed that calculation. And so I think the question is, "what do we do? How do we show up?" We have spent a lot of time over the past year trying to educate elected officials about why it's important to act, why it's important to see this moment as an opportunity to invest in America and the American people in jobs and lowering costs in a more just and equitable society.And now we need to start taking that conversation to the American people and having a conversation, however we can, in reaching them where they are about whatever it is that it will be called, what it will mean to their lives, how it will lower the cost of prescription drugs, how it will lower their energy cost, whatever else that will end up in there. And we have to tell that story as loudly as possible. And I think the odds are not in our favor to be able to do that as effectively as probably the campaign to label it another socialist grab.David RobertsYeah, my worry about all this, and this worry goes beyond climate is just that we're going to have something like Build Back Better pass, and then we're going to have these big hearings on January 6th. We're going to have all this stuff put to voters, and then for a whole variety of reasons, you know, it just looks like 2022 is going to be terrible. The midterms are going to be terrible. Just historically they're fated to be terrible for Democrats, which is going to look like voters basically rejecting Build Back Better, rejecting the January 6th Commission, affirming the coup attempt, affirming all the obstructionism, do you know what I mean?It's just going to look like everything they've done is going to get affirmed in 2022, which is just my ultimate nightmare.Lori LodesYes. I mean, everything you said is what keeps wakes me up in the middle of the night, right? And why I have insomnia, it's just like the dread of where we are. I hope that the Supreme Court's overreach power grab that we have seen just over the last week, but really they've been building up to it, right, that it will break through in a way that will change the calculation for November. But that's hard, right? It's hard when you have elected officials like, "well, that's why you just need to vote." And it's like, "but you haven't done anything to earn my vote."David RobertsI know.Lori LodesBut the reality is that the elections this November will decide: will abortion rights be ended? Will we ever take climate action and even have a fighting chance to not basically take down the entire planet with us? Will guns be allowed in every community on the streets, wherever you are? And the American people are going to have a chance to vote on it. And while that doesn't necessarily meet the rage that I and others have of being at this moment, it is the tool we have to send a message that, "this is not okay. You cannot take us back."David RobertsThe way I put it is, "just vote for more Democrats," is both the least exciting and motivating political slogan I can imagine in the universe. But it is also, at the same time, plainly true.Lori LodesThink about it.David RobertsIt can be both at once.Lori LodesRight? Think about if we did, you were saying it earlier, in 2020, the expectation is that we would have 52, 53 Democrats. Think about if we did, how this all looks different. Manchin would not have been in the driver's seat necessarily.David RobertsIt's a good way to torture yourself. Just think if Maine voters hadn't been their quirky selves.Lori LodesI mean, I just think about North Carolina more than anything.David RobertsLet's not give ourselves ulcers right here in real time. So I want to ask another question about the future. Pretty grim questions. Say, as odds have it currently that Joe Biden loses one or both houses of Congress in the '22 election. That means, I think you and I can agree that legislatively Dems are done through 2024. They're just not going to let anything else pass. And then if you look at the sort of trend lines, it's probably going to be a good long while before Democrats have a trifecta again, which is the only way that they can pass anything.It could be ten years, it could be more, which just seems like in November 2022, the door to federal climate legislation, which was open just briefly these last two years, is going to slam shut, maybe not permanently, but for a long time. So given that, what should the climate activist community do with its time? It just seems like, honestly, getting involved at the federal level is just a waste of time. So I'm just curious, what do you think the movement should do? What should activists do in the event that happens?Lori LodesI think first and foremost, going back 30 seconds ago is before we get to 2022, we've got to do everything we can so that we keep the Senate and the House and the presidency, obviously, because that is the reality. If you look at the Senate map in 2024, if you look at it in 2026 ...David RobertsIt's real bad.Lori LodesAnd that's why you said — it is horrible. We will not have power again, at least until probably 2028, 2030.David RobertsAnd I think people I just want to insert this too, because I'm not sure it's widely appreciated. It's not just because of which states are coming up for elections. It's also the general bias of the Senate toward rural.Lori LodesOh, my goodness.David RobertsAreas and rural states is just getting worse and worse and worse. Like the playing field is tilting farther and farther.Lori LodesThat's exactly right. Exactly right. So first, I refuse to give up hope that we can do something about November because I do believe we can. And there's a lot of great candidates out there running, and running on climate. So that is the one thing I would say. It's like don't vote for the Democrats, vote for the people who are going to do something on climate. Look at who is saying what on climate. It just so happens they will all be Democrats because the Republican party refuses to even acknowledge that this is real, let alone doing something about it.So putting that aside, you got to it. But I think, especially after the Court decision this week in West Virginia vs EPA that we have to look to the states. I do believe this is our last, best chance at congressional action. And it just so happens we have like four or five weeks, right? Our window is now like rapidly closing.David RobertsWell, I just want to say I just want to put it on the record here, even though it's pointless and petty, that almost the first post I wrote after the 2020 elections was, "hey, look, we got a two year window, and then it's going to close probably for decades afterwards. Let's not mess around. Let's do what we can while we can."Lori LodesHere we are.David RobertsShockingly, no one listened to me, and we did this instead.Lori LodesBut the great thing is that we do see states acting, right? Like just this week, I don't know if Newsom actually signed it into law or not, but they put forward nearly $54 billion in climate. New York is obviously taking action. You have mayors and governors across the country.David RobertsNew Hampshire, am I making this up or did New Hampshire just pass some super ...Lori LodesNew Hampshire just pass something too. And when you think about New Hampshire, and other coastal states, who are going to see a boon in jobs and sort of reworking of their economy because of offshore wind, right? I think that there is so much capacity at the state level, and we are all going to need to lean in and really have those states set examples. They need to act as quickly as possible. I think that's the biggest thing when you think about where we are in 2022, what could happen in 2024, the states need to act quickly, and get as much progress underway, and have it locked in before 2024.David RobertsYes. Because this is something else, I think, that doesn't get discussed enough, which is that if, God forbid, if Republicans take a trifecta in 2024, which at least like currently, that's what the sort of models show. They're not just going to sit by and let states do exciting progressive things without pushback. The Republican federal government and the Republican Supreme Court are going to be extremely hostile to state action. So that's going to be a whole new dynamic for Dems to struggle with.Lori LodesRight. If the federal government wants to stop states from taking real climate progress, we know the Court is captured. That has been proven time and time again. It will be hard to stop. There is a great uplifting statement, but I do think it's why we need the states to move quickly. We need to get creative and aggressive in states filing lawsuits as well, right. Like there was these horrendous comments from Lindsey Graham earlier today, "about 50 years, we had a 50 year plan. We told you what we were going to do, and we won power. So we're doing it."And it's like we need to have that same type of deliberate focus of mobilizing on climate. I think we are on a path, but it's going to be hard, and it's why again, going back to your point, yes, it sounds hollow, but the most important thing to do is to make sure that climate champions are the ones who are deciding what our future is going to be.David RobertsI think there are lots of people in the climate movement who have already sort of concluded that pursuing federal action is futile, or even that pursuing sort of going primarily after government is futile. And they're turning their attention to, sort of, other institutions, I think in particular of the activists turning their attention towards financial institutions, banks and things like that. So do you have any thoughts on, I know you're sort of, by experience and inclination, a creature of government battles and politics, but are there extra governmental sort of roots forward for climate activism, do you think?Lori LodesAbsolutely. But I also want to start out with, like, we cannot give up on the federal government getting involved in doing more. There's a quote that I read coming out of the Australian election which was, "it seems impossible until it isn't."Right?The Australian Prime Minister lost because he was doing too little on climate in a time where no one thought that was actually going to happen. The fires, the floods, everything changed the conversation. And I don't think that we can afford to take any tool out of our toolbox because the problem is so big and the status quo is so ... not even suboptimal.It's just so not enough.David RobertsThat's like the kindest possible words you could put on. But people do have to prioritize, and there's limited money, and there's limited organizational power, there's limited sort of opportunities to communicate with the public. So you do have to make some choices.Lori LodesAbsolutely. And I think what is happening in the financial sector is extremely promising, and a lot is moving. I think that you have seen a concerted pushback, recently, about shareholder activism, the so called ESG platform that corporations use to show that they are taking action, and it shows it's working right. And I think it's something we have to keep an eye on because they really are gunning for taking down ESG. And by "they" I of course mean the oil and gas lobby and their mad Republican allies in Congress, and that is a real opportunity to shape the market if corporations change how they are doing business right.And I think that is one of the biggest opportunities we have. Also, you have front-line communities who are on the front lines every single day in dealing with the ravages of climate change, dealing with the legacy of pollution, and they are going after the fossil fuel infrastructure in a way — like the Louisiana bucket brigade — that sort of challenges the way we think about things. So I mean there is no shortage of the work that needs to be done at all. And I really think you said it, it's like, "how do we prioritize? What are we doing at this moment that will have the biggest impact and do the most to set us up, so that we really can meet our climate goals and not just abandon the planet."David RobertsAnother long running sort of intramural debate on the Democratic side. One of the things that is notable about Republican, the Republican Party especially recently, is its extraordinary level of self-discipline in the sense that if you drift off the path and say the wrong thing, you get taken out by a primary. And that's happened now enough times to enough high profile targets that the entire party apparatus is just absolutely cowed into saying exactly what the MAGA movement wants it to say. Like they have whipped the party into shape. And this is a long running argument on the Democratic side about whether there ought to be a Democratic Left that is equally sort of active and vicious, and whether taking out a few Dems that are wishywashy on climate change is, in your mind, a salutary effort to push the Democratic Party in the right place.How do you feel about this sort of taking out Democrats who aren't trying as hard as they should?Lori LodesSo I think that there is a very big need for the Democratic Party to have elected officials at every level who are willing to fight for climate change. The issue is just too existential. It's not just an issue. The problem is too existential and we need new, better elected officials who are willing to go to the mat on climate. The question about taking out Dems, like I am all for primaries, right? Like if a better Dem is out there, and takes or defeats an incumbent, and is able to go on and become a member of Congress, outstanding.And I think we have seen Sunrise and others wage really formidable challenges. I applaud those efforts, and I think they're very much needed as part of the architecture of how we get our issue to be a top tier issue. At the same time, I am really focused on how do we make sure that people know just how awful the Republican Party is as a whole, right.David RobertsThat is also my obsession. Lori, it's weird, I have that same quest.Lori LodesThere are people who will vote for a Republican even though they care deeply about climate, but the two don't go together. And I think it's an untenable position for the Republicans in the long term. And they know that, they see that. That's why they formed a so called "b******t climate caucus", right? And it's why Rick Scott, who put out his eleven point plan, he has climate in it, Right? After the words, "weather changes all the time. We care deeply about climate change, but we don't want to do any of these hysterics," right? It's just they are not going to be taking it seriously, and we need people in power who understand that climate change is an existential threat, and that we do not have the luxury of time to wait any longer on actually acting and acting boldly.David RobertsYes. Defining the Republican Party. What a thought.Lori LodesI know if you have a billion dollars and you want me to make that brand stick, I am so there for it.David RobertsYeah, I remember, I think it was on an Ezra Klein's podcast. I forget who the guest was. It was a historian. But the point the historian was making, which was sort of mind blowing to Ezra and to people listening, was just that, nominating Obama, lots and lots of voters. That was the first time they ever realized, "oh, the Democrats are the party of diversity and civil rights." That was the first sign, that was the first clue they had. Even though ...Lori LodesWhich is mind blowing, right?David RobertsYes. Even though there have been decades of experience by that point, which is just to say that people engaged in politics, like us, constantly fail to appreciate how little people know. And I think you're right. Like on climate, even though at this point, to people like us, it's sort of like painfully obvious, the lay of the land. I suspect that we're in a similar position of civil rights when Obama was like to most people, just don't know. They don't put it together. So I agree, just going out and saying things that we think are obvious seems very necessary at this point.Lori LodesAbsolutely. The only path forward is for us to be very clear about who's on what side, right. And I think, and for the Republican Party, it goes well beyond just not believing in climate science and refuting facts. They are beholden to the fossil fuel industry.David RobertsYes.Lori LodesRight. Millions of dollars, more than millions, pour into their coffers so that they will continue doing the oil and gas lobby's business.David RobertsIt does complicate, somewhat getting that message out when Biden's up leasing new oil and gas leases to oil and gas companies, kind of muddies the who's on what side message.Lori LodesIt makes it more challenging, for sure, but I do think there is a political reality that we are all dealing with and that elected officials are dealing with acutely, which is people are really struggling with gas prices, right. It's not just people in polling saying that. When I go to the grocery store, I hear about people talking about gas prices because they are so high. And I think we are in a really challenging moment where how does the leadership in this country show that they do understand that people are hurting, they are taking action and at the same time not put us on a path that will just make it worse.David RobertsYes. And maybe making a point like, "hey, maybe we shouldn't have spent the last several decades making all our cars bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and less and less fuel efficient, and building all our cities so that everyone has to drive everywhere. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't made those awful decisions and started doing something different now."Lori LodesThose are the exact questions we should be asking, right. Because the decisions we make now are going to impact people also for the next 30 years, right. We need to take action as soon as humanly possible. We should have taken action a long time ago, but then we also have to think about what is that 30 year trajectory, and what are we doing. My son is four years old, and I'm thinking about it constantly in this work, right? It's like, "what does the world look like when he is my age?" And it's scary. But we have to be thinking about our public policy not only in the short term but in that long term and answering those big questions when we're making our policies happen.David RobertsOkay, well, I suppose there was zero chance we were going to be super optimistic on this pod, but I think we weren't as horrifically depressed as we could have been. For us.Lori LodesIt could have been worse.David RobertsThat's our mantra. Now every day I wake up, "it could be worse."Lori LodesThere's a great children's book I have that I will send you that is all about. "It could be worse."David RobertsAll right, well, thanks for coming on, and thanks for talking, and maybe we'll talk again in a couple of years.Lori LodesThank you so much, sir.David RobertsAlright. Bye, Lori.Lori LodesBye.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

In this episode, lawyer 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 plants? But that's not quite right. He specifically didn't speak on the inside versus outside the fence-line question. It sounds like all he did is just say whatever regulations you pass on coal plants, they cannot require utilities to shift generation to non-coal plants, i.e. generation shifting. Is that all he said? Is that it?Jay DuffyWell, and he also didn't say that ... The interesting thing about this section 111 of the Clean Air Act, which is what we're under right now, is EPA doesn't actually require any sort of pollution control. What it does is come up with, okay, what's the best system of pollution control out there? Comes up with a standard, and then it's up to the states to then set standards for their individual power plants that they comply with in any way they see fit.David RobertsRight.Jay DuffySo in this ruling, it does seem like even complying with generation shifting is still on the table, you could have a rule based on cofiring, or CCS, or some other quote unquote inside the fence-line measure. It seems like the pathway forward could still be an individual plant deciding to shift generation.David RobertsRight. So I think, as I understand it, what he said was when EPA is contemplating output standards for coal plants, it cannot take generation shifting into account when setting the standard.Jay DuffyRight, that's exactly right.David RobertsIt has to set the standard based on inside the fence-line options like cofiring, like CCS, things like that. But in complying with that standard, the state can still use generation shifting. That's right?Jay DuffyI think so. I mean, there is a lot of ambiguity in this opinion. I think we'll be parsing through it for a while. I mean, as I said at the end, Roberts kind of says, "hey, even though I just said a lot of stuff negative about cap-and-trade, and I've said some other things about fuel switching, et cetera, I'm not ruling on that. This opinion doesn't rule on that. All this opinion is saying, the Clean Power Plan, don't do that again." I think we're going to have to read the tea leaves and find out which pollution controls have been cast more doubt upon in order to think about what the future of these regulations will look like.So yeah, it's a mixed bag and what is still on the table is a little unclear. I think the inside the fence approaches are definitely still on the table. Whether or not market mechanisms like trading or other things like that are still on the table, I'm not as clear. As part of basing the standard on those. Could you do a CCS based standard, carbon capture and sequestration based standard in conjunction with trading and set the BSDR and the standard on that? That's unclear in this opinion, to me.David RobertsRight, but if you could do it, it would have to be trading among coal plants, right? It would have to be trading among the regulated plants.Jay DuffyYes. I think thats ...David RobertsSeems like he's trying to sort of cut non-coal plants out of the picture entirely.Jay DuffyI think that's exactly right. I think that cannot be the basis of the standard. Shutting down the plant can't be the basis of the standard. We certainly know those are off the table and frankly, we've known that since they stayed the rule in 2016.David RobertsYeah. So I guess if we're just confining ourselves to this ruling and not trying to sort of contemplate what might come next or what else they might do, it seems to me that the sort of sole implication of this ruling is that standards for coal plant emissions are going to have to be less stringent than they otherwise could have been. That seems, because before you're setting the standard based on this broad set of possibilities, and now he sort of narrowed the set of possibilities, and so a standard based on that narrowed set of possibilities is probably going to be less stringent. Is that fair?Jay DuffyI think we could reach the same sorts of stringencies as the Clean Power Plan. You and Jack and Kirti talked about this a lot too, is that the Clean Power Plan was met eleven years in advance. So query whether that was all that stringent. The pathways forward of cofiring with natural gas or a carbon capture sequestration based standard, those techniques can, especially CCS, lead to near zero emissions. So I think there's still pollution control technologies out there that can do it, but that's yet to be seen.David RobertsAnd so to use those as the basis for your standards, say, if the EPA says we're going to set output standards for coal plants based on CCS, EPA has to demonstrate that CCS is what available? And does it have to show anything about the cost? Like, what does it have to demonstrate to allow it to use CCS as the standard?Jay DuffySure. So all those factors are listed in the statute. And is it adequately demonstrated? Is it cost reasonable? Does it reduce emissions? Is it the best? Does it take into consideration energy considerations such as reliability? So those are kind of the kind of things that they need to think about. In 2015, when the Obama administration promulgated the Clean Power Plan in it, they said, "we've looked at CCS, we've looked at cofiring, and they meet all the criteria of Section 111, but they're more costly than generation shifting. And we think even if we set a standard based on CCS or cofiring, that the bulk of the compliance would come from generation shifting. So we're just going to go with that."So to me, with that taken off, with generation shifting taken off the table, the record is already there for a kind of CCS/cofiring based standard. And right now, if anyone wants to build a new coal plant, that is the standard. Right now, it's based on partial CCSDavid RobertsRight. For new plants?Jay DuffyThat's right.David RobertsAm I wrong in thinking that the sort of net effect of this might be the coal industry just punching itself in the face because a standard that requires them to use CCS is going to be, it seems to me, way more destructive of the coal fleet than the alternatives.Jay DuffyI would say it w iill be more costly than generation shifting was, but still within the parameters of cost reasonableness under the Clean Air Act, with a forward looking, kind of technology forcing statute. And we have things like sulfur scrubbers in the 70s, which EPA promulgated rules in order to deal with acid rain. When the standard was imposed, there were only three in operation, these sulphur scrubbers, and there's only one vendor. By the end of the 70s, there were 16 vendors, and the cost of those scrubbers had been cut in half in 20 years. So I think the forward looking nature of the Clean Air Act provides a good pathway to cost declines.You know, that's not to say that the you know, obviously EPA has already found that CCS is cost-reasonable when it did so in 2014 and 2015.David RobertsWell, and surely in the subsequent seven years it has come down in cost.Jay DuffyThe cost has come down, and also the climate crisis has gotten worse. So the necessity to reduce these emissions is even higher.David RobertsLet's get back to what EPA should do next here in a little bit. First I want to talk about the ruling a little bit more. So let's talk about then major questions. Doctrine. The doctrine, as I understand it, is just, "if Congress intends agencies to do major things, it will specify so in law and statute. And we don't want agencies sort of interpreting vague statutes such that they are given major powers." Right? I mean, that's sort of the idea. And I think the idea in this case is the ability to regulate CO2 in the US economy is a major thing.So it is impermissible for EPA to sort of ring that out of the Clean Air Act because the Clean Air Act does not specifically say that. Is that more or less Robert's reasoning here?Jay DuffyWell, would you mind if I read you something before I hop into his reasoning?David RobertsPlease.Jay DuffyOkay. "The Court's alarm over global warming may or may not be justified, but it ought not distort the outcome of this litigation. This is a straightforward administrative law case in which Congress has passed a malleable statute giving broad discretion not to us, but to the Executive Agency. No matter how important the underlying policy issue at stake, this court has no business substituting its own desired outcome for the reason judgment of the responsible agency." Who wrote that?David RobertsWas that Scalia in Chevron?Jay DuffyThat's Scalia in Massachusetts versus EPA, along with his friends Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito.David RobertsHilarious.Jay DuffyI've been reading it over and over again.David RobertsThis is Chevron, right? This is what's known as Chevron, which is the idea, which has been practice, as far as I know, for quite a while in the Court, which is just giving agencies sort of broad ability to interpret statutes as they see fit and more or less trying to keep judges out of it. This has been standard practice for a long time, right?Jay DuffyThat's right. I mean, this is how Congress works, right? There's not a bunch of scientists and engineers, et cetera, over in Congress trying to figure out what the best pollution controls are and how a power plant works. So what Congress does is they want these laws to last for a long time. They want them to be able to adapt to new problems and new solutions. And so they write these kind of broadly worded statutes like, "Find the best System of Emission Reduction."David RobertsAnd the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are sort of legendarily designed to be flexible designed to incorporate new information and change and grow over time. That's partially why conservatives hate them so much,Jay Duffyright? That's exactly right. There are plenty of guardrails here. There are a lot of factors that Congress confined EPA with in order to find the best system of emission reduction. But up until this point, the "major questions doctrine" to me and to the dissent and what we argued in our briefing was Congress delegated this authority to this agency. And it's okay that it's broad words, but is it acting within its lane, its expertise? And is there anything in the statute or in any other law that kind of really conflicts is a mismatch between what they're trying to do and something else is pushing back on it.The interesting shift that happened here is the "major questions doctrine" used to be defined under this utility air case as, "Congress should speak clearly if it wishes to assign an agency decision of vast economic and political significance." And now there is a subtle shift here that does a lot of work in the West Virginia case. And it says to overcome the skepticism of this is a major rule the government has to point to clear congressional authorization to regulate in this manner.So it went from, "do you have the right to make the decision? Is this your decision to make?" To, "what decision did you make? What is the how? how you made the decision?" That actual rule needs to be kind of pre-authorized. And to me that subtle shift does a lot of work.David RobertsYeah. And it just seems completely counter to the spirit of the Clean Air Act because the whole point of the Clean Air Act is lawmakers in the 60s and 70s saying, "we don't know everything that's in the air that hurts people. So we're just going to say whatever that turns out to be, EPA should regulate it, right. Like whatever science discovers is in the air hurting us, EPA should regulate it." So sort of by definition, it can't specify in that law how EPA should regulate new threats. It doesn't know what the new threats are. That's the whole point.Jay DuffyRight. This section and a lot of these sections apply to a variety of different sources, a variety of different pollutants. So if you regulate X pollutant from a cement plant, can we not figure out what the best system of emission reduction is? We have to go knock on Congress's door and say, "is this too big? Is this a good approach here?" That's not how this is designed. It would really gum up the works.David RobertsYes, it would gum up the works. And I'm sort of obsessive about this, but it just seems like "major questions doctrine" as it's being interpreted on its face, counter to the literal spirit of a bunch of laws that Congress passed. It seems like in and of itself, it's thwarting Congress's intent under the guise of doing the opposite.Jay DuffyRight? That's right. I think Nathan Richardson wrote an article recently called "Anti-Deference".David RobertsRight.Jay DuffyIt's not even just Chevron. It's now you've got a thumb on the scale against doing something important, and it's anti-regulatory in nature. As you spoke about with Kirti and Jack, there isn't an issue brought up, there aren't any court rulings out there that say, "oh, you're not doing something important." That's a major question. And you could see that throughout, looking at the factual background as they laid it out, was a lot of focus on the cost to the industry without any description of the benefits to society.David RobertsYes, this is a sort of theme lately. They wrote a gun ruling that had virtually nothing in it about the victims of gun violence. They wrote an abortion ruling that had virtually nothing in it about the impact on women. And now they've written a pollution ruling that says almost nothing about the effects of pollution.Jay DuffyYeah. The humans who breathe.On humans.Yeah.David RobertsIt's striking. And so why ... that quote you read was the pretty standard Chevron reading of agency discretion, why do you think Roberts has shifted? Is it just as simple as because he can and has a giant majority now?Jay DuffyWe can kind of see this thread from Roberts over the course of the past decade or so. He, in a dissent to this case called City of Arlington, said that deferring to agency's broad interpretation of laws isn't quite the very definition of tyranny, but the danger posed by ... don't worry, it's not the very definition, but the ...David RobertsTyranny adjacent.Jay DuffyExactly. But the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.David RobertsI mean, yes, it can. I can dismiss it. Watch me. I just did.Jay DuffySo at the time in that dissent, justice Scalia actually responded to that dissent and said, you can characterize anything as a major question. You can characterize anything as over jurisdiction.David RobertsIndeed. Based on vibes.Jay DuffyExactly. Vibes only, a nod to our friends at the other pod. But he explained that everything could be characterized as a question about agency and authority, and that sort of rule would be an inappropriate transfer of interpretive power from the agencies to the court. I think that's kind of the path we've been on. The interesting kind of detour that Roberts took was in the Affordable Care Act case, he essentially said there, this is a major question. "The treasury shouldn't be making health care decisions. But I'm not going to say that the rule is illegal. I just am going to say that it's the court's decision to make."And there he upheld the quote, unquote, major rule. So we've kind of seen a shift just since the Affordable Care Act, and I was hopeful for a more narrower approach to the "major questions doctrine" than what we saw here, knowing that the Roberts opinion in King versus Burwell did actually end up upholding the major rule. It just didn't grant deference to the agency.David RobertsAnd now he is thwarting the agency directly. Let's talk about then. Maybe there's no answer to this, but what in the hell is a "major question"? What are the characteristics, what are the sort of metrics or standards by which an agency contemplating a rule sitting around, I'm just picturing them sitting around a conference table contemplating a rule, thinking, "well, but is this major?" How do they know what standards or metrics have been offered by Roberts for other people to judge whether something is major? Or is it literally just feels major to John Roberts?Jay DuffyHe literally said, in the opinion, "does it raise an eyebrow? Does it raise an eyebrow?"David RobertsWhose eyebrow? John? Who's eyebrow?Jay DuffyAnd how high does your eyebrow have to go?David RobertsI know, raise it a millimeter. 2 millimeter.Jay DuffyThat's the most striking. There are some parameters or factors, although even in Gorsuch's concurrence, he said, this is not an exhaustive list. Come with us. Come to us with further suggestions as to what might make something major.David RobertsOh, God.Jay DuffyBut is it old? Which strikes me saying, as the Constitution is 235 years old, has it not been used a lot? They just kind of use it or lose it idea. Is it an ancillary provision? I saw someone on Twitter earlier today say I love all of my Clean Air Act provisions equally, there are no ancillary provisions. They were all written by Congress, a sort of anti-novelty principle, which I think Jack made a great point on your last pod about, so once a law is enacted, if the agency doesn't go and do something big at the outset, they kind of get locked into what it is, even though here we're dealing with a portion of the statute that deals with an entirely different pollutant and a different source category.So of course, the solution is different.David RobertsNot to pound the table on this, but the whole freaking point of the Clean Air Act is to say we don't know all the pollutants yet. There might be new pollutants. Let's do scientific reviews every few years and see if there are new pollutants. So by definition, if you find a new pollutant that's novel, it it's going to be the first time like this. These are all Catch-22s.Jay DuffyThat's right. And I also think that the interesting thing here is that, it kind of goes back to that Scalia quote, that you can characterize anything as major. And I would characterize the Clean Power Plan as the most cost effective, efficient means of reducing emissions from the power sector based on decades of them doing exactly that, and then they continue to do it such that they reduce their emissions beyond the targets of the Clean Power Plan. But if you read the opinion, that is not what you come away with. You come away with this idea that there was an EPA takeover of the entire electric grid.And so that's what's troubling to me is that you can use these kind of squishy factors and characterize things however you see fit, to kind of fit the factors almostDavid RobertsWell this is one of the great ironies, and this is one of the things that makes me laugh about this whole judgment, is the particular provisions being characterized as major here, in this judgment. The targets were met without the regulations ever passing, meaning almost by definition, if they had passed, the targets would have been met at zero cost, since they were going to be met anyway. So if a regulation that would have had almost literally no effect on anyone at all, if that counts as major, what wouldn't count as major? Literally? We know how major this would have been.We can now see in historical retrospect how major it would have been. It would have been tiny. It would have been completely marginal. It would have done almost nothing.Jay DuffyWell, there is some interesting back and forth with Justice Alito at the oral argument where he was arguing, "that it's not about what's happening in this actual rule, it's about what could it, what is the most you could do with this new interpretation? That's the stick by which we should be looking at." Yeah, and I don't know how much that played into the thinking here, but you're right. I mean, there was no rule at issue. Justice Roberts essentially admitted that this was an advisory opinion upfront. So the standing here was based on this idea of voluntary secession exemption to mootness, which essentially says, "you EPA have told us that you're not going to bring the CPP back into effect, but you could, couldn't you?"And then they could look at the record and said, "no, the state plans were due to the agency in 2018. The targets have already been met." And so then they move on and fairly explicitly say that EPA needed to somehow demonstrate unequivocal abandonment of generation shifting, henceforth.David RobertsBut how could it demonstrate that? What does it even mean?Jay DuffyRight, well, it's by definition, the concept of generation shifting is not what was before the Court. The Clean Power Plan repeal, not even the Clean Power Plan was what was before the Court.David RobertsYeah, this is the most sort of tortured, obvious effort to insert itself in agency deliberations and just like scrabbling together the most thin justifications for it. It's really striking the deeper you get into it. So I wanted to ask briefly about concurrences. As I said, this seems like a very Roberts-esque ruling as opposed to an Alito-esque ruling. So were the other conservatives on the Court, did they have, as they want to do, crazier things to say in their concurrences?Jay DuffyAs someone who will be litigating before this Court again in the future, I'm sure I will not opine on anyone's craziness, however. So we've all known for a while that Justice Gorsuch is a fan of the non-delegation doctrine, and he provided us with a reading list in his concurrence. Interestingly, Thomas, who has signed on to these sort of concurrences on the non-delegation doctrine, especially on the shadow docket cases about vaccines and eviction moratorium, Thomas didn't sign on to this one, so I'm not quite sure yet what to make of that.David RobertsYeah, it's not like Thomas to show any restraint.Jay DuffyRight. Essentially, what Justice Gorsuch, he wanted to get into what the "major question doctrine" does, and I think he sees it as a way to vindicate his concerns about non-delegation, without all the messiness of essentially striking down multiple laws. He says that, "'the major question doctrine' is something that preserves Congress's power to legislate and for the lay people to have their say." But they did. The Clean Air Act was written, and it was supposed to do important things, and I think it discounts what Congress actually did. And there's a lot of public input that goes into these.David RobertsYeah, that's what I wanted to emphasize. They are trying to characterize agency actions as anti-democratic, as though there is this cabal of bureaucrats up there doing things with no care for the common man. But if you look at actual American governance, the EPA, in coming up with one of these rules, arguably takes in a lot more public input and is more responsive to public input than the friggin legislature is. Like, these rulemakings are arguably one of the most democratic things America still does.Jay DuffyYeah, that's right. And they are required under the Administrative Procedure Act to provide public comment. They can't change the rule too much after they provide the public notice of the rule. They need to take into account and respond to the thousands of comments that come in. This is, as you said, kind of more democratic than what we get to do with legislation. So I think it undermines that significantly.David RobertsI mean, I'm cynical about this, but this idea of non-delegation is basically just Congress shouldn't hand off important things to agencies. It should do the important things itself. Again, what counts is important. Again, why? This is the thing about non-delegation and "major questions doctrine". It's just like, where is this coming from? There's nothing in the Constitution. The word major does not appear. You know what I mean? Like, all these principles are just made up by conservative jurists. Am I wrong about this? Is there textual or constitutional basis for these things? Or are these just like, kind of how these guys feel?Like "they shouldn't be doing major stuff, It just feels wrong." What is the basis for these doctrines?Jay DuffyYeah, and I think the idea is that there's a separation of powers concern that Congress is supposed to be making the major decisions, and that the agencies are just supposed to be there to fill up the details pursuant to them making the major choices. But as we've talked about what constitutes major, and there's plenty of scholarship out there talking about the legislature delegating authority to agencies since the founding.David RobertsYes, the dissent had quite a bit on that, I think.Jay DuffyThat's right.There's also a really strange and gratuitous footnote about Woodrow Wilson in the concurrence. It was one of the stranger things I've read in a case in a long time. Gorsuch essentially says that, "Woodrow Wilson was a racist, which I believe is true and didn't like laymen, and that his attitude was that we need more experts making policy." And so the insinuation here is that you need to pick Woodrow Wilson's side or scientists and engineers making technical determinations about complicated pollution controls. Pick a side with Woodrow.David RobertsIt's a little bizarre guilt by association there.Precisely."This racist liked scientists. Do you like scientists? Sounds racist." The cynical take on non-delegation is just Congress doesn't have the expertise or the time to get into nitty gritty detail about specific decisions that administrative agencies might make. So if you say that all major decisions have to be made by Congress, in effect, you're just radically reducing federal power, right? You're just going to get a lot less law and regulation out of Congress because Congress just doesn't have the capacity to do what it's being asked to do, right?I mean, that's Gorsuch's long term goal, right? It's just to shrink the federal government and reduce federal power. Is that too cynical?Jay DuffyElena Kagan, Justice Kagan says in her dissent that all signs here point to just an animosity toward the administrative state. So the system, the way it works right now is a conservative Court can decide what is major and kick it back to a Congress who isn't working right now in a lot of ways.David RobertsYes, the very conservatives saying, oh, this is the job for Congress are the same conservatives who have spent decades rendering Congress completely useless, and frozen, and unable to do anything. It's almost like they just don't want the government to work at all.Jay DuffyI'll give them what one ... on our side of the briefs, we did understand and acknowledge that the Clean Power Plan was novel. We believed that the generation-shifting mechanism was fully supportable, and was demonstrated, and cost effective, and the best means of doing this, but we did in our briefing, we understand that creating a formal role for renewables to generate credits is novel and could be envisioned as outside of EPA's authority.David RobertsIt is a bit of a stretch.Jay DuffyIt's a bit of a stretch, and we admitted that in our briefing. And our hope was that that would create an off ramp within the "major questions doctrine", even, to say that the EPA has overstepped kind of in those same ways that they've overstepped before in the case law. They're looking at, like, treasury looking at healthcare or something like that. EPA kind of bringing in unregulated sources formally into a program. Maybe that was too far. And our hope was that that would lead to the Court being able to give a nod to "major questions doctrine" and sort of, are you staying in your lane the same sort of way as Justice Kagan describes the "major questions doctrine" in her dissent?But unfortunately, they decided that they needed to go further and kind of say, "is the rule that you came up with, is that pre-authorized by Congress?" Not just "is this within your lane?"David RobertsRight. But it is narrower than it could have been. So they're saying you can't take generation shifting into account. But I thought it was clever of you guys to argue this. In a sense, you gave them that as a sort of modified, limited ruling to sort of forestall them ruling in a much broader way. So the sort of generation-shifting thing is kind of like a sacrificial lamb that you offered up for them to kill. So they didn't kill the whole thing.Jay DuffyWell, not even the generation shifting amongst sources. The hope was that you could then preserve even just shifting between covered sources. What we kind of expressed was novel was including non-Clean Air Act sources in the program.David RobertsSo shifting amid regulated plants is still on the table.Jay DuffyI don't know.David RobertsWe'll find out in future lawsuits.Jay DuffyRight. I don't think anyone's chomping at the bit to test that one.David RobertsRight.Jay DuffyBut he did say the way the Clean Power Plan did it exceeded EPA's authority. And there's a lot of language in there that says that just reducing generation at a source is not a system of emission reduction. So I would doubt that that is within anything anyone wants to pursue and may just be precluded by the decision.David RobertsWell, I want to talk about what avenues EPA should pursue, but first, let's just talk briefly about my sense, is that what Roberts would have preferred to do on Dobbs and on abortion is shave away at it incrementally, bit by bit, because he kind of scolds the majority in that case for the jolt. This is too big of a jolt, and we're not supposed to jolt people. I want to erode abortion rights bit by bit by bit, like I'm eroding voting rights and money in politics. So we're easing our way into this new reactionary future. That seems to me like what he wanted to do on abortion and was upset that Alito didn't go along with it.It seems like that is what he's doing on the Administrative State question. So I'm curious about two things. One, I'm curious since he doesn't really control the majority anymore, right? Like if Alito, and Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett want to get together and go big, he can't really stop them anymore. So I'm curious about two things. One, why you think they signed on to the kind of slower, more incremental strategy this time, and then, secondly, what you think is next, because this is surely not the last word this court is going to have on the Administrative State.Jay DuffyRight. I mean, I think on the power plant side and the paths forward there, I think that was incremental. It's pretty narrow. It takes off just the Clean Power Plan approach. But I do think that the Chief is actually more aligned with the conservative, less incremental side on the administrative state. As I said, it's tyranny adjacent. I think this opinion actually is an opinion that the rest of the conservatives wanted to sign on to. It kind of creates this you don't need to get into Chevron or any sort of deference and it's actually an anti-deference canon.David RobertsThey never mentioned Chevron. It's quite striking.Jay DuffyNo, and the interesting thing too is that the Trump administration, when they repealed the Clean Power Plan, they came in with this Chevron one claim language. Every system that you utilize to control pollution from these plants needs to be to or at an individual source. It was a 65 page Federal Register notice. And, you know, half a page talks about the "major questions doctrine" and they say our plain reading of the Clean Air Act is that you can't, you can't use generation shifting and everything needs to get bolt on control. And we think the "major questions doctrine" confirms that.They don't even get into it all that much.David RobertsSo that's, in a sense, Roberts did not confirm that interpretation, right? The idea that the only permissible regulation here is something that you bolt onto a coal plant, which was sort of the Trump EPA's take. He didn't affirm that and sort of by implication said that's wrong, right? I mean, in some sense this is a ruling against that interpretation as well.Jay DuffyI think that's right. And I actually think that would have been a more dangerous decision for regulating power plants and for a path forward for power plants. They kind of were narrower on this. What does 111 say? And is it as confined and extreme as the Trump EPA had proposed? They were a little more narrow there, but then used the "major questions doctrine" much more than the Trump administration did in order to do the work of knocking down the Clean Power Plan.David RobertsWhat's next then? Are there other particularly significant cases regarding the administrative state that are on the docket? Or do we know sort of what the next step? I mean, I'm just assuming that Roberts is going to be trying to sort of destroy the administrative state in pieces. Is there any sense of what's coming next?Jay DuffyWell, I work on transportation litigation as well, and we're currently in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals litigating a challenge over light duty vehicle standards. And we have the statement of issues in from the red state attorneys general and there they're saying any reliance on transitioning to zero emitting vehicles ...David RobertsOf course.Jay DuffyRaises the specter of the "major questions doctrine".David RobertsSame basic thing, right? Same idea. You can't make standards based on the idea that fleets could switch to electric right?Jay DuffyThat's right. And the same sort of thing too, where a lot of the automakers, they're fine with the standards that EPA is coming out with. And as we saw in West Virginia, it was the coal interest and the red states. It wasn't the power industry. The power industry was actually arguing for this sort of interpretation because they know that this is the way that the industry has worked for years.David RobertsAnd I bet they would like to just know what the hell they're supposed to do at this point.Jay DuffyI know. I mean, that's the real troubling thing going forward is now everyone's guessing as to what's major.David RobertsI know this whole idea that conservatives care about regulatory certainty is such a freaking joke. They've just inserted very fundamental uncertainty into every agency decision now.Jay DuffyRight. Even thinking about the power plants, I've been on the briefs here. I've argued portions of the case and even I can't quite tell you what is on and off the table. And I've read the opinion ten times already. So I don't know how exactly we figure out on a variety of rules. There's always going to kind of be this looming big brother of major questions.David RobertsWell, this again is a cynical take on it, but I feel like cynicism is justified these days. It's almost if he had been more specific and clearer, it just seems like Roberts left quite a bit of vagueness in there on purpose. Because the effect of vagueness is that the agencies will start being cautious on their own, right. They're going to start sort of patrolling themselves, policing themselves, being cautious themselves, rather than take chances. So in a sense, it's almost leaving the vagueness out there seems deliberate. It seems like a deliberate play to sort of just signal to agencies, "hey, rein yourselves in," across the board.Jay DuffyRight? I mean, I don't know can't speak to the intentions, of course, but I know that it is going to raise that for all the agencies trying to figure out what the lines are. It also leaves very little guidance and a lot of breadth to lower courts who deal with, you know, the majority of these, these sorts of decisions. Most agency decisions, you know, go to the DC Circuit, and now they kind of have to parse through, you know, what exactly is major here.David RobertsKnowing that at any time the Supreme Court could just take something away from them, reverse them. Like the way the Supreme Court is treating these lower court rulings. Must be discouraging to be a judge at that level, I would say. Let's conclude then by talking about what EPA should do. So it cannot do what the Clean Power Plan did, which is make output based standards for existing power plants based on a wide array of compliance strategies, including generation shifting. You can't do that. But Roberts didn't specifically preclude a lot of other routes forward. I know you're not in charge of EPA.You're not in the administration, but sort of your sense of what EPA is going to take from this and the likely route it's going to try to take forward now addressing greenhouse gases from existing power plants.Jay DuffyRight? I mean, I go back to the 2014 and the 2015 rulemakings where EPA said that cofiring and CCS are available and meet all the criteria of Section 111. To me, that seems like the natural path forward to stringent standards. That's what I anticipate.David RobertsAnd that's just to clarify, EPA is saying, "you have to bolt this thing onto your power plant to bring it down to meet this output standard." You cannot get more straightforwardly legal than that, right? I mean, there's no fuzziness about whether EPA is allowed to do that, is there?Jay DuffyWell, as I said before, EPA can't tell you to do that, but they can base standards on it, and then you can apply however you see fit. But yes, CCS is a carbon scrubber, just like other scrubbers that are bolted onto plants. Cofiring with CCS is at the source just like other things that have been used for decades. I am certain that even in the ... there's currently a case over that 2014 new source performance standards for coal plants, that's based on CCS, that has been stayed for years and years now because the Trump administration said it was going to repeal it, and then it ended up not repealing it.And now this EPA is reviewing it. So there are challenges there essentially saying CCS is not adequately demonstrated, and it's too costly. So I'm sure we'll have those arguments, but those are more the sort of like record based, "let's go through a bunch of engineering diagrams and modeling and cost metrics," which is not usually, and I say that with a long pause, the thing that the Supreme Court spends their time on.David RobertsSo you think probably that question will be resolved by the DC Circuit Court and the Supreme Court will not mess with it. Is that your guess?Jay DuffyThat is my guess. Based on historically, the types of cases that the Supreme Court takes up because that they don't waste their time kind of like parsing through an administrative record on sort of engineering details.David RobertsYeah, I'm just trying to exercise my tragic imagination more these days and imagine what they could do if they woke up grumpy one day. So am I right in saying the reason EPA didn't do that in the first place was because it wanted to make a system that was more flexible, and adaptable, and lower cost? So am I right in saying that by eliminating these novel possibilities of treating the whole electric fleet as one system and requiring you to, more or less, make your standards based on what you can bolt on the coal plant, you're going to end up with a system that is tougher on coal plants, are you not? I mean, this really seems like the coal industry shooting itself in the foot, like you're going to end up with standards that are more difficult to meet and are probably going to lead to more coal plants closing.Is that wrong?Jay DuffyI don't think that's wrong. I think there is a path forward to do it. I think there's a bunch of compliance alternatives, as I said before, with the sulfur scrubbers. I think once a regulation is put into place, it is remarkable how quickly industry can innovate, and learn, and decline costs, and things of that nature. So it could be something that spurs some real action based on the technology forcing nature of the Clean Air Act and what it requires, which is putting on the best system. And those are the best systems right now.David RobertsYeah, we're all, I guess, just speculating at this point, but so many of these coal plants are just kind of lumbering, half-dead giants anyway because as you say, compliance wise, utilities can comply by shifting generation if they don't want to plow a bunch of money into a half-dead coal plant. So I just sort of anticipate, if the choice comes down, bolt CCS onto this already not particularly competitive coal plant, or just let it die. I'm guessing let it die is going to be the more common route, but we'll see about that. So what's the schedule then?Now EPA is in the midst presumably of analyzing this, because they weren't going to use the CPP anyway. So I guess by way of wrapping up, I'm sort of curious like where EPA is on this. Are they starting over now with a new rulemaking or do you think they've got a lot of work done? Sort of like when do you think we can anticipate a new rule out of EPA?Jay DuffySo EPA has said in it they do a unified regulatory agenda in the spring, and they said that there will be proposals on new and existing power plants for their carbon emissions in March 2023. They have been working, they have been thinking — at Clean Air Task Force, we go in and have meetings with EPA and provide them with our analysis. And we have a whole bunch of engineers, and scientists, and policy folks who do modeling and all sorts of analysis that we go in and provide to EPA to help them form their rules. And we've done that.So we know that they've been taking meetings with us and and others to work on on this new set of rules, and my God, the the record for for what you can do on on these fleets. You know, we've been giving them materials since 2012, you know, we've written written the same sort of comments over and over again for a decade now. So they certainly have a lot of information to build on and we're urging them to move as swiftly as possible.David RobertsYeah, just trying to imagine what happens if these rules slip in under the deadline, and then Trump administration comes in and then whoosh, the whole thing. Like, if they pass rules on new power plants and existing power plants, and there are lawsuits, as there will be, and those lawsuits are resolved in the lower courts in EPA's favor, would that mean that a Trump EPA is stuck with these rules, like legally? Or can they just throw them out all over again and start this whole damn thing over again?Jay DuffyThey certainly could.David RobertsThey would have to have a legal rationale for doing so, though, right?Jay DuffyYeah. An agency can change its mind. It depends also on what the DC Circuit ruled. If they said that heat rate improvements alone are insufficient, then that's the law of the land on 111, and they wouldn't be able to do something like that, or even something along those lines. There can be holdings that will bind future administrations, but if it's EPA just using their broad authority to come up with what that agency at that time thinks it's the best system, then in the future, another administration could find that a different system is the best system. It is a bit of a whirlwind.It is exhausting. We've been litigating what the meaning of a system is here, for most of my career has been the word system and what it means.David RobertsOh, it never ends. Okay, well, we'll leave it there. We'll leave it there with the modified, limited, hopeful statement that EPA, after this ruling, still has authority over greenhouse gases, still has authority over existing power plants, and still can and will pass regulations forcing existing power plants to reduce their emissions. So that's all happy and positive.That is, although the "endangerment finding" was challenged in the DC Circuit last week.Surely SCOTUS is not going to take on reanalyzing the "endangerment finding". Just tell me they're not going to do that.Jay DuffyI know. I actually think that the West Virginia opinion strengthens the "endangerment finding". It makes clear that EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants. So I think that is a very weak case.David RobertsOkay, well, on that extremely limited positive note, let's wrap it up. Thanks so much for coming on at such short notice and for clarifying all those for us. Thanks a lot, Jay.Jay DuffyThank you, David. Happy Fourth.David RobertsYou too. Bye now.Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. 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