Volts

In this episode, Charles Marohn of Strong Towns discusses why urban planning too often creates money-sucking suburbs, what it might look like to build healthy communities, and why there are so many barriers to doing so.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsCharles Marohn — “Chuck” to his friends — grew up in a small town in Minnesota and later became an urban planner and traffic engineer in the state. After a few years, he began noticing that the projects he was building were hurting the towns he was putting them in — subtracting more tax value than they added, forcing everyone into cars, breaking apart communities and saddling them with unsustainable long-term liabilities.He began recording his observations on a blog called Strong Towns. It quickly caught on, and over the years, Strong Towns has grown into a full-fledged nonprofit with an educational curriculum, an awards program, and a rich network of local chapters working to improve the towns where they are located.Marohn has since written several books, most recently 2021’s Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and 2019’s Strong Towns. Intellectually, he sits somewhat orthogonally to most of the contemporary urbanist community. He’s an avowed conservative and opposes many of the state and federal solutions to the housing crisis favored by today’s YIMBYs. But there is arguably no one alive in America who has done more to get people thinking about what makes for a healthy community and how the US can begin to repair its abysmal late-20th-century land-use choices. I was excited to talk to Marohn about why suburbs are money-losers, the right way to think about NIMBYs and local control, and why the city planning profession is so resistant to reform.Okey-doke, without any further ado, Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Charles MarohnHey, thanks for having me.David RobertsThis is really cool. I've been sort of a follower of Strong Towns for many, many years. It's great to finally get you on here. I wish we could be talking under more pleasant circumstances.Charles MarohnOh yeah. You got to always have some joy and optimism to things.David RobertsI'm trying. Before we get into any of that stuff, I am sure this is something you've talked about a million times, but I still don't know that it's sunk into the general public. So let's just summarize real quick right off the bat, the core of the Strong Town's critique of suburbs, the sort of Ponzi scheme critique. Because I think still to this day, it probably comes as a surprise to most average Americans, just the idea that suburbs don't pay for themselves, but I just don't think most people know it. So let's just review that real quick.Charles MarohnIt's astounding though because we've come a long way, because now I see when people bring up what is kind of like an ignorant statement of like, "I pay my taxes, this stuff is paying ..." people are like, "Whoa, hang on, let me show you something." So when I was a young engineer and planner, I have a civil engineering degree, I have a planning degree, I was building all this stuff to make cities really successful. I was putting in roads and streets and pipes and building Walmart parking lots and Arby's drive throughs and ...David RobertsEvery architect's dream as a child.Charles MarohnOh, yeah, no, this was great stuff. And I believed in my heart that I was making the city that I live in, the city that I grew up in, wealthier and more prosperous. But over and over and over again, I would be exposed to these insane projects. These projects that if you're an engineer, you kind of work in a silo of design. If you're a planner, you kind of work in a silo of regulation. But when you do both, you wind up with this left brain, right brain conflict that makes you ask like weird questions. And that's what I was doing.I was asking questions like, "Okay, this is going to cost us a million dollars. How long will it take us to recoup that with the tax base that we get?" And I would run these numbers and it would be insane things like 120 years. It's like, okay, either I'm calculating this wrong, or something's really messed up. And I started just doing this over and over and over again with all these different developments that I had worked on. And in 2008, I started to publish this stuff. I started to write a blog and I share this stuff.And quite frankly, I was open to the idea that maybe I was crazy, right? There's got to be something I'm not seeing because there's a lot of smart people doing this work. I can't be the only one asking this question. But turns out, I was the only one really asking this question. Or there were others, but they were disparate voices, either from the past or silent. And we started to build at Strong Towns. Myself and some of my colleagues and friends started to build this body of insight, this body of evidence that at a certain point just became undeniable.And the undeniable nature of it is that when you build in the suburban pattern, we call the auto-oriented pattern development because we certainly find this style of development within urban areas too. Right, we tear down stuff and rebuild it in a suburban style. When you see this style of development, what we find is that it generates from a cash flow standpoint, a lot of immediate cash. The quintessential example is we get a developer to come in and put in the pipe and put in the road and put in the sidewalks and build all the infrastructure and then gift it to the city.And the city then gets all the tax base, all the revenue, all the money coming in from this without having to spend anything upfront. So from a cash flow standpoint, the city is way ahead, way ahead in year one, way ahead in year two, way ahead in year three. But the problem with this transaction is that the city then agrees to take on the long-term liability. We will go out and maintain that road. We will go out and maintain that pipe. And of course, they do this on behalf of the public, right? So we all collectively together get cash today in exchange for a long-term promise that we have to make good on in the future.If you compare those two things, if you add up all the cash, and you compare it to the ultimate amount we have to expend, in this style of the development, the post-war style of development, the style of the first ring, second ring, third ring, exurbs, the style that we've re-developed the internal core of many of our cities around. It's not just functionally insolvent. It's bizarrely insolvent. It creates a dime or two of revenue for every dollar of expense it generates. It literally is a wealth-destroying, kind of, growth machine. And, yeah, I think the difficulty in perception is that we can all see that cities that are growing fast are shiny and new and look better and are doing better than the cities that are stagnant or declining.David RobertsRight.Charles MarohnWe can all see that. We can all see that those cities have bigger budgets and fancier stuff. And while all of us, hopefully, live multiple generations or multiple decades, keeping track of that slope of decline or ascension over that period of time and coming to grips with it is just not something the human mind is set up to do. So I'm a little bit sympathetic to the culture and why the culture has bought into this. I'm really hard on professionals who have calculators and pencils and notepads.David RobertsRight. Well, you make the point that you have to bring in this new cash to cover the old stuff and then even more cash to cover the old, old stuff. So only as long as you're building new suburbs are you staying ahead of the game.Charles MarohnYou have to grow at accelerating rates.David RobertsRight.Charles MarohnAnd that is ... people objected to my use of the term "Ponzi scheme." Like, early on at Strong Towns. That was a big fight we had. People would come to our site and they'd be like, "How dare you say Ponzi scheme?"David RobertsOh, funny.Charles MarohnBecause they assumed that anyone who runs a Ponzi scheme is nefarious, is trying to do something evil. And I actually think the psychology of a Ponzi scheme is a lot more human than that, right?David RobertsYeah. There are lots of examples that's just got to grow, got to grow. And if you slow down growing, it all starts to fall apart. I mean, that's a fairly common dynamic.Charles MarohnI don't blame the people who hate Bernie Madoff for losing all their money. Right, I get that. But I think if you actually look at Bernie Madoff's story, he felt pressured to show earnings, and so he fudged a little bit. And then fudging a little bit one year kind of forced him to fudge a little bit more the next year, and that forced him to fudge a little bit more next year. And all of a sudden, there was never a point where you could reckon with how out of alignment things were. You had to just kind of pretend that this Ponzi scheme would work itself out.And when you saw, like, interviews with Madoff, they asked him, like, "How do you feel?" And part of his feeling was, "I feel relief."David RobertsNot running to stay ahead anymore.Charles MarohnExactly.David RobertsWell, one of the things ... I mean, it's one thing to point to this style of development and its intrinsic sort of unsustainability and say, "Well, that's bad, but I can understand why some places do it." But the situation in the US seems to be that it has become utterly hegemonic. Utterly! I'm from Tennessee originally, and a few years ago, we had occasion to drive down from DC down through to Tennessee. You know, all these rural highways, and you go to these small towns, you know, that have maybe, like, 10-15, whatever, 20,000 people.And even there, you get the four-lane strip with the big box stores surrounded by lifeless, single-family home suburbs. Like, even there, it's the same model. Insider cities, in the exurbs, in the small towns, this bizarre, utterly, sort of, like, unpleasant — it's just not pleasant to be in — style has become utterly hegemonic in the US. And that's just baffling. Seems like it requires some sort of explanation. And you were in that profession. How does that happen? Because what you discovered is not, you know, it doesn't take that much of a cognitive leap to see it.Charles MarohnNo.David RobertsAnd yet here it is hegemonic, and virtually, no one else is objecting to it. And you started objecting to it 20 years ago, and it's still going on. What the hell? What is the source of this grip that it's got?Charles MarohnYeah, it's a really good question, and it has led me to, actually, over the last decade, spending more time studying human psychology and human behavior than anything. And people are like, "Have you read this planning book?" And I'm like, no, "I haven't read a planning book in a decade. Have you read this new Kahneman book?" Because that's where the answer comes in, right? Let me simplify this down. Why do people smoke? Why do people who are diagnosed as prediabetic continue to eat sugar? Why do people who have a history of heart disease in their family eat fatty foods and things that lead to heart attacks?These are questions where I think if you are not participating in that, we all have something like this, right? I mean, that's the great findings of Daniel Kahneman, the cognitive psychologist. Like, humans do irrational things, and we rationalize them and pretend that we're different or we understand why, or we're in control. But the reality is that we have a fast reaction, a gut reaction, an impulse on how we do things.David RobertsSystem one.Charles MarohnSystem one, and then system two, rationalizes it after the fact. So I know that I need to eat healthier, but there's a bowl of ice cream that my kid is having, and she offered me one, and I'd be really antisocial if I didn't, so I will eat healthier tomorrow.And now it's tomorrow and I'm at work, and there's a pile of donuts, and it's kind of like, I can have one. Like, it's not a big deal. We are really, really good at rationalizing each individual step of our own decline and demise. That's not a commentary on the darkness of humanity. I think that there's good cognitive reasons why humans, as they were evolving out of hunter-gatherer societies, or even go back further, evolving out of chimpanzees and primates and mammals, why this kind of instant gratification gene, in a sense, is embedded in our DNA.David RobertsVery true for individuals. I think everybody immediately recognizes that as individuals. But you would think one of the reasons we build institutions or one of the reasons we build expertise among groups of people is that we're supposed to be able to watch over one another's shoulders, right, and check one another so that we can check that error collectively. But instead, here we have the entire profession acting basically like the diabetic individual eating cake.Charles MarohnOkay, but here's what you said. We have institutions to, in a sense, check our avarice, right? Check our human behaviors. Totally agree. This is also why we destroy institutions from time to time, because we, as humans, feel constrained by them. We feel as if our avarice or our impulse is being constrained improperly. I tend to be a little bit on the conservative side of things. I mean, I'm a small-town guy from a rural area. I've grown to understand the yin and yang of left and right and really appreciate the dichotomy and the roles that people who are pushing boundaries versus people who are trying to cling to institutions and ways of being.Like, I get the tension, and I actually appreciate the tension. But it just, I think, shows that the suburban experiment cannot be understood in any other way than a progressive attempt to reshape the continent around a new set of ideas. It is a destruction of a certain way of life in order to create whole cloth, something that would be better. And it just so happens that in our political framework, the mechanism of doing that became, in a sense, the Republican mechanism, right? Like, we're going to recreate this around a model of big business and big top-down corporations and big top-down institutions.So there's something for everybody, right?David RobertsWell, let's talk about, rather than the dysfunctions of the planning and civil engineering professions. Let's just, at least briefly, talk about when you talk about a strong town, the model that's been lost in the car era. Presumably, physical layout has a lot to do with that, but that's not everything. So sort of what are the kind of elements of a strong town that you are trying to recapture through this movement?Charles MarohnThat's a great question. And I think that when we go back to the early days before I started writing, when I was trying to get my mind around this problem and trying to come up with like, well, what does this problem mean and what do we do? I gravitated to the New Urbanists because the New Urbanism is a collection of people who have, in a sense, gone back and tried to understand why do cities of the past work, and why do cities of today not work? And they do things like go out and measure sidewalks and street width and all this.And there was a central argument, and I'm going to caricature the New Urbanism. I love these people. I have a deep respect for them. But I think there have been things that they have evolved on over time. And I think one of the things that has been evolving is this insight that if you just get the design right, everything else will take care of itself. If you just build the human habitat in the right way, the humans will respond. And anyone who's ever been to Baltimore, which is one of the most beautifully designed cities in America, will recognize that that's simply not true.There's a deeper interaction there. I think that we have to recognize that at the end of World War II, we were, as a nation, in this very unique position. We had just gone through the Depression. We had just gone through, if you're a bean counter in Washington DC, we got out of the Depression by starting, "you're joining a global war." We were demobilizing millions of troops. We were shutting down industries with millions of jobs. There was a sense that we were just going to go right back into the depths of the Depression.And instead, we took these complex, adaptive human habitats that had evolved and shifted and been very bottom-up for thousands of years. And we said, "We're going to take all of this capacity, all this industrial might." We had more oil in Saudi Arabia at this point. We had the world's reserve currency. We had all the gold. We had this culture that was united. We're going to take all of this capacity we have and we're going to direct it into this new project of building a new version of America. And that means we got to build quickly, which means we have to standardize, we got to have standard road sections, standard street sections, standard housing forms, standard zoning classification, standard building styles, and types.And we have to repeat this process over and over and over and over again. And if we can do that, it will create enough energy in our economy to not only lift us out of depression and keep us out of depression but make our country powerful and rich and wealthy and build a really strong middle class. And it worked.David RobertsAs you note, "As long as it's growing, as long as you're ahead of the ..."Charles MarohnYeah, we learned. That lesson really well, right? And so you even hear economists now today saying, "Well, what should we do, economists?" And they'll say, "Build more infrastructure, because that worked in the 1950s and the 1960s." It is long past diminishing returns. And the economists don't understand that. We always talk about a strong town being more like diet and exercise than it is like being ripped, right? So we can look at like a weightlifter and be like, okay, or someone who does a ton of aerobics and be like, alright, this person is in really great shape. If you look at cities, there's no cities that are ripped.There's no cities that are in really great shape, right? We've all been subjected to 70 years of this macroeconomic growth experiment. We're all atrophied, we're all struggling, we're all insolvent, we're all in a mess. So strong towns. The idea is more like diet and exercise. How do you develop good habits and good practices that will allow your city to evolve, adapt, and grow stronger and more prosperous over time? So that's what we focus on. How are you doing your budget? How are you doing your design? How are you doing your layout? How are you investing in transportation?What does your approach look like in terms of developing capital projects? These are things we try to help people get a grip on and just think about them differently.David RobertsI'm curious. I want to think that there's a lot of that progress going on beneath the surface, because one of the things that's most striking about all this is that the kind of critiques of car-based suburbia that you are talking about go way, way back. They go way back. And at this point, at least among my cohort, whatever my demographic cohort is, people like me, it's just like conventional wisdom at this point. Of course, it's bad. Of course, if you build more lanes, there's just going to be more traffic. You know, induced demand. Like, of course, if you build around cars, businesses will do worse because, you know, of course, more businesses get more business from pedestrians, just like stuff like that among my crowd has just been accepted. And yet ...Charles MarohnYou lose every time.David RobertsThe zombie shuffles on still. Still, still, still. So who are these planners who haven't heard the news? Who are these traffic engineers who haven't yet been convinced by the evidence for induced demand? Like, what is the disconnect between this very well-established critique at this point and the zombie that seems unaffected by the critique just decade after decade?Charles MarohnRight.David RobertsI can't reconcile those, I guess.Charles MarohnDid the people running Rome not recognize that bread and circuses was a dead end. Of course. Right? Of course, they did. We look back and we're like incredulous, like how would they have done something this stupid? And then we don't recognize that we are human and trapped in the same kind of thing.David RobertsRight?.Charles MarohnLet me put this point on it. At Strong Towns, we spend a tiny bit of time thinking about macro policy and how to change it and I will take calls from Congressmen from time to time and chat with them. They're very pleasant and all that, but we don't have a program for that level. I don't actually think there's ... we just passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that was totally a disaster. If I could have written a horrible bill it would not have looked any different than this. This was a bad, bad, bad bill and it was acclaimed. It was acclaimed by both parties.It was acclaimed by the national media. It was acclaimed, you know, on Main Street. I still travel around the country and people are talking about the infrastructure bill. You know, not all that much, but like if they're going to say something positive that's they point to that.David RobertsWell, the bar for success at the federal level is so low at this point.Charles MarohnI don't think we should pretend that we are going to end the bread and circuses, right. That's not the project that Strong Towns is trying to undertake. I think at Strong Towns we have to understand that, in a sense, the bread and circuses will end at some point and that's going to be a really, really painful, painful experience. And when that painful experience comes to fruition, we need to have a project that not only is nascent but is actually working in places. We need to have an alternate model that has some credibility, some success, some adherence, some people who have worked out some of the kinks and are figuring out, like, here's a best practice for this, and here's a best practice for that.Because the alternative to that is going crazy as a society. And we need something positive that we can do that will keep us from going crazy.David RobertsThat's a good segue into my next question then because the whole Strong Town thing is to sort of reject grandiose top-down visions from both the right and the left in favor of this sort of bottom-up evolutionary, incremental ...Charles MarohnCan I push back a tiny bit?David RobertsSure.Charles MarohnAnd then you continue your question.David RobertsSure.Charles MarohnYou said "Reject top-down vision" and I guess — "grand vision" — I guess I want to say I feel like I have and I feel like so many people affiliate with Strong Towns have grand visions. What we reject is the grand sweeping action to achieve that vision, right? It's the fact that I have a grand vision of "Here's what my life is going to be." If I go out and borrow a ton of money and just put myself in hawk and achieve for one instant the thing that I was after. That's not really like attaining something, right? I want to build up to what success looks like.David RobertsRight.Charles MarohnHumble steps,David RobertsTop-down imposed sweeping reforms then, in favor of bottom-up. But the sort of other side of that is, at least in the current urbanist, YIMBY, whatever you call it, community. When I hear bottom-up, my first thought is NIMBYs. My first thought is, insofar as there is community involvement in a lot of these questions, it is almost always on the side of "No, no, no, build nothing, change nothing, keep this crappy system that we built because it's sending my home values through the roof." Or I also think of environmental review and just the bureaucracy, and just when I think local involvement, that's where my mind goes, is sort of wealthy boomers going to town meetings, shouting at people who want to build bike lanes.So how do we reconcile that, sort of, like, bottom-up vision of yours with the sort of scourge of NIMBY-ism that seems to be what is actually happening bottom-up in cities?Charles MarohnYeah, totally. I could not agree with your analysis more. Let me give you a brief history of the 20th century as it goes with public engagement. So we get out of World War II, we start building all this stuff, and we empower engineers and we empower planners and we empower corporations to just build, build, build, build, just keep going. They actually had a plan at one point to use atomic bombs to build a highway through the Rocky Mountains. That's how much power we gave to engineers, right? I'm not joking. Like that was the legit plan that went through.Like, okay, we're going to do this. And the next phase was, "Wait a second, this is totally junk. Like we hate this. We don't like this at all." And then you have born out of that all the kind of like environmental renaissance of the baby boomers, right? You get the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and you get environmental reviews and you get NEPA, you get all this stuff. And what that establishes is a process to go through to accomplish what you want to accomplish. And so in a sense, the baby boomer response to the process dysfunction of building suburbia was to attack it with more top-down process.And now you go to kind of the next iteration. And the next iteration is to say, okay, this is all messed up. These processes are resulting in really bad things. We need — and I'm going to put in superficial, I'm going to put in parentheses on the beginning of this — we need a superficial level of public engagement. We need the public to feel involved, feel listened to. And it's almost like the participation trophy, right? For public engagement, we need to have everybody feel like they're heard but again, not results that we really want. We fight these things.We battle. But what this has done is it's empowered the NIMBY. The craziest person can show up with two of their friends and shout down the most sanest proposal. And the investiture of time it takes to overcome that is just asymmetrical to what anyone would be willing to do given the limited upside.David RobertsAnd of course legendarily, in a lot of these decisions, the people who will benefit from them don't exist yet, right? Or don't live there yet. That's the whole point. And if you're not there yet, you can't very well show up to a meeting, right?Charles MarohnOr even look at something simple like, "We're going to put in a new traffic light on this highway because Walmart wants to go here." And you're like, okay, well what that is going to do is it's going to rob about 30 seconds a day from everybody who uses that highway. So 20,000 people who have invested for this highway capacity to get somewhere are now going to have 30 seconds of their day robbed. So over the course of a year, they're going to have 3 hours of their life robbed or whatever that works out to be. And over the course of a decade, they're going to have a day and a half.Alright, that is like a small bit of pain. How much time would you spend at a public meeting trying to fight that? You're not going to, right? Collectively when we add up everybody together it's a huge dramatic loss. But for each individual player who's negatively impacted, it's not enough to justify your participation in the system. But for Walmart, the gain is enormous, right? They'll hire teams of attorneys and teams of advocates to go and show up. And say we need to do this.David RobertsClassic, classic asymmetry here.Charles MarohnAsymmetry. Right. And so you have this in many different realms. Like the NIMBY who doesn't want something built in the house next to theirs can show up with four of their neighbors and shout down something. But the like 20 people who need a place to live, they're out at their job and they're out working and they're trying ... And the amount of time they would have to invest to actually make a difference is so huge and the potential upside so minimal. It's asymmetry. So the answer to this problem is not look back through history. It's not to empower the technical people more.That's one option on the table that we just need to get ...David RobertsTechnocratic override.Charles MarohnYep, we need to get the oligarchy of technocrats in here to run things for us because we're incapable. Option number two is that we create more process. This is the baby boomer reaction, like "More process, more process and we'll get better outcomes." Option three, we'll call this the Gen X option. I don't know if it is or not, but I'll claim it as my generation is the idea that if we can have a lot of participation trophies and a lot of theater of public engagement that maybe we'll get some better ideas and people will certainly feel better about things.David RobertsOr a sheen of legitimacy.Charles MarohnRight, the sheen of legitimacy. The answer to it is the ancient practice of subsidiary, the idea that decisions should be made at the level in which they can competently be made and no higher. And the role of every level is to either make the decision that is at their level or assist the levels below them in making a decision. I point often to the chicken problem, backyard chickens. Where should backyard chickens be regulated? Should they be regulated at the regional level, at the state level? There really ... it's a block-level decision. If I'm going to have chickens, that doesn't affect anybody except my neighbors.And so that decision should be one that neighbors make together. Now people will say, "Well Chuck, I don't like my neighbors. I don't get along with them. We fight, we disagree." Okay, but you got to work this one out. That's not a decision you can allow other people to make for you. You have to, as a neighborhood, make that decision, or as a block. "Well jeez, we just can't we're at each other's throats."To me that's where the role of the city comes in. The city says, "Alright, I can't make this decision for you. I could, but that would be wrong and it would be a dummy standard applied to everybody and we need local nuance. I can't make this decision before you, but what I can do is I can help you as a neighborhood reach a decision together." If we had government that functioned like that, what we would find is that the regional rail project is not going to get derailed by one block of people who are rich enough to hire lawyers and create all kinds of process. That's a regional decision. It should be made by a regional government representing everybody. But the chicken thing is not going to get screwed up. Or contrasting, the big developer is not going to be able to come in, buy off the city council, or mobilize whatever to shove the eight-story condo unit down your throat.David RobertsWell, but I guess I would object to ... well, not object, but my question is it seems slightly question-begging since the whole point of contention here is if the decision is whether to put a bike lane in neighborhood x. Is that like chickens, in that it mainly or only affects neighborhood x and therefore should be made at the level of neighborhood x? Or is it an infrastructure decision that affects the whole city and its transportation flow in which case you make it at the city level? Or, there's a lot of research lately showing that these local NIMBY decisions are creating a housing crisis which is having macroeconomic effects on the entire country, which might suggest that maybe the federal level is the level for some of these decisions.So it's not obvious to me what the right level is. And in a sense, that's the whole point of contention, is it not?Charles MarohnNo. Well, it is in one sense because this is what politicians do, right? They're like, "Well, this thing affects everybody. And so the temperature you set your thermostat has to be decided in Washington DC. Because it's a macro issue." The answer is not to what degree does it affect everyone. The answer is, "At what level can this decision be made?" And it should be made at the lowest level that it can be made. I think one of the problems that we confuse, and one of the things we get up our minds wrapped around, is that we're so used to working at the wrong scale that it's hard to reconcile the idea of subsidiarity with the kind of projects we do today.You brought up a bike lane, and a bike lane is like a very popular kind of project amongst a certain group of people because they're like, "We need more biking and walking." I can tell you that almost every bike lane project I see is the wrong project for that community. There are very few where it's like the right project originated in the right way. And let me walk you through that just briefly. We have a thing at Strong Towns that we call the four-step process for public investments. And the core of this process begins with going out and humbly observing where people struggle.A lot of times when we're looking at bike projects, they don't originate with a humble understanding of where people are having a difficult time using the city as it has been built. Where they generally start with is either someone at City Hall really likes bike lanes, there's a grant out there for bike lane projects. We have a capital improvements plan, and our complete streets policy says we should put in bike lanes, or some regional authority is like, "We're trying to build a regional bike trail. You guys need to put in a connection." All of those are the wrong place to originate a project.When we originate projects based on where people are having a difficult time using the city, what we wind up doing is making projects that are actually scaled to the urgent demands of people on the ground. And those projects are not opposed. They have their own baked-in constituency. And the thing about those kind of projects is there's an endless number of them and the implementation does look a lot more like subsidiary.David RobertsI don't know. When I think about bike lane decisions being made at the neighborhood level, it's hard for me not to think that there would just never again be a bike lane.Charles MarohnYeah, I don't know. I don't know the city you live in, but if we went out here where there's a lot of opposition to bike lanes. I mean, the last big bike lane project we put in went right in front of a Catholic church in town. And I go to the different Catholic church, but I've attended this one. I know the priests, I know the people there. The Catholic church was irate about it, and they were irate about it because it took away the place that they would park for funerals and weddings, right? Like, right out in front, like it took away this place.It was a stupid bike lane project. No one ever bikes there. It's not a place where people bike. But what happened was they came up with a master bike lane plan, a master bike plan. They were redoing the street. This is phase one of implementation. And they said, from a very top-down kind of rote approach, "This is where the bike lane goes." And what they did is they generated a ridiculous amount of opposition to bike lanes. My recommendation to them, this is my city now, was, let's go out and see where people are biking right now, and then let's bike with them or follow them or talk to them and find out where you are biking right now is it most difficult? Where are you having the most struggle? I bike all the time. We can go out and do this. We can go out and talk to people. Show, like, crossing this bridge: really dangerous. Crossing the street: really dangerous. What can we do to fix that?And the amazing thing about fixing that is that a. there's already people using it, they're just struggling, b. those people are adjacent to other people who would probably use it but for the danger or the struggle. And so, c. when you fix it, you not only have a built-in constituency whose needs you're responding to, but you have a related adjacent constituency that's going to come forth and affirm the thing that you did and the value that it provides.That's how you build a culture of biking and walking, and that's how you get bike lanes everywhere.David RobertsAnd can you point to a place? I mean, Strong Town gives these awards, it runs these academies, tries to teach city leaders, tell us a story of a town that is strong, that is doing things like that.Charles MarohnThat is ripped.David RobertsNot yet ripped, but on a good health plan, let's say.Charles MarohnWell, we have the annual Strongest Town contest, and that is really a celebration of places that are doing this kind of incremental work. Where are the places that are doing the diet and exercise of building a strong town. And none of them are perfect, and we tell them, like, "Don't be ashamed to apply if you're not perfect, because none of these cities are." But we have tended to have this long list of mid-sized towns where they are, and I'm going to generalize here, but I think this is generally true, where they are too poor to be stupid, but just connected enough and coherent enough to grasp the need to work together.And those are places that are astounding. I mean, Pensacola, a few years ago. I'm going to Jasper, Indiana here in a couple of weeks. You know, these cities are places where they all have kind of the same problems everybody has but have found unique ways to deal with them. But if you told me like, Chuck — okay, I was in Sacramento last week, and the people who run the Council of Governments in Sacramento, it's this regional governance body, they go around and around to places and talk to people, and they do like these retreats. So they're going as a group to Salt Lake City to learn from the people in Salt Lake City.They have in the past gone to Amsterdam to learn from Amsterdam. And they listed these places that they've gone. And then they asked me, "Chuck, where would you go?" And I said, "I'd go to Detroit, I would go to Memphis, I would go to Buffalo, I would go to Shreveport, I would go to Cleveland, Akron." These are places that you see the most innovation, the most entrepreneurial spirit, the most flexibility of thought. These are the places to me that are the most exciting.David RobertsAnd get zero national attention.Charles MarohnOh, yeah, no, they get zero, right. But they're uninhibited by, you know, we went back and talked about that cultural expectation of the bread and circuses and all that. The bread and circuses are done in these places, and so they're uninhibited by that hang-up and they can actually focus on doing great stuff. And these places struggle. I'm not going to pretend that you're going to walk in there and go, "Wow, this place is amazing." But if you scratch the patina a little bit and talk to some people and go to some neighborhoods, you're going to see story after story after story that will blow your mind, that you could do in Sacramento, that you could do in an affluent place and see amazing success.David RobertsI want to get to politics. But there's one thing I wanted to hit before then, and this is given what's going on as we are talking, somewhat thematically appropriate question, but I wanted to ask what makes ... it seems like one of the key features of a good town, a good community, is safety, a certain level of public safety. And I just wonder of all the reforms and things you look for and things Strong Town rewards with its awards and whatnot, what kinds of things create safety? I was reminded recently of a Tweet thread where this woman asked, "What would you do if there was a curfew for men? If they had to be in by ten, what would you do?" And by far the most common answer was, "I would love to go running at night. I've always wanted to go running at night and I just won't now because of safety."Charles MarohnRight.David RobertsI'm sure physical structure and design structure has something to do with that, but also there are other factors, community, sort of. So, in the safety dimension, what makes the community safer?Charles MarohnI'll give you the number one thing and it's people, right? People make it dangerous and people make it safe. I was able to spend some time in southern Italy, which is a really amazing place, but also very poor. And there were a lot of places where the crowds and the sheer number of people in these places were conducive to things like pickpockets and that kind of stuff. But not to rape, not to assault, not to the things that you would fear. There's a level of people less than that. The pickpocket part actually goes away, too, because you lose the thickness of the crowd in a sense.When we look at places that are great for biking and walking, I think our affluent assumptions is that places that are great for biking and walking have great biking and walking infrastructure. And that's actually not true. The places that are the best for biking and walking have just the most people who bike and walk, regardless of the infrastructure. So if you've got like crappy infrastructure but there's tons of people walking all the time, that place becomes instantly way safer than anything else. Because, and I'm going to say this and people may recoil this, but most people are good, most people are decent.We do bad things sometimes, and sometimes we do things that will make you cringe. But the reality is that most culture is actually pretty good. We're pretty good to each other. And when we get people out together, that added security of having more people around you is what will keep you safe. This is a related insight to Jane Jacobs's "Eyes on the Street."David RobertsYeah, "Eyes on the Street." I was just thinking.Charles MarohnYeah, but it's even, I think, a step beyond that. "Eyes on the Street" recognizes that people don't want to get caught, right?David RobertsRight.Charles MarohnBut I actually think there's a next step to that is that I think people are genuinely inclined to be their most lovely self when they feel like they are in an environment where other people are viewing them.David RobertsEspecially other people who are again going to be viewing them the next day and the next day, right? A community of people.Charles MarohnLet me say it this way, people who matter to them. Right?David RobertsRight.Charles MarohnAnd I think there's a way to go really dark with that because there's a way to have this be an insider versus outsider kind of thing. Humans are, I think, lovely and beautiful to each other, but a lot of that is a function of in-group versus out-group behavior. And sometimes in out-groups, we are not as lovely to each other. The response to that has often been, "Well, then let's get police out there, and let's regulate that." To me, the response in a healthy place is to just increase your in-group.David RobertsRight.Charles MarohnLike, expand your in groups.David RobertsSocial trust. It's the bedrock of everything.Charles MarohnYeah. When you look at ...there's a fascinating book by Tim Carney, conservative writer, and he looked at ... basically, he studied the 2016 presidential primary, and he was trying to make some insights on community. So this was all Republicans, right, places that voted Republican in the general election, so voted for Trump in the general election. But he wanted to know what places in the primary supported Trump and what places didn't. And of course, this can be broke down precinct by precinct. And he created a map around the country of what these places were and what they look like.And what he found is that the places that voted for Trump tended to have more crime. They tended to have more social isolation. They tended to have more people who identified as Christian but didn't go to church. There was a bunch of things like that that you were really getting a measurement of what I would just say is like the end result of the suburban experiment, right? Like, complete individual autonomy and social isolation from others.David RobertsGod, I think that's so true. And I bring this up and people look at me like I'm crazy. But I really think the suburban model, the end product, is to make people into psychopaths. You make it so that each lives in their individual castle, and the only way they interact with the community is as drivers. And as I'm sure you're well aware, nothing makes you more of an a*****e more quickly than driving a car.Charles MarohnWe've done studies on — not we, Strong Towns — we humans. Psychologists have done studies with rats and with monkeys and with chimpanzees, and we've looked at social isolation and the impacts of it. And it does not take much social isolation to make ... and I would say lower level, not homo sapiens, completely neurotic.David RobertsRight.Charles MarohnIt does not take much social isolation. We have built a development pattern where the marketing brochure is social isolation.David RobertsYes.Charles MarohnHere's how we can help you, facilitate you, being the most antisocial person you can. Yeah.David RobertsHere's how you can escape other people.Charles MarohnRight.David RobertsAnd this is the thing, the safety thing. I've spent a lot of my life walking around suburbs because I have dogs and I walk them frequently in Seattle, where I live, is chock full of suburbs. And the whole notion that they're safer has always struck me as bizarre. And as you say, it's about the density of people. When you're walking around suburbs, even healthy, wealthy suburbs in the middle of Seattle, you just don't see many people. When you see one, it's like the two of you alone on a block, and there's something creepy about it. There's just something that's always felt unsafe about it, even to me, a sort of stocky, white dude who's probably the safest any human could be.It just doesn't feel even safe to me. I've never understood this idea that escaping away from other people makes you safer. I don't know why that's taken hold.Charles MarohnLet me actually make this statement that I think affirms what you're saying. The most dangerous development pattern is the failing suburb. Because there you combine all of the neuroticism of social isolation with all the desperation of poverty.David RobertsAnd we're going to see a lot more of those in coming years.Charles MarohnOh, my gosh, that's my nightmare. I think that is the thing that is going to define the 21st century is dealing with that problem.David RobertsYikes.Charles MarohnBecause you you isolate poor people in inner cities, and it's a despotic thing, but you at least isolate them in coherent neighborhoods. I mean, neighborhoods where they can walk to get food and walk to a job and get on a bus and get somewhere to a doctor or what have you. You isolate the same demographic. You isolate poor people in America's second-ring, third-ring suburbs. And, to me, you're talking "Mad Max."David RobertsYeah, that's very dystopian.Charles MarohnRight. That's very dystopian.David RobertsLet your mind run. Well, I did want to ask you about this, too, that I had so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and we're running out of time, but let me squeeze this one in, too. I'm sure you've even asked a million times. The puzzle of how to build a good place, I feel like is not solved, but I feel like we're just setting out to build a brand new place. We have a lot of good guidance and know a lot of things to do now. But of course, the big problem in America is all the suburbs already built along this crappy model spread out. It can only get to them by car, and they're there.What do we do with them? Have you ever heard, I mean, I've had a lot of sort of urbanist-y kind of people on and ask this question all the time, and if you had to hear a good answer, but what do we do with them? Do you know of ways to rehabilitate or densify or something to help your typical sort of windy, curly Q street exurb? Or is it just lost to us?Charles MarohnWell, let's pause at this. There are some brilliant people working on this problem. Ellen Dunham-Jones, Galina Tachieva, they've created ...David RobertsOh, they're coming on the pod in a few weeks.Charles MarohnOkay, great. They've made beautiful books, and they show brilliant architecturally how we make this transformation. And you look at them and you're like, this is genius work. The problem is that the work is misaligned with the culture, and it doesn't scale to the size of the problem. So I feel like there's insights from those books that we can use and adapt, but as a solution, suburban retrofit is not a solution. Because the reality is when I say we collect ten cents, twenty cents on the dollar of what we need to maintain all this stuff. The implications of that is that a lot of what we built will not be maintained.David RobertsYep.Charles MarohnAnd so when we look at these places, we have to recognize that the goal of saving them all and retrofitting them all is the ultimate pouring good money after bad. Half of the streets we have today, half of the roads we have today are not going to be here 50 years from now like they just won't. The bridges will not be here. The interchanges will not be here. This is bizarre. People who have trouble getting their mind wrapped around this, yet everybody who has trouble getting their mind wrapped around this can think of what it looked like when we walked away from the core of our cities.We just walked away from these places, ordered them up, and said, this is not ...David RobertsDetroit's right there. We can just go look at it.Charles MarohnWe can go see it. It's not a difficult case study to examine. So you look at this and then what you recognize is that there is no discernible pattern between the neighborhoods that make it and the neighborhoods that fall apart. And so what we need to do as a public project is actually work in this bottom-up, incremental way. And the places that start to coalesce and those will have physical attributes, but they're also going to have cultural attributes of people being willing to work together. The places that start to coalesce into success, those are the places where we make our limited investments.Those are the places we triage. So if neighborhood A says, "We're a bunch of NIMBYs and you're not allowed to build an accessory apartment or a duplex in this neighborhood," but neighborhood B says, "Hey, we welcome corner stores and we welcome duplexes and we welcome all kinds of investment," and I'm a city and I can only fix one neighborhood. I got to decide between A or B. I'm going to pick the one that is embracing others. I'm going to pick the one that has upside potential from an investment standpoint. I don't think that's a hard choice to make.David RobertsYeah, it is going to leave us with ...It's going to leave us with a lot of mess.Lots of abandoned, crumbling ... I mean, I guess no matter what we do, we're going to end up there. But jeez, if you think that landscape is vast and soulless now, just like, project your mind ahead 50 years and imagine it crumbling and falling apart and largely abandoned.Charles MarohnIf we learn something from Detroit, which I think we should learn a lot of things from Detroit, but if we learn something from Detroit about that transition, there really needs to be an industry of suburban salvage more than anything. Right? Instead of having your house go to nothing. We're going to purchase it and salvage it at some point.David RobertsStrip it for parts.Charles MarohnYeah, strip it for parts. It's exactly what we'll do. Strip it for parts. Because that wire has value. Some of the other stuff has value. We'll strip it for parts.David RobertsPretty bleak.Charles MarohnBut it is bleak because what we built was stupid, right?David RobertsYes.Charles MarohnI mean, I think a lot of us would like to save ourselves from, like, okay, I didn't go to college. I knocked out my girlfriend when I was 17, I have a drinking problem, and now I'm 45 and I got my life straightened out. That's great, like from that point on, do good things. Right? But it doesn't make up for the fact that you kind of made a series of bad choices for a couple of decades. You got to deal with that. And I feel like as a society, we made two and a half generations of really bad decisions.David RobertsWell, America is so good at honest self-reflection and coming to terms with its own mistakes in a mature and clear-sighted way. So that shouldn't be a problem.Charles MarohnWas that Churchill, "We'll always do the right thing after we've tried every other option"?David RobertsYeah, that quote is starting to sound a little tinny to me, much like Obama's arc of history. I'm like, well, when, though? Yeah, we tried everything bad and we're still trying it. When's that? Anyway, let's talk politics for a minute, you know, or at least were last time I checked, in a self-described conservative. I don't have to sort of belabor the evolution of the right in America in recent decades and of the Republican Party, among many, many, many other things. We have seen it now become basically explicitly pro-suburb. Right? Instead of implicitly, it's now saying, Joe Biden is going to come take your suburbs.Charles MarohnYeah, no, he wants to kill the suburbs, right.David RobertsPut his flag down in the exurbs and everything else going on. So I wonder I know that small "c" conservatives like you, sort of, pro-urbanist conservatives exist. I know that the species exists. Where is your political home? What has become of you? What do you make of your own sort of political location at this point in trajectory?Charles MarohnThere's a really good book that was ... that no one's read by a guy named Blake Pagenkopf, and I interviewed him on my podcast a while back. I can't remember the name of the book, but he only has, like, one or two, and they're both on the same topic. So he helped me understand this because I had long ago, I mean, long ago, like mid-2000s, walked away from the Republican Party and said, "I may have conservative tendencies, but this branch of national politics and local politics being nationalized doesn't make any sense to me."I've never embraced the Democratic Party because there's kind of a central flip over the chessboard every now and then kind of individualism to it that I've always kind of struggled with the idea that every problem needs a big top-down solution that reworks everything. And that impulse has always not been something I could see in myself.David RobertsWell, this is a kind of old-school Burkean conservatism you're talking about, right? Just have some respect for the accumulated ...Charles MarohnAccumulated wisdom.David RobertsWisdom that's written into communities.Charles MarohnRight. Here's the interesting thing. And this is where Blake's book really kind of helped me become comfortable with this.David RobertsIt is, by the way, called "Rebooting our Political Operating System."Charles MarohnOh, thank you.David RobertsI looked it up.Charles MarohnWhat I found is that I could have better conversations that were more productive and more operative with people who were far left of center, but who were very bottom-up than I could have with anybody who was conservative when they were at their core, top-down. The bottom-up person who understands is very environmentally sensitive and understands ecosystems and understands that kind of thing, to me, I find really enlightening. And I've learned a lot from people like that. The person who cares deeply about social justice within the neighborhood that I live in, I have learned to disassociate them with a national social justice campaign run from a top-down to drive votes. And I've learned to listen to them with compassion and empathy because really, quite frankly, they're talking about my neighbors and humans.And I do love them and I do care about them. I feel like what Blake's book describes is a political spectrum that doesn't go left-right, it goes more quadrants top-down versus left-right. And when you do that, what you find is that the left and the right have a common cause politically. Democrats and Republicans have common cause in top-down action. And that is the thing they agree on the most, and that's where they can find consensus. And I am ultimately, the other day, a bottom-up person. And I find a lot more to work with on the political left from the bottom-up than I find in the political right, which has become very, very top-down.David RobertsThe bottom-up left, you're talking about stuff like cooperatives and things like that, citizen councils and all this kind of stuff.Charles MarohnYeah. And let me say it this way. A cooperative is not where my sensitivities lie, right? The people who found cooperatives and work in cooperatives and do other kind of left of center, bottom-up things, they're motivated by things that are different than what I feel like I'm motivated by. But I find their work inspiring. I find their work adjacent to mine, and I find that we can collaborate really, really well. And I respect them and I respect where they're coming from. I am sensitive to other things.And when I can ground my sensitivities in a neighborhood level, a bottom-up way in the humans that surround me, my things that I'm sensitive to I can express those in ways that what I find is that people who are left of center really understand and appreciate, and even if they don't agree, they at least respect. When it gets to the big top-down project, we have a hard time having a conversation. And so I have kind of divorced my own reading list, my own sensitivities, my own view of the world from the top-down. I just don't spend a lot of time on it. I let it be. And I put my efforts into this bottom-up project. And we started this conversation with you saying something along the lines of tension and with everything going on in the world.And I said, we got to have a lot of hope and joy. The bottom-up gives me a lot of hope and joy, particularly in other people, particularly in people that I'm told I'm not supposed to agree with.David RobertsYeah, this reminds me of ... I don't know if you've been following James Fallows. He's flying around in his little plane, visiting small towns, and coming away with very much the same thing you're saying. Like, if you're looking for a place away from these intractable, maddening national debates where there's actually some consensus and good things happening, you go to these little mid-sized towns that are kind of out of a national spotlight, and there's all kinds of good stuff happening.Charles MarohnI think that's true. I will also say this. I found the same thing in large cities, New York City. If you talk to a true New Yorker, they will describe New York City as a series of neighborhoods.David RobertsRight.Charles MarohnThey don't describe it as a top-down system. They describe it as a series of neighborhoods, each with their own culture, each with their own attitude-approach. And to me, I find the same exact kind of interaction with each other in a place like New York City at the block level, at the neighborhood level that I do in in, you know, a city like mine with 14,000 people.David RobertsYeah. I just wonder, you know, we seem to be moving nationally into a period of conservative dominance, at least for the next few years.Charles MarohnAnd you say that, and I would actually say the opposite.David RobertsReally?Charles MarohnYeah. No, I was having this conversation with someone today, and I said, "If you are left of center and you are plugged in nationally, you can go a long, long time without hearing an authentically conservative message delivered well, you will only hear caricatures of conservatism. But if you are a right-of-center, unless you want to not listen to the radio, not watch TV, not go to the movies, not go to college, not participate in civic society, you are going to be bombarded continuously with left-of-center messaging. You just will be." And you might say, like, well, the Supreme Court is very right.Okay, I get that. It's the way the kind of ping pong balls fell in terms of turnover, and you can complain about political maneuvers, and I get that. I respect those complaints. The reality is that we are culturally top-down, a very left-of-center project.David RobertsWell, this is the great contradiction, right? As we seem culturally center left, but the Senate is structurally right. The Supreme Court is structurally right. Now through gerrymandering, the House is structurally right. We keep getting conservative presidents that lose.Charles MarohnLose the popular vote. Right.David RobertsSo when I say dominance, at the very least, they're very likely to control all three branches of the federal government for at least some period of the next decade. And it seems like it's going to be a very long time before Dem's get a trifecta back. And it doesn't seem to me, given the character of the current GOP, that they're just going to let blue cities merrily do what they want, implement progressive policies. So I wonder if there's any kind of new political coalition to be had based in good city-making.Charles MarohnYeah, that would be my hope. I mean, really, that would be my hope. I will say I have been around long enough now. I'm 49.David RobertsMe too.Charles MarohnOh, okay, good. We have the same, like, timestamp on our culture.David RobertsYeah.Charles MarohnSo I've been around long enough where I have experienced the highs and lows of one-party dominance. Like, oh, we won everything, and then, oh, we lost everything. And the reality is we celebrate the New Deal and the 100 days of FDR that's never happened again, and I don't think it can happen. Right. We will have to have a different form of government for the type of hegemonic thing to occur. Republicans had control of everything just a few years ago, and they got zero things done. And they got zero things done because they are the party of organization.Right. Like, Democrats fight each other. Republicans line up and vote for things. They still couldn't get anything done. And I think what we've reached is we've reached a point where, at the federal level, there's really not answers to any of our existential problems. The answers have to be evolved out of local conversations and local action. And so you just see, like, is Obamacare a bad bill? Yeah. Is there a replacement you come up with that would be good? No. So what do you do about that? You just complain and try to get people out to vote for you so that you can pretend you're going to do something.I know people get frustrated because they want the federal government to work. I think we don't appreciate that the federal government is designed not to work. We are designed to have a very limited federal government with power concentrated in states and really concentrated in neighborhoods of people.David RobertsThe one thing I would want to throw into that, and I'll get yelled at if I go this whole interview without mentioning it, is climate change. And I guess, do you see bottom-up reform in cities moving fast enough or being dramatic enough to get a handle on greenhouse gas emissions? In other words, I can envision a lot of good things coming out of bottom-up, but it's real hard for me to envision climate change coming under control without some centralized top-down action.Charles MarohnOkay, let me make this a fair question. So we have Option A, which is some type of top-down action to address climate change. We have Option B, which is bottom-up action to address climate change. And Option A and Option B are in a race against each other to see who can get to where we need to be. What I'm going to suggest to you is that Option A has zero chance or near zero chance of getting to the finish line. And people can argue with that and say, "Well if we just got like an overwhelming number of people elected ..." Look, the most dedicated to climate change president that has ever been has just done a gas tax holiday for six months, right?We're not at some tipping point where people are serious about it and they're not. The best thing ... people ask me, "What's the number one strategy we can do at the local level to build a strong town?" And I'm like, a. go out and plant trees. Like street trees are the lowest cost, highest returning investment that can be made. The number two, get people walking and biking. Build a culture of biking and a culture of walking. Number three, fill your parking lots with stuff. Get rid of parking lots and fill them with things.David RobertsAmen.Charles MarohnNow you tell me if your strategy was we need to get the right people elected. They need to have the guts to pass the right package to do the right stuff so that we get some action on climate, so we get electric cars and we get whatever your package of solar panels and what have you is. Or we can make a bottom-up choice to emphasize communities that plant trees, get people walking and get rid of parking. Which one is going to be further along the race a decade from now? I don't even think it's close. The strong town's approach actually can get done and actually scales.David RobertsScale is the question though, right? I mean, all these local fights. One of the things that when I look at this strategy and I think about it scaling that sort of causes me to despair is that each local community is different. The dynamics are somewhat different. It's just battle after battle after battle after battle.Charles MarohnSo at the end of World War II, we didn't have to convince people to move to the suburbs. They didn't have to be like a national program saying, "This is good for you, you should do this. I know you don't want to do this, but you should do it." People did it in mass. They wanted it. And I'm telling you people want walkable neighborhoods. They want corner stores. They want good sidewalks. They want street trees. We're not selling that strong house anything that people don't want. People want us in droves. They'll pay extra money for it. They fight to live in these places.David RobertsThey go vacation where it exists.Charles MarohnThey go vacation in them, right. We just don't deliver it in the marketplace. And I'm saying make that switch. We will deliver this in spades, and it will scale big time. Because everybody in policy understands, like, this is what people want.David RobertsWell, I hope you're right about that. And maybe we'll we'll check in a decade and see whose strategy failed worse.Charles MarohnYeah, well, I'm I'm not, you know, saying there should be no top-down action, but I'm just saying I feel like what I see happening with the progressive project is 98% of our energy put into trying to win the next top-down election to get the results we want and 2% of the energy put into recycling our Aquafina bottle. And what I would like to see is 2% of our energy put into this chess match of gladiators at the federal level and 98% of our energy put into making places better. Because you do that and it's a revolution. Everything changes.David RobertsGreat. Well, alright, Chuck. Thanks so much for all your work. And thanks for coming on and talking.Charles MarohnThanks, friend.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

Readers, I am keenly aware that you subscribed to this newsletter to get articles and podcasts about clean energy, not to hear about my life and travails. And I’ve already sent you one life-and-travails message this year. So I debated with myself a long time about whether to send this one, especially given all the other horrible stuff happening in the world.But, in the end, there is an unavoidable intimacy to this format and that is one of the things I like about it. I don’t have any bosses or advertisers or funders to report to — there’s just me, trying to create good content, and (some of) you, paying for it. Given that life events are currently affecting my ability to work, I feel I owe you some explanation.Attentive readers may recall that I’m supposed to be in Italy right now, vacationing with my family to celebrate my oldest son’s high school graduation and impending departure to college. As fate would have it, that vacation has been canceled. Why? Well, part of it is that, as followers of my tweets may already know, my entire family has Covid at the moment. But the other part, which I haven’t yet shared, is that I also have cancer. Specifically, I have a relatively rare cancer called urothelial carcinoma — a 4.5-cm mass in my right kidney cavity. It was identified via a CT scan about a month ago. A few weeks ago, I had a procedure: a right ureteroscopy with biopsy and ureteral stent insertion. They also fired some lasers at the mass, which I found oddly gratifying. The good news is that, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, the biopsy indicates that the cancer is low-grade. The bad news is that the mass is so big that it’s got to come out regardless; my surgical options are no different than if it were high-grade. Because it has gotten so big, trying to laser it to pieces could take two, three, or even more full surgeries, followed by a lifetime of vigilance, since this type of cancer tends to recur in surrounding tissue via the “field effect.” Recurrence in my kidney or ureter would be bad; recurrence in my bladder (which I only have one of) would be worse.The other option is just to have my right kidney taken out entirely, which is what I’m scheduled to do next month — what the official documentation refers to as a “nephroureterectomy, robot-assisted,” which I also find oddly gratifying. I like having robots and lasers on my side.Having a kidney out is not a small thing — it’s a serious surgery — but there are very good chances of full recovery. People lose or donate kidneys all the time and go on to live long, healthy lives. My colleague at Vox, Dylan Matthews, donated one of his kidneys out of pure altruism and wrote a detailed account, which has been a great comfort to me. To be clear: I’m in no pain. The cancer itself is causing me no symptoms outside of hematuria (bloody urine), which admittedly is no fun, but it was the only way this thing got caught. A tumor in your kidney lining (as opposed to the cavity, where mine is) can grow for a long time and cause no symptoms at all. It’s a good thing my tumor made a ruckus.Suffice it to say, in the vast hellscape of possible cancers, I could have done a lot worse. I am, in the grand scheme of things, quite lucky.That said, losing the vacation is a real bummer. For one thing, it was all set up: the plane tickets were bought; the lodgings were booked; the train tickets were reserved; the cars were rented; the tours and outings were all lined up. It was going to be magic. But what really hurts my heart is not getting to send my son off with some indelible memories of his final summer with us. I wanted that time with him so badly. As a sad, sweet gesture, Mrs. Volts made us reservations at an Italian restaurant in Seattle for last Monday night — the night we were supposed to leave for Italy — but then, over the weekend, the older boy tested positive for Covid. He isolated immediately, but the next day I tested positive and the day after that, Mrs. Volts and the younger boy. To summarize: rather than nibbling gelato and sipping espresso at a street-side cafe in Florence, we are at the end of a week spent slumping around our house, coughing and snorting and unable to do much but watch TV. (The Old Man is really good.)One additional downer: remember a while back I told you about my aching wrists and elbows? Yeah, that’s worse than ever. I can type for short bursts, but holding my hands steady in any position for more than about 30 seconds brings sharp pain. This means I can’t really sustain concentrated work on longer writing. I can basically … tweet. And given that tweeting is already what I do when I’m anxious, I’ve been tweeting a lot lately. It’s not great.I tried some voice control and transcription programs, but I found them weirdly enervating. It is exhausting to talk all the time! But I’m going to have another go at them, since this doesn’t seem to be going away and I still can’t think of a practical way to take six months away from a keyboard to let them rest. Anyway. I have lived, on balance, an extraordinarily fortunate and privileged life, and I’m still living one, but I tell you — when it rains, it pours. I will get my kidney out; Covid will pass; I will figure out how to deal with the tendonitis. Some day soon this will all be behind me and I will get back to full productivity, including writing the long explanatory articles that I desperately miss writing. I want to bring in more guest pieces, do more deep dives, and set up some regular features and themes. But in the meantime, while I am navigating this crapstorm, there might be some slow weeks and months around here. I’m going to try to keep up the podcasting, but it may be a bit more sporadic.As I said last time, if anyone feels like they’re not getting what they signed up for and wants to unsubscribe, I understand and do not begrudge. Subscriber growth slowed considerably when I shifted from writing to podcasting, as I suspected it might, but it hasn’t yet ever gone down. Y’all have stuck with me and I can not tell you how grateful and humbled I am to have you all here. In the meantime, my prognosis is good. My health-care providers are good. My insurance is good. My wife is a superhero. I don’t need or want for anything. I just thought I should let y’all know where I’m at. Volts is one of the things that keeps me going, so thank you for reading and listening and just being out there. This is a public episode. 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In this episode, Kimberly Nicholas discusses her published research on the most effective policies to reduce car use in cities.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsIn the US, the movement to get cars out of cities is … what’s the nice word? … nascent. But in Europe, where many cities were built before cars and big-box sprawl never completely dominated, there is growing agreement that cars need to be reigned in. It’s partly about fighting climate change, but beyond that it’s about quality of life — living without air and noise pollution, using your legs to get around, and enjoying public spaces.More and more European cities are discovering what Copenhagen found when it studied the problem in earnest: every mile traveled on a bike adds value to a city, whereas every mile traveled in a car subtracts value. The pushback against cars in the Europe has been going on for decades now, but there has been little effort to catalogue and rank the various policies and initiatives involved. What works and what doesn’t? What should other cities prioritize?Into that breach came a recent research paper in Case Studies on Transport Policy that dove into the academic literature (surveying 800 papers) to rank the top car-reducing strategies. It was co-authored by Paula Kuss (based on her master’s research) and Kimberly Nicholas of Sweden’s Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies. Nicholas later wrote a summary of the research for The Conversation that received an enormous amount of attention. As it happens, driving cars out of cities is one of my enduring obsessions, so I eagerly accepted Nicholas’ offer to review the research, discuss the themes evident in the top-performing policies, and ponder whether such policies could ever take hold in the US. Our conversation was enlightening and heartening, despite making me want to move to Europe.With no further ado, Kim Nicholas. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Kimberly NicholasThank you so much. Long-time listener, first-time guest.David RobertsI want to talk about your study, but before we jump in, there's just a couple of kind of background things I want to establish. One point, which you emphasize a couple of times, which I don't feel like is super well understood. I feel like a lot of times, in my experience, when we talk about declining cars, or trying to get rid of cars, or blocking cars, or anything that inhibits cars, it strikes people, I think, intuitively as a punishment to the poor. And the point you make, at the top of your post about your paper, is that this is not in fact, the case.In fact, the sort of transportation sector is weighted as it is toward the wealthier. So say just a little bit about that by way of background.Kimberly NicholasYeah, I think that's so important that people understand that it is overwhelmingly the rich who drive the most, and it's very important to design climate and transport policies that simultaneously tackle the very serious and increasing problem of inequality. But that's fully possible to do. Some of the people who benefit the most from active and public transport are lower-income folks. So our study focused on Europe because Europe actually has a policy to ...David RobertsStudy.Kimberly NicholasExactly. The European Union has promised to deliver 100 climate-neutral cities by 2030. And those cities have just been chosen. And in order for that to actually happen, cities have to reduce the number of cars.And when we look in Europe, the data show that it's the rich who drive the most, the richest 10%, about 21% of their emissions comes from driving. And they take up so much more space in cities, which is something we often don't think about. But in Berlin, for example, it's three and a half times more public space that goes to car drivers than non-car drivers. So the car really is a tool to increase inequality.David RobertsAnd that's just parking mostly, right? That public space?Kimberly NicholasLargely parking. Also roads and other car infrastructure. In Sweden, it's about 100 m², roughly 1000 square feet. That's the size of many apartments in cities, here. So you think, "Okay, what value could we get for that land? That could be public parks, that could be more housing where we need it in cities." And it's just a really inefficient use of space.David RobertsAnd you make the point that EU is doing fairly well on some climate metrics, but its transportation sector is actually kind of a little bit of its Achilles' heel. It's not on a good trajectory.Kimberly NicholasNo. And I think that this is really something that it's important for the world to take a look at because to get down to zero emissions and actually stop climate change, the first thing is to produce a lot of clean energy. And I think listeners to your podcast are well aware of that, and you talk about that a lot. But then you have to electrify everything to run on that clean energy. And transport is the next sort of phase. And you see in some of the earlier leaders at the national level, Sweden is one of them, where emissions have been declining too slowly, but they are on the way down.California is a state in the US that's the same, where they're making the transition to produce clean energy, but they're not yet, or they're just really starting to gain traction in electrifying cars to run on that clean energy. And they're not tackling the need to reduce cars and switch to the need for less mobility and sustainable mobility.David RobertsWhat is that case? Because I think a lot of people, a lot of people, especially new to this area, sort of think, "Well, transportation runs on gas, switch it over to run on clean electricity, and you're good." I think that lots of people think that's most of the solution, and I think a lot of people also think that that's faster to do that than to change cities. So what's the case for trying to reduce overall vehicle miles traveled alongside electrification?Kimberly NicholasWell, the climate case is that we won't meet climate goals unless we do that, and the inequality case is that we'll continue to exacerbate inequality unless we do that. So I think that's a very strong case because if we're serious about these goals, and actually making cities safer and healthier and more fair and nice places to live, we actually need to focus on reducing cars. And a lot of cities are starting to realize that, especially in Europe, but also elsewhere. I mean the US does have a lot of work and activism and research showing the need to actually reduce cars.And I think the IPCC, the UN Climate Panel, has started to pick this up, and their latest report focused on this "avoid-shift-improve" model, which I think is really helpful because, for a long time, climate policy has really been focused on just the improve. Take unsustainable tech, replace it with sustainable tech, done. And on a finite planet that's not enough. Because not only do we have a carbon budget, which we need to meet to stay within Paris Agreement limits of warming, we just have a material world that is limited. We have a limited amount of land and water and resources, and we have to use less of them than many of us in wealthy countries do right now in order for everybody to have enough.David RobertsAnd a lot of new drivers on the way, in the next few decades. Or at least a lot of people who will newly have enough money to drive, if that's the option.Kimberly NicholasI had a really interesting conversation, actually, on Twitter. Someone from Ghana got in touch with me and was talking about what sustainable mobility looks like there. And I mean, the reality there is that the vast majority of transportation at the moment is on foot. And his argument was that this kind of approach to reduce cars can actually really benefit people in cities in Subsaharan Africa, for example, that are growing fast, that have a lot of transport needs, that are choked by car traffic, and aren't designed and aren't meeting the needs of how people actually get around.And those cities have an opportunity to do things right from the beginning rather than do what actually Copenhagen did, which was be designed for cars, and then due to grassroots organizing, kind of re-engineer itself to be a city for people instead of cars. But that's obviously a fight and more expensive and takes more time, than doing it right from the beginning.David RobertsYeah, they could leapfrog cars in the jargon. Let's talk about your study then. So you looked across the EU at cities that are trying to reduce vehicle travel and looked at their policies, and tried to sort of compare them and figure out which are the most efficacious. And so my sort of first question is it just seems like, intuitively, that's a lot of very different circumstances, a lot of very different policies, a lot of different areas or sectors. They cover just there's so many apples and oranges. How did you find some sort of data set where you could compare across these?Kimberly NicholasIt was a struggle. Thank you for recognizing that. As we write for academics and the people doing the research that formed the evidence base for this study, which was led by Paula Kuss for her master's thesis, please use a standard metric and one that can actually be linked to emissions. So if any of you listening are in a position to measure car use, please measure vehicle miles traveled by modal share per day. So how far do people go and what means of transport do they use to travel that distance? Because as you saw, we had to combine different measures, and then make somewhat subjective assessment of "okay, how do we rank these?"We can say, "drop in car use by commuters," or "drop in the number of cars in the city center," or "drop in the share of residents who have a car," and make some kind of informed guess about, "well, how many people or what percent does this apply to?" But it's not as good as if we could say miles traveled, but nobody measured that in our study. We screened more than 800 papers.David RobertsReally? Zero cities are keeping track of that metric?Kimberly NicholasThey may well be doing it, but it's not ending up in the peer-reviewed literature. And we also checked about half of our database came from reports at the city level. So, I mean, it may well be in PDFs at individual cities, but that weren't part of the European Union databases that we looked at for inclusion. So the data may be out there if you're willing to dig on an individual level. And I guess now that we've identified here are these couple of dozen cities where you should be looking, it might be more feasible to go into their city council websites and so on. But I think that's just prohibitive as a place to start a research project.David RobertsThere's an element of subjectivity here that we think it's directionally correct. So I don't want to go through the whole list since there are quite a few different policies here. But let's talk about the top three, then. Let's go through the top three, what they are, and how effective they are and where, and who's using them.Kimberly NicholasSure. So leading the list at the top is a "congestion charge". So London was the first to implement this. Drivers need to pay to enter the city center. And that was, we found the most effective overall.David RobertsIs that spread beyond yet London? I know New York City has beat its head against that wall for quite a while, but has not done it yet, right? Has any other city done it?Kimberly NicholasSo we only looked in Europe, and in Europe, we found Milan, Stockholm and, Gothenburg are all using a congestion charge as well. London's was the most effective. So city center car traffic in London dropped 33%, which is quite a lot.David RobertsWow.Kimberly NicholasOther cities were not as much. The approach that we took doesn't really let us dive into the details. I think you would need to add some social science research to interview people who were involved and understand, you know, the design and the actors and the coalitions at play. And, you know, why, why exactly did it get this result on the ground?But even the ones that didn't see as big of a result, the fact that it's for the entire center city, of 12% to almost 20%, was really substantial.David RobertsCould you look closely enough into those policies to see whether the main metric is just price? I mean, sort of like efficacy goes up with price, or is it more complicated than that? Because I know London has increased its charge a couple of times, hasn't it?Kimberly NicholasYes, it has. I don't have an answer to say, "for every dollar a city charges, it drops by this amount." I mean, London's, I think, partly reflected inflation since it was first put in place in 2003 at £5 per day, and then it's now at £15. So I guess that's faster than inflation. But it probably does need to go up over time to remain effective in reducing car use. But we also know that once people change habits, they get stuck in new habits. So if this drives people, no pun intended, if the congestion charge drives people out of their cars, or to do remote work, or to drive less, or to carpool, or to switch to public transport, those new behaviors can become a habit.And maybe the increase in charge is maybe more relevant in affecting the behavior of potential new drivers.David RobertsRight. And it's also important to mention that revenue goes toward public transportation. Has there been — I'm wondering whether London voters are able to sort of see with their eyeballs a notable improvement in public transport that can be traced to this policy?Kimberly NicholasThat's a really critical element of policy design, and we found that in the most effective policies, they need to combine carrots and sticks. So you need to have something that explicitly reduces or restricts cars and parking. That's the stick. And you also need to have something that aims to increase and improve and expand the alternative. So public transport, active walking, and biking.David RobertsRight.Kimberly NicholasA lot of people on Twitter were looking at my table that lists interventions by a congestion charge or parking and traffic control, and they're like, "you forgot bike lanes." I'm like, "no, look in the carrots column. Bike lanes are there." But just adding bike lanes alone without changing the playing field, that right now really overwhelmingly favors cars and driving, is not enough to shift behavior.David RobertsRight. And I imagine that effect is both just in terms of efficacy, but also in terms of political economy. You need to sort of sell some sweet with the sour or whatever, or however it goes.Kimberly NicholasYes, exactly. I mean, I think a common theme in getting climate policy enacted is you can expect resistance from a small, probably powerful group of people who benefit from the current status quo. So I wasn't there in London studying this 15 years ago when the first congestion charge was adopted, but I'm sure it was not a completely smooth ride.And I think politicians need to get much more bold about defending these climate policies on their social merits of saying, "look, here's the data. In the UK, it's overwhelmingly the richest households that have a car. Almost 40% of the lowest-income households don't have a car. And those are more likely to be BIPOC communities. Those are women and single head-of-household. So if we care about equality, we actually need to have some restrict over consumption as well as increase the standards for people at the lowest end."Number two drum roll, please. Thank you. It's parking and traffic control. So that means removing parking spaces.David RobertsOh, my God. Removing parking spaces? What? I just broke out into a sweat.Kimberly NicholasI said it. You mean like a fevered fantasy of delight?David RobertsWell, a little both, and terror at the thought of proposing this in the US city.Kimberly NicholasIt can happen. It can happen, Dave. You can do it. That's the stick, then, in this case. So that's not an economic stick. The first one was an economic stick of a monetary charge, but this one is a public goods and services stick, basically, of reallocating the space in a city, the public space, to be of higher use to people than cars. And so alongside that restriction, and basically the carrot is, you make those spaces really beautiful and usable, and you put bike lanes and walkways in and add car-free streets. And then people use that space and benefit from that space in a different way, and that creates popularity.And I know that US cities, as well as many other cities, have done this, for example, with the pop-up bike lanes and bike lane expansions starting during the Pandemic, for example.David RobertsI find that whole episode, you address that actually in your post, and we might as well talk about it here because I find it somewhat disheartening. There was a lot of sort of pop-up urbanism during the Pandemic, with a lot of new bike lanes and other walkable streets that excluded cars. And as I look around, I'm not sure how much of it is sticking. It looks like a lot of it is getting rolled back. Do you have a sense of that?Kimberly NicholasYou're probably right. I haven't seen a study. We know that in the Pandemic, public policy did not seize the moment as it should have.David RobertsOn a number of levels.Kimberly NicholasYeah, yes, absolutely. I'm not an expert on the health level, but on the climate level, only 18% globally of the COVID funds were in line with climate goals, basically. So there could have been a huge opportunity there to tackle some of these systemic problems, that was largely missed, unfortunately. But we know that those moments of disruption are an effective moment to change behavior, that habits form in a context, and when the context changes, "so okay, I'm not going into the office anymore." People do develop new routines and habits. So smart city planning would have kind of seized that and capitalized on that more.And some cities did do that. So European cities that added bike lanes during the Pandemic increased cycling rates by eleven to 48%. So it was a really big increase. But now, as you said, we are seeing some rollback of those initiatives. I don't have a number overall for how much, but I mean, at least anecdotally some cities are returning. And I guess what this tells us is carrots alone are not enough. You need policy change that actually focuses on the source of the problem. So I mean, if we're talking about fossil fuels, it's production and supply. If we're talking about transport, it's restricting cars and parking.David RobertsYes. And so then number three is one of my favorites. Let's talk about number three.Kimberly NicholasAlright. Number three is the "limited traffic zone". So that's excluding cars from parts of the city, with exceptions for residents. And I should say we haven't talked about this yet, but I mean, all of this can and should be designed to make sure that people who need cars, for mobility and social inclusion, have access to them. And that's the really important part of reducing the inequalities, that for disability or other reasons for people who actually need cars, that should be possible. So certainly those folks would get an exception. But in a limited traffic zone, cars are excluded from a certain region.And again, the care that's linked to that stick is that violation fines fund public transport.David RobertsAnd is usually the city center, isn't it? I mean, that's usually where these things start.Kimberly NicholasYes, we just looked at cities again because we wanted to have something that was hopefully useful for this EU mission to deliver these 100 climate-neutral cities. But there are also ways of reducing car use in rural areas. And that wasn't the focus of our study here. But I think that's a really interesting area because, much like the misconception you mentioned that. "wait a minute, the poor are really car-dependent, and we can't punish them. Well, wait a minute, that's not what the data show." Similarly, people have the argument that rural people are more car-dependent, and at least in Sweden, the data show that that's not the case.That they may have fewer alternatives for public transit, for example, but they don't drive more on average, or they don't drive further than people in cities or suburbs. So in Sweden, and I think this is repeated elsewhere, it's a small minority of folks who do a really excessive amount of driving. It's 25% of the population here that cause 90% of the car emissions. So it's targeting those folks. And those folks are largely the highest income. And then they're distributed around, geographically, between the countryside and the city pretty evenly.David RobertsSo who are the sort of marquee cities here? London did this, didn't it? And didn't Paris also do this?Kimberly NicholasLimited traffic zones. The example we talked about was Rome, and they saw a 20% reduction in cars during the hours that this restriction was in place. And even when it wasn't, they saw half of that 10% reduction. So it shows that having policy change does lead to pretty widespread and more lasting behavior and social change, rather than it's not only like a light switch that people just only follow when it's on. It starts to shift norms and create alternatives and do other good things.David RobertsYeah, seems like a huge piece of this is how to take those changing habits and sort of reinforce them and accelerate them and make sure they don't roll back.Kimberly NicholasYeah, that's true. I mean, there you start to get into some of our other policies that we identified as effective, which have to do with, for example, workplaces and schools, because then I think the employers and schools and cities can do a lot to promote new norms. I mean, to make to have the infrastructure to shower at work, for example, or secure bike parking, but also to kind of make it easy and accepted and even expected to cycle to work. And I know that was in the news recently of some dismissive comments about, "oh, people in Denmark are so poor that they have to cycle to work."David RobertsAnd it was like the most American thing I've ever seen in my entire life.Kimberly NicholasYeah, "no, they actually are doing fine financially, and they prefer to cycle." And here's a minister in a suit on a bike, and it's just the best way to get to work, and it's not a hardship.David RobertsAnd I think of also all those videos I'm always seeing of bicycle school buses in Barcelona. Are you familiar with this? Just like huge herds of children on bikes that all ride together for sort of safety. And it also seems like the social part of it too is a big part of habit formation. Just having it be socially accepted and having your peers doing it too and being able to do it together.Kimberly NicholasAbsolutely. I mean, my friend David Kroodsma biked from grad school at Stanford to the tip of Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of South America. And he had an amazing journey. It was raising awareness about climate. He met so many people, and people would invite him to stay in their homes, and he slept in a lot of fire stations. And I mean, he wrote a book, had an amazing time. And he told me that he also did something similar across the US, and he could never meet people because there are never people on the street.David RobertsThere are just no people on the street. I really don't think Americans realize the lack. Because you kind of have to travel overseas, and you just get used to like, "I'm in a city, of course, there are people around."Kimberly NicholasYes. That's so much better for us as humans. And in terms of social cohesion and trust, which is really important for democracy, and knowing a diverse group of people, and getting to know your neighbors, and actually having small interactions with others in the real world. I mean, the cars are so isolating, and David said he would have to go to gas stations or grocery stores, was like the only moment he could grab people out of their cars.David RobertsJust hang out outside McDonald's. Speaking of trust, one of the themes you sort of pull out of this study is how well-placed local governments are to do this kind of stuff. So talk about that a little bit.Kimberly NicholasYeah. So we found that the policies that worked did a couple of things. They needed to combine carrots and sticks, as we've been discussing, so that could be economic or city planning as tools to make it more expensive, or difficult to drive cars and park, and make it easier and cheaper to walk and bike and take transit. There's also information campaigns that can be a part of that. And then who is it that can do all these good things? Well, 75% of the measures in our study were led by local governments.David RobertsWhat were the remaining 25%? Where did they come from?Kimberly NicholasI mean, most of these interventions had more than one partner involved. A couple of them were led by the transit agencies, sub-NGOs, a couple of businesses, and those kind of players were also usually involved in partnership with the local government.David RobertsRight.Kimberly NicholasBut I think what it says to me is that local government can and should be leading these initiatives and should be making the case for them, building the political will that we always talk about. But in really practical ways, saying, "Okay, who can do what, and who do I need on board to do this?" And it's not only politicians and elected officials, but I think civil servants have a huge role to play here. I mean, people who are working in transport, and streets, and planning departments are really important in making cities better for people.David RobertsYou said you went through 800 studies, so I'm sure you've looked at programs in a lot of different cities. Was there any particular city or any particular program that you had sort of not appreciated before that jumped out of you, that sort of caught your imagination?Kimberly NicholasOne that kind of surprised me was car sharing. So the two cities that have adopted that and that we found had measured its impact, had good reports. So they found that they replaced 12 to 15 private cars with each shared car. And that was, like, a carrot-only policy. So that's having integrated into neighborhoods, nearby where people live and work, having cars that you can check out with an app, for example, just for an hour or two, as opposed to a more sort of centralized rental system.David RobertsRight.Kimberly NicholasBut the thing that surprised me there, the question that was raised in other literature, is there is a risk of that seamless and easy use of cars drawing in more people who previously were not driving. So, I mean, it's clearly a win for the space issue, which we were discussing earlier, that cars need a lot of public space to move around and park, and 95% of the time they're sitting still, which is really inefficient. So it helps with some of those issues. But I think the jury is still out on how effective in the real world are they at actually reducing miles traveled and the number of people traveling by car.David RobertsRight. And may this is a good time to mention that the other thing people refer to as car sharing, which is sort of car services Uber and Lyft and all that, as far as I can tell, the recent studies I've seen show that they probably increase vehicle miles traveled in cities, all told.Kimberly NicholasYes.David RobertsWhich is a bit of a sad trumpet ending for that much-hyped trend.Kimberly NicholasIt's the same with E-scooters. There was just a study in Switzerland, that there's a lot of hype and probably a lot of very good intentions, I think, in these kind of micro-mobility and shared mobility. But as you said in the US, there was a really comprehensive study that found that Uber and Lyft entering a market, increased vehicle ownership in the city overall and also eroded took away from public transport use for the high-income areas. So it's the opposite of the carrot and the stick. Both things are going in the wrong direction.David RobertsBummer.Kimberly NicholasYeah.David RobertsLet's talk a little bit if you have anything to say about it, about how or whether this sort of analysis can be ported to the US. Because I'm looking at your policies and not only just sort of on politically do they seem challenging in a US context, but also a lot of them are sort of premised on shifting people out of cars and into public transit. And a lot of US cities just don't have the public transit to absorb a very large shift. So is there any plans for a similar study like this in the US.Or how applicable do you think this is to the US?Kimberly NicholasWell, I'm not planning to do one at the moment, so if anyone listening wants to, please go for it and feel free to contact me if you want some advice.David RobertsYou can find enough policies to study.Kimberly NicholasWell, I think. They're out there. And actually, I will answer your question, but something that doing this study made me realize is that there's a huge research need for really applied research like this, that is not scientifically groundbreaking, to compare apples and oranges and sift through these large number of studies. But it's actually really important that we have this evidence base. And this is one of the studies that I've done that I've gotten the most feedback from citizens, from people, from city planners, actually, around the world, saying, "I can use this in my work."David RobertsYeah, there's a lot of will out there to do this now, I feel like, recently.Kimberly NicholasYeah, and for a lot of different reasons. We do need people who like to do the work, to make the work accessible. Please measure miles traveled, as I said, and then put it online, I mean, get it out there and share it. And somebody needs to compile it because we need this evidence base to help push forward good climate policy. But okay, that was my hobby horse. Now, I forgot your original question. Oh, "can we do it in the US?"David RobertsWell, just how depressed should we be about the US putting any of this into effect?Kimberly NicholasWell, I know that things are tough in the US right now, but I will say there's so much potential, actually. And I really see cities as leaders in reducing emissions, and actually making a fast and fair transition to a fossil-free world happen, because cities, we have about ten times more cities globally that actually are on track and reducing emissions than we have countries. There's about 20 countries that are reducing emissions, where they're going down, which is the right direction. All of them need to speed up and do much more. But they've started that transition. But we have over 300 cities that are actually decreasing emissions.And I think that cities are a really effective place to engage in climate work. And that's good news for citizens as well, because it's easier to get involved as a citizen at the city level, to show up at city council meetings, to organize your neighborhood. I mean, those things actually do really work.David RobertsYeah. You don't get into politics in the paper, but it strikes me as this just such a straightforward reflection of politics, and the sort of sorting of political tribes into and out of cities. So all the willing people have been sorted into cities, which does make them fertile places to do this. Did you, in the process of looking through all these papers, learn anything about the politics? Because, of course, when you rank things by how effective they are, I'm sure there are policies we could think of that would be way more effective than any of these, but couldn't get past anywhere.Was there a political economy sort of aspect to this study or your other work?Kimberly NicholasNot in this study in particular, but it is something that I think about a lot because the only way for climate policies to reduce emissions is to actually be enacted and enforced. So we have to think about feasibility. My friend and colleague Christian Nielsen is doing some of this work on, basically, including in models and in the way that traditionally the people. For example, in the IPCC, the Climate Panel, have been assembling and ranking policies to start to include not just technical effectiveness, but actual behavioral plasticity. So how willing are people to actually use and adopt these things and the political feasibility? How do we get legitimacy and actually get these policies enacted?So I can just say, I know these are very important issues, and I don't have insight, because of the way we did this study, to how did these cities succeed in getting them passed. But that could be a next step to now that we know where these cities are that actually worked. We could contact these folks, we could interview them, and try to scale it up. And I know that some journalists have actually, or at least one journalist contacted me and was planning to do that, to try and find the people in these cities who actually did this work. So now that we know where the bright spots are, we can dive into that further.David RobertsOne sort of parallel that struck me, as I was thinking about this, is discussions over carbon taxes. I think the conventional wisdom at this point is, "yes, in theory, a carbon tax is the most effective sort of per ton per dollar policy, but it also happens to be the most politically challenging policy." You're going to face the most resistance from the most people if you push it. So in that sense, it's not effective because it's very difficult to pass. And I just wonder about whether congestion charges are a little bit like that. Obviously, efficacious if you can do it, but so difficult to do that it might be worth doing other things instead, or alongside, or, you know what I mean?Kimberly NicholasYeah, absolutely. And I think that's smart to think about in a local context. I mean, the other cities that passed congestion charges after London, I actually don't know enough about the process that London went through. Their mayor, I know, was instrumental, but I don't know exactly how that policy got put in place. But the other three that have it had a referendum, so people voted on it. That's obviously a good way in a democracy, to demonstrate legitimacy. This is the will of the people. But I totally agree, if in your context a congestion charge is just the kiss of death, then if you combine workplace parking charges and workplace travel planning with mobility services for university and school travel planning, you could maybe get just as far.Yeah, when we did the study. So we ranked these interventions by effectiveness, and then another part of the study was to apply it to the city of Lund, which is where I live and where Paula Kuss was doing her masters. And I have a project trying to help Lund actually reach its climate goals and be climate neutral by 2030. We have a long way to go, but in our case, for example, we didn't recommend the congestion charge to Lund because we did do some of that political feasibility work on the ground here. And from interviewing local experts and civil servants and politicians, it wasn't ranked feasible.David RobertsOh, interesting.Kimberly NicholasWe chose the three that were the most, that combined the best combination of feasibility and effectiveness, and everyone was like, "oh, apps, we should do an app." And we're like, "nope, that's not that effective." So even if it's very feasible, we're not going to suggest that.David RobertsPeople love their apps.Kimberly NicholasThey really do.David RobertsYeah. I wonder ... this is sort of a random thought, and it's probably not going to be captured in your study because it's about policies that have been in place for a while ... but I wonder how big the working from home trend is. Are you aware of any studies yet on the working from-home effect on reducing cars, and what, and whether there — I've been wondering if there are cities should be embracing that and passing policies to sort of try and reinforce it and keep it in place, or if you have any thoughts on that at all.Kimberly NicholasYes, I haven't seen a study about exactly that from the Pandemic. But from earlier work, in 2018, Seth Wines led a study where we compiled existing interventions across high-impact domains. So driving, meat consumption, energy use at home. We wanted to do flying at that reduction. At that time, we found zero cities that had even tried to reduce flying, so we couldn't include that. But the ones that we found that reduced the most CO2 were telecommuting. So incentives to do that can be really effective.There's a newer study from the UK, I linked to it in that post in The Conversation. That study is called "Do Teleworkers Travel Less?" And that's based in England. And they basically conclude, "you need to work from home three or more days per week to actually reduce your overall driving." That there seems to be some substitution effect of perhaps more leisure travel or people. I think a big risk is people moving further away from work because they don't have to be there so often.David RobertsRight.Kimberly NicholasBut we know that most emissions come from long-distance driving. So if you're only driving to work once a week, but it's 100 miles instead of you used to drive every day, 3 miles, that's a worse equation for climate.David RobertsInteresting. Yeah. And this is another area where it just seems like the difference between the EU and the US is so huge, because working from home if you are living in a city, you have other reasons to go out and mingle with people other than work. But if working from home just means being stranded in your suburb all day, every day, just seems like a different thing in terms of driving and just in terms of life quality.Kimberly NicholasYeah, I hear you.David RobertsFinal question, and you touched on this earlier, but another thing I think about the US is how car dependent our rural areas are. I think probably considerably more so than in the EU, or in a place like Sweden. My experience of the rural US is highways, two-lane highways with roads branching off them. And even in little, small towns, you pass through, like in the South, where I grew up, even tiny towns are built such that you basically have to drive everywhere, such as to be hostile to walking. So I just wonder whether you've heard about policies for reducing vehicle miles traveled in rural, or even like exurban, suburban and exurban, and rural areas, because in a sense it's easiest to do in a city, I would think.But have you heard about efforts to do it in the more far-flung and less dense areas?Kimberly NicholasYes, I have and I heard about it from readers who contacted me and discussed on Twitter and in my newsletter. So I think in my newsletter that I wrote about this, which was "We Can Fix It", a couple of months ago, I think I linked to the study that someone brought to my attention. So it was a report from the UK that was specifically about reducing driving and increasing sustainable mobility in villages and rural areas. So there are people thinking about that. And I do think that's really important, both for social inclusion and cohesion. That the dynamic, in many parts of the world, is this urban, rural divide, and people who live in the countryside feel like, "those big city politicians don't understand me, they don't see me, they don't care about me."And that's not good for democracy. So I think meeting people's needs where they are is really important. But I guess another thing to say there is that if we go back to this "avoid-shift-improve" model, the most effective way is to avoid the need for mobility in the first place, to have your needs close to hand. So, I mean, there's never going to be a sustainable way to travel 50 or 100 miles between where you live and where you work. That's just too far away. And I used to be one of those people. When I lived in California, I was commuting 70 miles from my home in Sonoma to grad school at Stanford, and it was a nightmare and now feels like completely ridiculous.But I did that for many years, so I know there are lots of reasons that people get put in those positions, and those are the things we also need to be thinking about structurally. I mean, how do we make towns attractive places to live that have jobs, so people don't have to commute? Or how do we make it affordable to live where the jobs are? And that was a policy that, I think, got mentioned briefly, that something workplaces can do is actually support policies for affordable housing and encourage people to live near work and incentivize that, rather than giving free parking and incentivizing people to live further away.David RobertsWell, this is also Interesting, and it strikes me as promising that you got such an enormous amount of feedback about it.Kimberly NicholasYeah, thanks.David RobertsIt seems like the iron is hot, or whatever the right metaphor is. Like, People seem geared up to do this now.Kimberly NicholasI think so. And that feels really exciting. And I mean, I think we need a lot more work in this direction. Imagine we lived in a world where politicians are ready to implement bold climate policies. What is it they should do? We really need better answers to those questions in specific places and for specific sectors. And "who can do what" is where I'm now shifting my research to because we do have a lot of ideas from many, many years of study of — we know in broad strokes what needs to be done.Transition off fossil fuels, have agriculture that feeds people without destroying the planet. Big Picture. We've got all that. We have a lot of technical solutions, but "who can do what" in specific places to actually make that happen in a fast and fair way, we really need more evidence base for. So I think this is the way I'm going in the future, and I hope others will be inspired to contribute, too.David RobertsAwesome. Well, thanks for doing the work, and thanks for coming on.Kimberly NicholasThanks for having me, Dave.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, political communications expert Dan Pfeiffer speaks to the wide influence of right-wing media, why Democrats keep losing messaging battles, and what they need to do about it.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsYou probably know Dan Pfeiffer best as one of the hosts of the wildly successful Pod Save America podcast, part of the growing Crooked Media empire of which he is a co-founder. Or perhaps you know him as the author of the Message Box newsletter, where he dispenses communications advice to left-leaning subscribers. But before he was a new media mogul, Pfeiffer was in the thick of politics as a top aide on Obama’s campaign and then in Obama’s White House, where he ran communications and strategy.Pfeiffer has seen the media war between the parties play out, and he has seen Democrats lose messaging battles again and again. He has first-hand experience of the growing power of the right-wing media machine to spread disinformation, set the agenda for the rest of the media, and deflect accountability.Now he has written a book on the subject: Battling the Big Lie is an extended examination of the growing imbalance between the conservative movement’s massive media megaphone … and the left’s lack of one. Listeners know that I have been obsessed with this imbalance for as long as I’ve been following politics, so I was super geeked to talk with Pfeiffer about how right-wing media grew, how it successfully intimidated both mainstream media and social media companies, and how Democrats can begin building a comparable megaphone of their own, before it’s too late.Dan Pfeiffer. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Dan PfeifferThanks for having me.David RobertsCongratulations on writing a book under extreme time pressure. An extremely stressful time to be alive. I hope the psychological damage has been minimal.Dan PfeifferI think we'll only know how much damage there was many years from now, so the full cost of this endeavor will not be known.David RobertsWell, I want to talk about the current situation, but just briefly at the beginning, let's look a little bit at history. So I wonder what you think are sort of the kind of the landmarks on the road to the current situation. So for instance, tell us a little bit about when the press, the mainstream press as the enemy, became a popular thing on the right. That's sort of the first and then the second is like, what are the sort of markers of the growth of their own media apparatus? How did we get here?Dan PfeifferSure, there had been a bubbling sentiment of conservative anti-press sentiment dating back to the New Deal and FDR and Democrats sort of dominating the conversation. But it became a political strategy, primarily in Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. He hammered the press, he hammered Eastern elites. He handed out pins to the press on the press planes, calling them members of the Eastern establishment. The press as enemy became an explanation to the right, themselves and their voters why they kept losing elections. It wasn't that their policies were bad. It wasn't that they were unpopular. It wasn't that their rhetoric wasn't good.It was that the press hated them. Nixon took that into hyperdrive because of his own set of insecurities and grievances. And even before Watergate, like in the course of the Nixon administration, there was real thoughts on how you go about destroying the press. Richard Nixon had his enemies list, which included members of the press. He also explored with Roger Ailes and some of his other aides very specific forerunners, the Fox News. In terms of state sponsored propaganda, there was an effort where they explored creating local news pieces created by the White House that would then be under a sort of undercover that would be sent to local news stations.There was an effort to fund a pro-Vietnam War documentary to push back against the Pentagon Papers and other efforts out there. And then when the press, in the common "tell all the President's men" telling of what happened, took down Nixon, that became sort of the cause celeb in the right. "The press is out to get us. The press is out to get us." Reagan took that in the 80s. Getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine as a part of it was part of his campaign.David RobertsOne question about that, about the Fairness Doctrine thing, I'm curious what sort of the public versus private justifications for that were, like, did Reagan and his people consciously do that in order to bolster right wing voices or was there some sincere ideological motivation back there somewhere?Dan PfeifferI think there was probably some sincere ideological motivation, but the primary driving factor, as I understand the history, was the fact that the Fairness Doctrine was putting downward pressure on efforts to have an emerging right wing radio ecosystem. And that in order to have that, every time they kept trying to move towards local stations, kept trying to move towards sort of the forerunners to Rush Limbaugh, there would be pressure from the FCC for equal time, et cetera. And so ending the Fairness Doctrine basically created the environment by which right-wing radio could thrive. Which created the environment by which Fox News could thrive.The idea that the FCC and the Fairness actor and the big government were preventing conservative media was one of the motivating factors among grassroots activists that pushed Reagan to do it. And then there are a couple of moments in time where the idea of aggressive Republican Party adjacent media comes from. And I use that to distinguish between ideological media like Human Events and the Weekly Standard and sort of National Review, of which we have examples in the pre-Trump era on the right and the left, right sort of real magazines. It's pushing the party agenda, left or right, depending.And that's obviously Roger Ailes recognizing that the power was in the press and so get partnering with Rupert Murdoch to start Fox News. Fox News becomes very, very powerful over the course of time finds a real market. And then there are two other moments that I think are incredibly significant. One is right after the 2012 election, there was a view pushed primarily by Steve Bannon that the right is losing the messaging wars and they need to double and triple down in the ability to push the political conversation in their direction. Their direction. And his view was cultural wars, immigration, et cetera.And that leads to Breitbart, The Daily Caller, Free Beacon with real investment from a new set of, quote unquote, "Rupert Murdochs," like the Mercers who help start Breitbart, or take Breitbart from its previous version to the Steve Bannon pro-Trump version. You have Foster Freeze, who gives money to Tucker Carlson to start The Daily Caller. And then the moment that really sort of takes that, which would be in Supercharges, is Facebook really hits a tipping point in around 2014 where its reach, the news feed and the algorithm all sort of combine with these new right wing digital outlets to move the political conversation powerfully towards right wing extremist messaging. And that takes off and then that sort of ends in Trump, and then Trump takes the whole thing to another level from 2016 on.David RobertsI remember, even back in the day, it's sort of early, after the emergence of Fox, the situation it created, which persists to this day in mainstream sort of especially like mainstream cable news, is you have this weird form. Of balance now, where the balance is on one side, explicit ideological right wing propaganda media, and then the other side, and I'm air quoting here, is just a couple of mainstream journalists from like the New York Times or whatever. Mainstream journalists who are scrupulously, as always, attempting to appear objective and unbiased. And that's just like a bizarre form of balance, a bizarre way of drawing two sides that always struck me as surreal but now is just absolutely bog standard and no one blinks at it.That's what balance basically means now, on like a Sunday show.Dan PfeifferThat's exactly right. The right has so convinced the media itself that it is left that in order to balance itself, it must seek out a right-wing voice. Like you mentioned the idea of the Sunday shows and that is often the lineup, particularly Meet the Press is a Republican, a Democrat, some journalists and a member of the conservative media. And then Facebook took this to another level when they started putting in trusted news sources in order to, quote unquote, "balance CNN and the New York Times," they had to have Breitbart and Fox or The Daily Caller or whatever it is.And it is like this I think this is one of Roger Ailes's great insights because he is someone who came from he was in media, was a political consultant, went back to media as he understood how to exploit the cultures the mores and the insecurities of the press in a way to push conservative messaging. And he knew that they were incredibly self conscious about liberal bias because many of them are personally liberal. They may live in New York or they may live in Los Angeles and then use it simply to bludgeon them into becoming a vehicle for pushing additional right wing messaging. I mean, it must have been Roger Ailes's dream.Like, he could not believe how successful his endeavor was that after Barack Obama was elected, the New York Times assigned an editor to monitor Fox for story ideas. That The Washington Post executive ... that is a real thing. The Washington Post executive editor at the time, Marcus Brauchli, said that he wanted his paper to spend more time paying attention to Fox, to learn more. In his wildest dreams, when he started thinking about Fox, in the idea of Fox, in the 70s and 80s, the idea that his hated New York Times would be so cowed by him that they would sign an editor to watch his network in order to hold a Democratic president accountable, it must have been beyond his wildest dreams.David RobertsIt's wild. It's been one of the wildest things about the whole process is the extent to which explicit ideological right wing media has been protected at every stage by the very establishment that it is devoted to destroying. It's so surreal and one of the most infuriating chapters of the last, actually. It's more than a decade ago. I'm revealing my age here, but that you cover in your book is Obama came in, you all came in with Obama. And by that point, I mean, it's pretty obvious from the jump, I think. But certainly by the time Obama took office, it's just super obvious that one of these things is not like the others.Right? That Fox is not just another objective news network, that it's very explicitly devoted to taking Obama down, it's devoted to the Republican Party. Seems very obvious, and I'm sure seemed quite obvious to you inside the White House. But then you all consciously decided to push back on it and just reaped a shitstorm not from the right wing media, but from its defenders in the mainstream media. That drives me mad to this day. I can only imagine what it was like from the inside.Dan PfeifferI was one of the people in the White House that were in the book who pushed to go aggressively against Fox. And my mistake, I guess three mistakes. One is misunderstanding the nature of it's, sort of like the NATO defense pack among journalists, that an attack on one is attack on us all. So that's mistake one is that we weren't just fighting, we're going to fight Fox. We're going to end up fighting everyone. And that's not worth our time and energy and not a fight you're going to win. The second, I think, was in sort of in our tactics.We made some mistakes, and when we got into their access, that's where the press, I think to some extent understandably comes to everyone's defense because it's not whether we're going to do interviews with them or not. It's not whether we're going to acknowledge them or not. It's whether they get to show up and participate in sort of communal activities which they pay for.David RobertsRight.Dan PfeifferAnd then the third was that Fox would see it in their this part we sort of understood, but would see it in their interest too. Right. Obviously our attack on them became proof to their base that they were doing what they said. And now in situations like that, we can both win. Because as painful as that whole battle was, it did have at least I think and then maybe this is just me justifying my own decisions, a moderately moderating impact on how much the press was following Fox. It still obviously was a problem, but there was less like we really were in those first years of the White House would be like Glenn Beck segment.Phone call from Politico about Glenn Beck segment. Right. And that people created at least a little bit of more self conscious echoing of Fox before they came to us. But these are small victories.David RobertsYeah. And it still begs the larger question, which is why it was just super clear for me, as an outside observer looking at the media landscape, that Fox is not like other news, other news stations. It's very clear they're doing a different thing. And it just begs the question of why other journalists couldn't acknowledge that or couldn't see it or weren't. And this is what I always wonder, why they weren't pissed off about it. If you're a real journalist and you really care and you're dealing with fact checkers and editors and you're having to confirm things with two sources and et cetera, and then these people come along and just sort of, like, call themselves a news network, even though it's, like, 90% bloviating opinion and it's full of falsehoods and it's full of b******t.And they're calling themselves the same thing you're calling yourself. Where's the professional pride? Why are journalists not mad about Fox? Why instead are they defending and welcoming it? Have you ever figured that out?Dan PfeifferYeah, I think there are a couple reasons for it. Part of it is this sort of self conscious liberal bias where it's like, yeah, we are kind of liberal. Maybe it's not bad if someone balances out in the sense that this view that maybe Fox is a center right journalism entity during the day at least, as opposed to a propaganda operation. The second one is basically, up until 2012 or so, the people that Fox hired to be campaign reporters or White House reporters, they almost operated as intermediaries between the Fox higher ups and the people they were covering.And it's a pretty like people who had been at other entities and were well respected by their colleagues, like Major Garrett, Carl Cameron, and we would have conversations, I'm not going to out specific conversations with people. A lot of the people who would cover us, they'd come to you and say, look, we'd sort of kind of know this is b******t, what's your complaint? And they'll try to serve it as intermediary. So I can see in a world in which I'm not defending this, but just understanding sort of the fraternity or culture among journalism, is it's like we respect Major Garrett or we respect Carl Cameron, and he is one of us and worked with one of us.And then it began to take a transition with the sorts of people those sorts of people started leaving the network and going to other things and you end up with other people like Ed Henry or Peter Doocy or others who are you had to be all in on the scam or all in the propaganda to be there after a while. So it's like, I think it was a not a deeply naive approach from a lot of the press. It was born of subconscious liberal bias and some complete cockiness in their position in the political firmament that like, yeah, they attack us, but we are the fourth estate. We exist.We will forever be trusted and important. And before long that very, very they didn't realize they were. I often sometimes joke that the, you know, Fox and Roger Ailes in the right declared war on the press, and the press covered that war instead of participated in it.David RobertsLet's turn to real quickly to Facebook, because one of the more disheartening episodes the last few years so many disheartening episodes, but one of them is I sort of came into political consciousness in the early 2000s and watched as the right wing media sort of chipped away at mainstream media. Just accused it of bias over decades, even before the 2000s, like you say, starting back in the 70s. Just accused it of bias. Banged on it. Banged on it with these critiques, slowly wore it down until it sort of submitted to being polluted and ending up in this bizarre two sides objective versus right wing situation.But at least it took a while to bring the media down. Then along comes Facebook. The same exact arguments, the same exact disingenuous arguments, the same accusations of bias, the same whining and grievance, the same right-wing playing the refs thing came out again, except Facebook resisted it for all of like a few months and crumbled in just spectacular total fashion almost immediately. So is the explanation for that that tech-guys are even more naive about the ways of the political world than journalists are? Or is the right interpretation more cynical? Just that these guys just wanted to buddy up to power and never had any pretensions of journalistic integrity in the first place?Dan PfeifferI don't know that anyone at Facebook had any intentions towards integrity at any point. I don't think. That wasn't the I think I have always understood Mark Zuckerberg to be an entirely amoral person who stumbles into immorality when he's not paying attention. And so I think the answer to your question is both. So in the pre-Trump election, there was a inside Facebook like, deeply, deeply, deeply naive people about how politics works. So the moment that I think is notable in the pre-Trump period that leads to things going really bad in the Trump period is right around the time that Democrats are about to win the election.Now, the leadership at Facebook, whether it's Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg, has become relatively they're well connected with Democrats in Washington, either via Nancy Pelosi or through President Obama. I mean, Chris Hughes, who was one of the original founders of Facebook, worked on the Obama campaign in the early days of Facebook. They had plenty of connections among Democrats, as a lot of tech companies would do, from California would do, right? And then right when the Republicans are starting to control the House, they're starting to build up their government affairs operation because now they're a real company, and they're going to start bumping into the regulatory state.And Republicans are coming into Congress, and they figure, we have the Democratic side figured up. We can get people on the phone, so we need to hire Republicans. So they hired Joel Kaplan, who was George W. Bush's Chief of Staff, had worked in the Office of Management and Budget. Incredibly well-respected, well-liked, moderate-ish Republican like, not a Tea Party Republican. That was sort of the MAGA version of 2010. They hire him, and he's the only Republican of note in the company. So his word is like, he is the only one who if there's a question about product or marketing, there are lots of people there who have opinions on it.No one has an opinion on how to deal with Republicans other than Joel Kaplan.David RobertsHe's the Republican whisperer.Dan PfeifferYeah, he may be the only one that they even know, right? And so he starts giving them advice, and so they're like giving money to Republicans and doing meetings and all of that. But this first becomes a real issue in 2016 when this fake scandal emerges that suggests that Facebook is biased against conservatives and what they put on their trending news page and other Republicans yell. Then Joel Kaplan sort of puts together a plan that causes them to, even though they essentially did nothing wrong to apologize for it, accommodate these Republicans. Zuckerberg begins his outreach program.He dines with Tucker Carlson and all these people and some well meaning conservatives like S.E. Cupp and some other people. It's not all just like proto MAGA types. It's some conservatives in good standing, even if we disagree with them on a lot of issues. And then Trump wins. And this is where I think it takes the transition from sort of self conscious, naive liberal bias to we got to make money. And so there's fear of Trump using the power of the state against them. Republicans control all the levers of power in Congress. They're threatening all sorts of things around overturning Section 230, which gives them legal immunity from things published on their page.And the other thing that's important to know about Facebook is the Facebook audience is much more Republican than any other social media company. Twitter is overwhelmingly Democrat. The Facebook audience is older people, trans-Republican. And so they have a challenge. They're setting an inside game of being seen as being able to influence a process and prevent and be able to keep making gobs of money without interference from the Trump administration. And then there is the problem of if Trump turns on them, that would affect their bottom line because people will stop using the platform. They'd already lost a bunch of liberals over Cambridge Analytic and all these other things.And so if MAGA fans, Trump fans, started deleting, "hashtag deleting Facebook," that was going to be a real problem. So they were trying to navigate the situation where they were not upsetting. Their customer base was sort of in the old Michael Jordan apocryphal quote, apparently Republicans use Facebook too, or even may use Facebook more. So there was a fear about losing those people. So it is a combination of ignorance and avarice, I think, that got them in this position.David RobertsI want to come back to their sort of unsolvable problem at the end because I think it's kind of the root of everything. But first, let's get to the present day. So one of the most, I think, key points you make in the book, and it's a point I have been trying to make again and again and again for years, to no effect, is that everybody on the left seems convinced that the left has a messaging problem. And what you point out is that the problem is not messaging. The problem is megaphone. The problem is not the words we're saying what we're saying.The problem is the left simply does not have the capacity to get its words into its voters ears in a direct way. We don't have the big machine that the right has built that we're just discussing. But nonetheless, you can say that over and over again. And it proves incredibly difficult to dissuade average people on the left from obsessing over words, magic words. One of that you describe in the book being at these high dollar fundraisers in your suit, kind of hiding over in the corner, trying not to talk to anyone, and these rich people who hold the fundraisers finding you and buttonholing you so they can tell you their thoughts about messaging.And I have been at those fundraisers and I have talked to those people, and it was so vivid to me that I was getting beads of sweat on my forehead reading about that. I can't tell you how much sympathy I have for you being forced to listen to overconfident old rich white guy telling you how dems should talk, like the phrases that will magically make things work better. And of course, I'm in climate change. The first thing everybody knows about climate change is that environmentalists are talking about it wrong and instead should use this set of magic phrases which would open up the politics.It's really hard to dissuade people from that. But one of the points you make, which I thought was good, is if it came down to the quality of messaging and messengers, then how are these people winning? Look at these people on the right. Look at what they're saying. Don't over 3D-chess yourself into thinking that they're brilliant. They are in fact dumb and sound dumb. They're not good at messaging.Dan PfeifferThat's right. As I have made this point over the years, and then particularly in the context of this book, some people read my focus on the megaphone problem as an endorsement of every message the Democrats have ever had. And of course, look, I would stipulate our message could always be better, right? Strictly congressional messaging is inherently bad because you need anything that you need 50 Democrats to sign off on. And one of those Democrats is Bernie Sanders and one is Joe Manchin. Of course it's not going to be like super sharp, right? It's lowest common denominator strategizing.I worked in Senate leadership for a time. We went through that, though. In my world, it was Bernie Sanders and Ben Nelson. Or my world or Bernie Sanders and Joe Lieberman. And so it was very challenging. And I think Democrats have a little bit of this was described to me once by many, many years ago, back when Bush was president, that Democrats have a slot machine addiction, which is we're just hoping to pull the lever and get lucky on one thing as opposed to actually doing the work. Right. It speaks to our obsession around messaging, which is we can just come up with our bigger government, less smaller government, less taxes or ...David RobertsBetter together.Dan PfeifferYeah. Or MAGA. If we could just find one bumper sticker slogan, it would solve all of our problems. Or it also speaks to, and I think this has changed a lot in the last four or five years, our obsession with presidential elections, right? Presidential elections, if you can just they're exciting, they're sexy, they only happen every four years. It's a substitute for the hard work of building bottom up progressive power through candidate recruitment, candidate training, state legislative races, all of those things. And so we're constantly looking for shortcuts. And I think our messaging obsession is a shortcut to thinking if we just figure out this one magic zinger, we will solve all of our problems.And that's just simply if we come up with it, no one's going to hear it. And I obviously wrote this book about the megaphone, both their megaphone and our lack of one. You could write another book about the messaging, but I felt like we have a gazillion people working on the words and not enough people working on the megaphone. So I wanted to try to balance the scales in terms of what the focus was on.David RobertsI can't tell you how many classes of graduate students I've talked to, all of whom are busy-beavering away doing little experiments, trying different combination of words to see how people react in focus groups, looking for the magic combination of words. And I just want to tell them, like, so much of this is wasted effort.Dan PfeifferYeah.David RobertsProblem is the friggin' West Wing view of politics, because in West Wing, Bartlett solved every problem by pulling out the magic words, by having the magic speech by persuading people. And that's just like a very, I think, for liberals. Liberals are educated over-educated. Some might say love words. They love the idea of reasoned persuasion. And it's very self-flattering to think that that's what politics runs on, right? Because that's what you're good at and that's what you know. So it's just real easy to think that that's the engine of politics. But of course, as I tell people who come along and say, well, why don't you talk about climate change as a national security problem?It's like, do you think no one's ever said that I can send you 500 white papers. Like, people have been saying that until they're blue in the face for years. It just doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't get out anywhere because we don't have the mechanisms. We just shout it out into the mainstream media and hope that it filters down through the mainstream media to people, and that is not what happens. So I want to talk about building this megaphone, but first, just the most depressing realization I ever had about climate change is when the IPCC report came out and said, we got about ten years.Not 'til the Earth ends or not 'til it's too late, all this b******t, but we got about ten years to turn the ship around before we cross these thresholds that are going to be devastating. And when you hear it like that, you're like, oh, ten years? Well, if we have to solve it in ten years, that means we got to solve it with these people that we've got now, like, these people and these institutions, which is just like, "wah, wah, wah" So how big of a problem is the fact that democratic leadership, by and large, is old AF and have their, you know, their thoughts on messaging were formed not even by the Internet, but, like, by TV coming along, you know what I mean?Dan PfeifferRight.David RobertsSo do you just work grassroots up around them? Do you persuade them? Have you been able to persuade any of them to get a clue on this? Or like, what do you do about this lump of. Gerontocratic leadership that is on top of the party.Dan PfeifferMy theory of politics has been that people's understanding of the media environment is frozen in amber from the time in which they entered national politics. And so that was a huge advantage for Barack Obama in 2008, was he was a person who had campaigned and come up in politics in the age of the internet, right? You sort of can divide the world into time periods. There's the TV period from 1960 on. There's the cable TV period, which starts in the then the Internet really starts in the early two thousand s. And that goes in my mind up until 2014, which I think is the Facebook-Twitter period of campaigning.But so we have a bunch of people who are incredibly skilled leaders at certain aspects of their job, like Nancy Pelosi is, I think, without a doubt the greatest legislative leader in American history. She has done incredible work over a very long period of time. And she is in that role because she's the best vote counter, right? Chuck Schumer is in that role because he's a great vote counter. Joe Biden was, I believe, probably the only Democrat who could have won that election. But his skill set is not getting attention for himself. He was a perfect person to run against Trump.But in this day and age, what matters more than anything else is can you get people to hear what you're saying? And that means you have to change how you say it, when you say it, whom you say it to, and all of that. And I think that's very challenging for this group of people. The positives of it, I think, are that I really have felt in the larger progressive universe, including the progressive donor community, that in the last two years, since 2020, since I think the closeness of that Trump election of Trump almost winning that race, and then the power of the big lie scared a lot of people into realizing that we have to narrow the media gap.And you're seeing more investment from democratic donors into entities that are trying to solve that problem, either media companies or content factories and things like that. So there is some positive and there are among ... there was a group of us, I wasn't the only one, but sort of by far from the only one. There are a group of people after 2016 who were making the round saying this was the challenge. And there were all ... a gazillion meetings after the election between people in politics, old Obama people, silicon — I live out in the Bay Area — Silicon Valley people, like rich people.Holy s**t, what happened? How do we fix this problem? And there were massive gaps all across the board in the infrastructure, right? We had a data problem, we had an organizing problem. We didn't have the organizations to capture the huge wave of resistance that was coming in. Who's working on local stuff, all of that and the messaging thing often fell by the wayside for a whole host of reasons that we can talk about that has shifted. And there are even like you have to look for small victories, I think. But I've seen some things. I know the people in the Biden White House, I worked with lots of them at all levels.This is certainly not Joe Biden's natural skill set is communicating in this environment. And we knew that going in. We knew that when we nominated him. We knew that when we elected him. The people around him are pushing and working on lots of things and there are some small things that I think are really positive. Like I took note of Biden doing some progressive media interviews. Like with Brian Tyler Cohen and Heather Cox Richardson. There are some efforts happening out there. The DNC just launched a really, I think, potentially game changing program if they can scale it, where people can download an app that gives them content to share to their networks, whether it's what we're trying to do at Crooked Mmedia, whether it's the stuff that you're doing and other people Midas Touch, Demcast, there are more perfect union.There are lots of out there. Like we have a long way to go. But I've seen so much more focus and investment on trying to solve this problem in the last couple of years than I have in the full balance of my career in politics before it.David RobertsOne of the things that struck me as I was reading your book is the media and communications environment has changed so fundamentally in the last ten years that it has basically rendered the skill sets of the Democratic consultant class anachronistic. They just have a bunch of skills now and talents that no longer matter. And this was rendered vivid when James Carville goes on TV or actually was in Vox. He went on Vox and he's complaining about how Democrats are woke, how novel James, and says, we need to get this other message out there, so we need to start calling cable bookers and writing op eds to get this message out there.And I just thought, my God, how revealing is that, that when you think about how to get a message out there, your first thought is calling cable bookers and getting op eds placed in regional newspapers. That is just like some grandpa s**t. But that's the skill set that most of the consultant class has. And if you are talking about pivoting to a completely new environment, you are going to render a lot of those people useless and presumably they don't want to be useless. So what's your sense of how much resistance there is from the people who learned the old way, the old way of press management?Dan PfeifferThere definitely is some level of resistance. There has been over the course of my time in politics, mostly the same set of people making television ads for presidential campaigns, and the dominance of broadcast linear television advertising as a communications medium in presidential elections. In particular, the value of an ad, television ad in a highly polarized environment where an election is decided by 40,000 people is probably pretty small. It's like a historically inefficient way to communicate with people. I think it's slightly different in races where the candidates don't have 100% name ID. And I mean, this is getting sort of nerdy, but the way Facebook has changed its political advertising policies, you're sort of being pushed back in some ways to the old world.I think there is resistance. There's a sense, I think, that the whole consultant class is corrupt and this is all about making money. And there are certainly some people who on both parties who are not as ethical as everyone else. But for the vast part at least, the consultants I've worked with, they want to win. They want to win because they're Democrats, they care about the country. And also winning elections is better for business than losing elections. And most are pretty open to some new ways of doing things. It is sometimes hard because the candidates are less so because they are from an old world.They want their race this way, some of them, just because the way demographics have changed, haven't had a tough race in a very long time and so they're sort of operating in the way they were thinking. If you're looking for positives in this, the number of people with digital organizing and communications experience who are running campaigns, who have the actual campaign manager title and are making budgetary decisions, has gone way up. That's actually what most campaigns that I talk to, that's what they look for first. Someone who is digitally savvy and understands analytics, performance, measurement of communications and all of that.So there is some positive stuff there. The hard part is like, and I argue this in the book, is you have to entirely change the apparatus of how campaigns are structured to fully maximize a new way of communicating. And that is a hard thing to get anyone to wrap their mind around. And one of the challenges we had in this presidential election, this past one in 2020, was the old way of doing ... of how you communicate, where 99% of your communications is focused around press management is not a terrible way to win a primary. The Democratic primary electorate is the highest percentage consumer of political media and so maximizing your press coverage and managing your press narratives was a huge part of those campaigns.So there wasn't an incentive to radically rebuild the model for the general election. And then when Biden won the nomination, he was probably the person least likely to do it, just given his experience. But he did hire Jen O'Malley Dillon as his campaign manager, someone who has thought as deeply about these issues as anyone I know in the party. And they did a lot of things sort of under the radar in terms of how they communicated strictly towards the end. But making those changes in a pandemic when the headquarters shuts down, whatever it was, seven days after you win the nomination, and the day your new campaign manager arrives at the office makes it very hard under all scenarios.And so I think that there are some good things happening, but change is always hard, and change is particularly hard in the White House because of the way it's set up.David RobertsLet's talk about, then, the megaphone. You say it in your book. I've said it a million times. It seems so obvious to me that it's baffling, that it needs saying over and over again. But the right has this giant machine whereby they can directly channel their message to their voters and get all their voters on the same page. So, for instance, if the left comes out with a Green New Deal on the left, they introduce the Green New Deal at a press conference and then mainstream reporters write it up. And the left just hopes that the spirit and the details of the thing survive those write ups and make it somehow to left voters.Whereas on the right you're like, oh, here's a new thing. What do I think about it? Well, every one of a dozen radio stations and web pages and TV shows are telling you exactly what you think about it and what all the other people on the right think about it. So whether it's AOC debuting on the scene, or the Green New Deal debuting on the scene or what have you, like the left fumbles around with it, but the right swings around in opposition to it immediately and in lockstep because they have this megaphone. So the left needs something like a megaphone.But there are issues around that that people on the left struggle with, and I think of two in particular. One is whether it can find an audience. So one of the things you say in your book is that obviously the left's megaphone, the left needs to tell the truth, right, because trust is much more important on the left than it is on the right for a variety of reasons. We need people to trust government for the government to do things. We need to be persuading people who are not our natural ideological allies, people in the mushy Center.So we need trust. So we need to tell the truth, and we need to be transparent about where we're coming from and sort of what our priors are. But problem number one here is, I feel like one of the things we've learned from this, our miserable current media environment, is just that calm, honest transparency doesn't necessarily get clicks. It certainly doesn't get as many clicks as being a provocative a*****e. So the first question is just if such a thing happened, if the Democrats created something like this and started calmly explaining their positions in all their sort of truth and nuance.Why do we think that anyone would consume it? Do you think there's a demand for that kind of thing?Dan PfeifferThis is maybe a sad statement on the world, but I don't think there is a demand for nuance. Calm nuance is not something if you want calm nuance you can listen to NPR or read the New York Times if that's what you want. The calm nuance market exists and it's doing fine, but it's not necessarily helping Democrats and it's not the job of the people in the calm nuanced market to help us.David RobertsRight?Dan PfeifferSo I think a couple of things about this. One is I would say one stipulation is that there are two economic models for media, right? And I use I define media broadly. There is subscription model and I think there are people who've indicated they will pay for calm nuance or in depth reporting or policy analysis. There are people who will pay for that. And then there is digital advertising. And digital advertising is a click-driven model and those clicks often come through Facebook. So you are a prisoner of the Facebook algorithm. Now we know what the Facebook algorithm values, which is on a daily basis.It's Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and Dan Bongino who dominate Facebook in terms of engagement and posts that perform, right? And so in the media environment which exists, you have to find ways to get attention. You have to be loud. You often have to be oppositional just.David RobertsTo sort of put a pin or an exclamation point on this. People hating on you and yelling at you counts as engagement. So you can be the most hated post in the world and it could still be incredibly successful.Dan PfeifferYes, that is the most important thing for anyone to understand and I write a chapter about this in the book, just is that weaponizing liberal anger is one of the primary right wing media strategies, which is they want like in the sort of and this is a real Steve Bannon project, the Breitbart headlines. There's one I don't remember what's topic, but something like "Birth Control Makes Women Ugly" or something. There is all these horrible things that they say and they're specifically trying to trigger liberals into expressing their anger about the article online because Facebook counts your angry comment, your thumbs down emoji just like it counts a thumbs up emoji and therefore we are inadvertently spreading their content all over the place. So what do progressives do?We have to be willing to anger the right. You have to be loud, you have to be clear. You have to be like I named the book "How Fox, Facebook and the MAGA Media are Destroying America" as almost a model for the sort of the very direct, clear language you have to use to get attention. If it had been "How Fox Facebook and the MAGA Media are Undermining Democracy." That is not as clickable, right? That is the world we live in. And you have to be direct in how you do it now. Humor, so there are a couple of things about how this works in a progressive media ecosystem.One is being clear, indirect, and authentic and offering some differentiation between just more liberal New York Times, right? It has to feel like authentic. The second is it has to be entertaining and engaging. And that can be funny, that can be provocative, whatever that is. But I talk about this in the book. But it's like I watch these Trump rallies even now, and obviously there's no place in the world I would want to be less than a Trump rally, especially when you see the press going live from the parking lot or whatever. Those people I don't think it's a great statement in America those people are having a blast.David RobertsYes, they're very engaged. They look like dead audiences. That's what it reminds me of over and over again.Dan PfeifferYeah, there's all these merchants in the parking lot selling weird, oftentimes racist chuchkis. There are people wearing funny shirts. They're having a blast.David RobertsAnd these are people who have never had a Grateful Dead.Dan PfeifferYes.David RobertsYou know what I mean? Or a fish. Like they have never had a sort of cultural occasion to do something like a traveling festival like this. So for lots of them, it's like you can tell it's really life changing for them.Dan PfeifferYeah, it's like the bizarro version of Obama rallies in '08, very similar vibe. People wanted to like if it was in your town, you didn't want to miss it. And we were able to bring a lot and I think Trump succeeded from this as well, bring a lot of people into the process who just wanted to check it out because everyone was talking about it. And I think that that is like as I wrote in the book, we are trying to engage people who don't like to engage in politics. Our math depends on new people or people who've checked out the process.David RobertsRight?Dan PfeifferAnd so we got to make it fun. Like I tell the story, John Lovett tells the story all the time in my pocket puzzle. America co host that back when he was a speechwriter for Senator, then Senator Hillary Clinton. They had written a big climate change speech that she was going to give. This must have been like in six or seven or something, even before she ran for President. And Lovett had worked on the speech and like they often do with the big speech, they had shared it with President Clinton. And like at two in the morning, love its time, because I think President Clinton was in Vegas.He gets a call from the A traveling with Clinton with all of Clinton's notes. And Clinton's big takeaway is, you got to make solving our climate problems seem like an adventure that people want to engage in, that it's going to be huge, joyous, important work that you're going to want to be a part of. And we have to think about politics of it in progressive media is this is going to be something that is fulfilling and even fun and entertaining and you're going to want to be a part of. And if we're just trying to and the Republicans don't have to do it that way.Their math means they can just make people angry and get them to turn out. We have to do something a little more complicated, and our media has to reflect that.David RobertsBut you were saying earlier you have to be provocative. You have to have some kind of hook. But it's not just that you have to be provocative on step one. It's that when you're provocative and then you get scolded by the right and probably by some well meaning, goo-goo centrist Democrat, you have to not back down, right? You have to stick with your guns. And this is an intangible that I feel like it just gets undercounted in terms of what makes people want to you're talking about making it seem like a fun adventure, making it seem like a festival, like a cultural event, like something you want to be part of.Part of that, I think, is people are attracted to people who have the courage of their convictions, and it's just not I just don't think it's lost on the public that over and over and over again you see dems or people on the left backing down in the face of scolding and blowback and apologizing. I mean, this whole cycle of defund the police is just like a paradigmatic example, right? You got, like, three leftists say, defund the police. The right wing successfully hangs the thing around the entire party. And rather than saying, we believe in our activists this is not the best slogan, but we believe in the policy.And moreover, we would like to emphasize again the dire need for police reform. Instead, they just scrambled backwards, apologized, and did a big speech about funding the f*****g police. And that's just a classic example of every time they get smacked on the nose, they back down. How do you I don't even know what you would do, but how do you break that habit? How do you give people on the left some of the sort of bullishness and tenacity to just shake off criticism and double down?Dan PfeifferI mean, part of this is generational in a lot of ways, and there are always exceptions to every generational critique here because I talk in the book about how largely it is our older Democrats who struggle with this new media environment. But Bernie Sanders is actually pretty good at it, and so is Elizabeth Warren, even though they are also in their 70s. This is somewhat, I think, generational the way to do this Obama always used to say, in situations like these, don't play the game, call out the game. And so the way I have tried to convince people who I've talked to about the defund the police situation is, one, you have to understand what's happening here.This is not an on the level discussion of law enforcement and criminal justice policy.David RobertsI can't believe that's so basic.Dan PfeifferYeah. I mean, this is about race.David RobertsWe're not having a reasoned policy discussion here.Dan PfeifferYeah. I mean, it is about dividing people largely along racial lines. It is to scare the s**t out of white people. And you have to understand that in your response. And so simply yelling, we want to fund the police is not a solution to the problem. You have to take their critique of you and turn it back on them. Why are they trying to divide us or to exploit people is because they want to do why? The language that I always push people to is the language that was put forward in the race-class narrative about how the work that was done by Demos and a bunch of other groups is they want to attack you for defund the police.You should attack them for attacking you for defund the police and pivoting back onto your core set of issues like why aren't they trying to solve the problem? Why are they trying to exploit the problem? Why are they trying to divide us? Because they want to protect tactics of the law that you can pick your issue that you want to put in there, but is you have to punch back. Right. I kind of hate the idea that you should never apologize because there are times in which you are wrong, and when you are wrong, you should apologize.You should never back down in the face of bad faith critiques. Right. If something you say does not generate a backlash from someone, then you probably didn't say something provocative enough to get it.David RobertsI know we need to start training people to view this blowback as a sign of success.Dan PfeifferYeah.David RobertsThe first problem I raised about a Democratic microphone is how to attract eyeballs and viewers for accurate information. When it seems like lying. It's so much easier to be provocative and to get engagement with lying. The second problem, though, is the nature of the Dem coalition sort of legendarily. The right is much more homogenous than the left. Racially, ideologically, culturally, however you name it. The left has all these different groups, very different cultures, different ages, different whatever class, whatever. So, a. it's very difficult to sort of come up with a message that unites all those people, as you were saying.But also one of the problems I've seen is that for any attack on the left by the right, there will be some other faction of the left who also hates that faction of the left. And will join in the right's attack, right? So if the right is attacking AOC, you'll have centrist Dem saying, "Well, they kind of have a point." Whatever. Like whoever you attack on the left, you'll find somebody else on the left who will join in because the left isn't legendarily fractious. So the upshot of that is that every criticism coming from the right ends up looking bipartisan, right?Because they'll get somebody on the left to go along with it, right? And if you're too provocative or too left in your megaphone, you'll get wishy-washy mainstream Democrats tut-tutting, you scolding, you telling you to calm down, telling you to not be so provocative. Or as I'm sure you're familiar with, if you're out trying to sort of sell the mainstream Democratic line and sort of help the mainstream Democratic Party, you're going to come under constant attack from the left for being a simp and a sellout and whatever, a mouthpiece, et cetera, et cetera. So it just seems like so many factions on the left are so invested in battling one another.That sometimes strikes me as just like an insuperable barrier to anything like the megaphone we're talking about. What's the answer to that? You're not going to get the factions to get along. Is it just multiple megaphones? Is there a solution to that problem? Just from the point of view of messaging and media?Dan PfeifferProbably not. We have always been the Democrat has always been somewhat of a circular firing squad. I mean, Republicans present a more united front via Fox News and all of their other entities than they are in real life. They are trying to destroy Liz Cheney and a whole bunch of other people. Right now they're in these incredibly divisive primaries. Most Republicans actually hate Mitch McConnell. It's one of the few things that gives me hope for America, that Democrats and Republicans both hate Mitch McConnell personally.David RobertsBut I'm not sure normies, I'm not sure political normies are ever even aware of those divisions.Dan PfeifferRight. That's because the right is communicating. All that matters is whether your target audience knows about those things. And so this is what happens when this is how journalism works, right? And there's something wrong with this. It's just how it works, which is you say something, they call up someone to criticize to give the other side of whatever it is that you just said to offer it and post a review. And that's always more valuable, particularly in a polarized time from the perspective of journals, if that person is ideologically aligned with you on other issues, right? So Democrat crapping on Democrat is more interesting than Republican who craps on Democrat for waking up in the morning.But that is the price we pay for depending on traditional political media to be the primary distributor of our message. If you build up your megaphone. I want to try to find the right balance in this between internal party debate, which I think is largely healthy and should be understood. And I don't mean performative crapping on AOC or even sometimes left attacking Biden for things Biden can't do for the sake of clicks. It happens both ways, right? And some of these fights that happen between one left member and one centrist member are beneficial to both of them individually because the criticism of the other approves their bona fides to their base.But it's negative for the party as a whole. But having big debates about what we should do on various things, or pressuring an incumbent president to do something like cancel student debt, those voices should be heard. But when it comes time to focus the mind and win elections and we become more aligned around things, you need media outlets, ways to communicate where the price of that communication is not highlighting disarray within your party, which is, I think, what happens when you if you are relying on the New York Times or CNN as the way to brand your party.David RobertsYeah, the way I sort of convey this story, the anecdote I tell to convey this to people is one of my early sort of formative political experiences was tracking the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill back in 2009, 2010. And I naively read the bill and studied the policies involved and was all geared up to have a discussion with someone, anyone, about the policies involved. And what I noticed, and this didn't really become clear to me until kind of it had passed, but you had a left who was invested in crapping on it because it was a sort of mainstream market based policy that didn't go far enough. So you had the whole left apparatus crapping on it.You had this whole sort of like goo goo centrist above it all left who crapped on it because it's too complicated and it has too many compromises and a clear, simple carbon tax would be better. It's sort of this virtuous crapping on it from that side. And then of course, you had the right distorting everything about it and crapping on it. And the sort of net effect was the thing a. didn't have any real champions, right? And b. didn't have .... at no point was there a discussion in media about the actual bill itself as opposed to the weird symbol that various factions had made out of it.Kind of that's what I saw as missing. I was like, yeah, the left has its little megaphone for bashing stuff and the centrists have their megaphone and the right has their megaphone. But the actual meat and potatoes of mainstream Democratic politics, the bill that's actually on the table and might actually pass, has no megaphone behind it, has no one behind it. And so that's what I sort of struggle to envision when we talk about a megaphone is like, I understand how the left faction thinks they're kind of like cool and rebellious and how they get excited.And how the above it all centrists get excited by their priors being confirmed, but it just doesn't seem sexy or exciting or cool at all just to be a Democrat and to defend what Democrats are doing and to try to help Democrats. I don't even know that I can put my finger on it, but just culturally, it seems like there's no cool identity there.Dan PfeifferYeah, I mean, look, these are very challenging problems. There are incentive structures on all side that push people in various directions. And we used to joke sometimes in the Obama White House that the place where we would always find ourselves was where the left was mad at us and the right was mad at us just in that middle. Because that's oftentimes the correct possible policy solution. Right. It's not as nice as you would do it if you could do whatever you wanted, right? That is Obamacare in a lot of ways.David RobertsYes.Dan PfeifferIf you were starting from scratch and the President could just pick whatever plan he wanted, it would be different than the ACA.And no matter what plan you pick, the right was going to s**t on it. And so you often do find yourself in that place. I think there's not an easy answer there. I think a more sophisticated, more advanced, more digital friendly way of communicating from more people in the party could offset some of that would put more throw-weight behind what is happening if you were more aggressively using paid media and organic digital media and leveraging the existing in an expanded progressive media megaphone to just communicate directly with your people. Because that's the problem is the discourse is about the discourse, right?What people are hearing is they're hearing that some people are mad about something. Some of those people may be people that you like and therefore you think, maybe I shouldn't like this thing so much. And if you had more direct line of communication for Democratic Party leaders and progressives, I define that broadly progressives to tell their story on their terms, you would be able to it would not just become this is Obamacare problem, left is mad, right is mad. Everyone else throws up their arms and think, this thing must be fucked. And over the course of time, as the Affordable Care Act became so popular, that trying to repeal it cost the Republicans, the House and almost the Senate.And so things can change over time, but in the moment, if you can communicate more directly with people, you're going to have a better chance to at least compete with those other voices because there's going to be people. The right has this in some sense, too. Less so when Trump was president. But right wing media is shitting all over Mitch McConnell, right? Just attacking him, attacking him, attacking him, because there is a financial, political, click based incentive to do it. We have a similar thing on our side, but they then have Fox and a bunch of other entities who can balance the scales so that they're telling a more direct story.And that's kind of what we have to do.David RobertsThere's something perverse about the fact that the exact space of kind of political possibility is perfectly located at a spot that nobody loves. It's almost possible because nobody loves it. So that is like an intrinsic communication problem that mostly faces the left, because it's always the left that's trying to do things, trying to advance things and do things. And people will always default back to status quo bias, even if the status quo sucks.Dan PfeifferYeah, I mean, the political system is biased towards conservatives both in terms of the way that which the Electoral College and the Senate disproportionately value Republican base voters. But also it is a system designed for inaction and that is a problem for the party that wants to do things and it is an advantage for the party that wants to not do things. Where Republicans get in trouble is when they're trying to undo the few things Democrats did accomplish and then they generally fail at those things.David RobertsYes, the few things that we can make part of the status quo, then we can finally get status quo bias working in our benefit. But it's so difficult. It's so slow. Well, I've kept you a long time. I just want to wrap up with a final question, which is probably the biggest question at all and the least answerable of all, but I think is ultimately at the root of all this. So what you lament in this book, and what a lot of people have lamented recently, is that there used to be a core media that everybody had to deal with, right, that everybody got their news from, and that if you wanted to get your voice out, you had to go through them.This was through scarcity. Before the Internet, we just had a set number of TV stations, a set number of newspapers, and people go on and on about the disadvantages of that, all the biases that were built into that and all the blind spots that were built into that. And that's all very true. But the flip side is that we're all acknowledging now is it's not really good when there's no common source of information or facts, that there's no institution that is trusted across lines in the US. That's what we sort of come back to again and again.Like the mainstream media could do all these reforms that you suggest in your book, but ultimately, if it tells the truth consistently, it's going to be unfavorable to the right. So if the right doesn't have to trust it, it won't. And as long as the right has its own media machine, it won't. You see this sort of playing out now and how people talk about Facebook. Now we're talking about wanting Facebook to moderate content, but just step back and think how insane that is. We're asking Facebook to decide in our society, in our culture, what are the bounds, what are the moral bounds on dialogue, what is okay to say and what's not okay to say?What's merely controversial versus out of bounds, right? Like these are sort of things that are governed by norms and common understanding. And if those things are gone, if we don't agree about those anymore, why on earth would we think that a board of tech dudes could step in and play that role in our culture? It just seems honestly like I understand the recommendation for Dems for the left to create its own megaphone because the right has one and the left has got to fight back. But then if you're just left with two megaphones and no shared authority, that means in terms of messaging and news, but also more and more in terms of government and literal authority figures, it doesn't seem like the left just having fighting back the way the right is fighting.Seems like you just end up spiraling down this sort of partisanship black hole.Dan PfeifferYeah.David RobertsAnd it seems like what we need if we want to survive as a society long term is restoring something like some shared authority, something that we can all trust and just. Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, do you worry if there are just two competing sides and there's nothing above them, there's no transcendent rules or guidelines that we're kind of doomed?Dan PfeifferI worry deeply about the state of our democracy, the state of a country where there is no shared set of facts. Now, when you say it that way, it makes it sound like republicans don't believe these facts and Democrats don't believe these facts when the fact of the matter is we have a majority in this country. It's a majority that is frankly growing, that has a shared ... is attached to reality. It has a shared set of increasingly progressive, fact-based values and views of the world. Now, that majority, because of our political system and the current demographic world we're in, does not have political power commensurate with its numbers that Joe Biden can win by 7 million votes.David RobertsThese are not two mirror images, not two equal sides. That's always important to point out.Dan PfeifferYes. And I do not believe that anytime in the near future we are going to return to the pre-internet world of media where you had a series of trusted, a small number of trusted, putatively objective arbiters of fact and fiction in this country.David RobertsRight.Dan PfeifferI think there are a few things that can happen. I think there are some and I'm far from an expert in this there are some regulatory moves that can be made that can make it so that there is less disinformation and conspiracy theories flowing on social media. These platforms can be held more accountable. There are some proposals out there this is beyond my expertise, certainly about more transparency and regulation of the algorithm itself. So we take Mark Zuckerberg's individual whack a mole decisions about what to keep on the platform, when to take off out of it.I agree that is a losing battle. So that is one thing. I also think that we are also in a very strange period in American history about where the media and how people get information change so fast that we have a particularly vulnerable population to disinformation, right? Where younger people who have come up on Facebook, on social media, are going to be much better at separating conspiracy theory from reality, fact from fiction, genuine good faith arguments from bad faith arguments because they are much more savvy. Most people over the age of 50 were trained to believe, to have presumed to believe as true headlines they read.And the right has ruthlessly exploited that. Fox News has exploited it. A bunch of these digital sites have exploited it, and that has put us in this bad position. So I don't think we're going to go back to the old world. I think there is a way in which the new world is better. And one of the reasons why we have to build the Progressive Megaphone and I don't mean to be mercenary about this, is we have to defeat this MAGA extremist faction in this country that is existing at a very very dangerous time because of where we are in our technological evolution, where we are in information ecosystem, and where we are in the demographics of this country that the midwest is turning red before the southwest and southeast are turning blue.It puts us in a very, very vulnerable place. And if we can survive this and get to a better place and protect democracy and prevent Trump or Ron DeSantis president, we have a chance to age into a better information environment with more sophisticated information consumers.David RobertsI'm old enough to remember now when a vital young man named Barack Obama came into office and everybody thought, we did it. We made it past the boomers, we aged like the young people are finally here. And then, no.Dan PfeifferWe went right past the boomers, but we went the other way. We went to the silent generation to be in charge. So we went past the boomers, we just went the other way. And so hopefully we're getting towards some very young Gen X or late stage millennials to be in charge soon.David RobertsIt's looking like odds are a big Republican victory in the midterms. Odds are a Republican victory for President in 2024. Obviously, you and millions of other people are going to fight to change that outcome, but at least purely in terms of the statistical odds, that's what looks likely. And I wonder if one of the very small and very few bright points of that might be that if, like, a full on authoritarian movement takes over all three branches of government. If that might not just by force of pressure, cause the media to be more self aware of itself and its own norms and practices and its own health as an independent institution, if it might, in some perverse way, accelerate some of these needed changes in the media outlook?Or is that just wild optimism.Dan PfeifferIf your optimistic take is that a shift towards an authorian torment government would be good for the media, but I would file that. I would file that under I don't want to find out.David RobertsIt's like at the end of Watchmen when you bring in the giant space octopus to unite humanity against it. That's kind of the only thing I can imagine. Making the media be more self conscious about itself as an institution and its own prerogatives.Dan PfeifferYes.David RobertsObviously not the way you would want that to happen. Anyway, Dan Pfeiffer, your book "Battling the Big Lie" is out now. It's great. I read it. I appreciate the work you do. And thanks for coming on Volts.Dan PfeifferThanks, man. Thanks 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

In this episode, Johannes Ackva of Founders Pledge discusses his thinking on the most effective forms of climate philanthropy.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsSay you’re a private individual (or a company, or a foundation) who cares about climate change and has some money to spend on it. What’s the best way to spend that money? How can you ensure the largest possible impact?Similar questions about maximizing philanthropic impact have led to an entire field of study and practice known as “effective altruism,” which seeks to apply logical and empirical rigor to do-gooderism. But it is only very recently that effective altruists have turned their attention to climate change. One of the leading EA voices on climate is Johannes Ackva. He’s a researcher at Founders Pledge, an organization through which business owners and entrepreneurs donate a portion of their earnings to charity. For years, Ackva has been thinking through the puzzle of how best to channel climate philanthropy, given the structure of the problem and the politics around it. If you’re interested in what groups Founders Pledge has chosen for its donations, you can find a list on the website, but I was more interested in the thinking that led Ackva to those recommendations. Given the enormous spatial and temporal scales involved in climate change, the many social and political complexities, the extensive and irreducible uncertainties, how can a well-meaning donor have any confidence in their choices? I found our conversation quite enlightening — a new lens through which to view this familiar problem — it and I think you will too.Johannes Ackva, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Johannes Ackva:Yeah, thank you, David. Thanks for having me. It's an honor and pleasure to be here.David Roberts:Let's start a few steps back since I'm not entirely sure that the Volts audience will be familiar with the effective altruism movement, even though it gained quite a bit of press attention recently. So to start with, just tell us briefly, what is effective altruism and what is it trying to do?Johannes Ackva: So effective altruism is really a social and intellectual movement that tries to answer the question, “how can we do the most good possible?” And, not only answer that question in a theoretical way, but in a very practical way, actually trying to do as much good as possible. There are two components to it. The first one that I would stress is, of course: altruism, which is about trying to be really serious about helping other people and other beings. So, effective altruists usually take a global take, including all humans, also all future humans, also all animals. So, having a really expansive form of altruism. And many effective altruists donate a large part of their income to the global poor or change their careers. So this is the altruism piece of it. And then there's this effectiveness piece, which is like thinking really hard and long, and trying to use as much evidence as possible to think about “how can we have the most impact?”, the most positive impact. And one thing about impact here that I think is crucial, because I think it will come up throughout our conversation, is that a lot of what I'm saying on climate is motivated by this notion of counterfactual impact. Given what everyone else is doing, what is the thing that is additional, should be done next? So, not only trying to have impact, but trying to have impact that otherwise would not happen in the world. And I think that's really key to how we think about climate.David Roberts:And this is the concept of additionality, doing something that would not otherwise be done?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, doing something that would not otherwise be done. Yes, that's the concept of additionality.David Roberts:I won't claim any deep familiarity with the ins and outs of the movement, but my impression over the last few years is that some of the most prominent spokespeople for effective altruism are relatively down on climate change as a target for philanthropic giving. I think the idea is that they're trying to think about all humans today and all humans that will ever be. They're thinking about what might cause the extinction of the human race, and they say climate is unlikely to cause extinction, whereas, you know, a terrible pandemic or an asteroid or an AI that becomes sentient and does a terminator on us are much greater threats of extinction. So why, within the context of effective altruism, do you think that climate change is a worthy target for people's giving and attention?Johannes Ackva: First, I would say you're broadly right there. And it’s funny, because I was a climate person before I was an effective altruist, before I encountered effective altruism. So, it was the first instance of having to justify myself. Why am I working on climate? Growing up in Germany this was something I never had to justify. So I think that's broadly right, most effective altruists do not focus on climate and I think the reason that you’ve outlined as to why is broadly right. Climate is a really big threat, and I think effective altruists acknowledge that there are very serious threats from extreme climate change, so the view is not that climate isn't a serious problem. I think effective altruists take it very seriously. But seeing a broad set of problems of similar magnitude (like nuclear war, advanced artificial intelligence that you mentioned, or bio risk) where many of those issues receive far, far less attention than climate change is the reason that many effective altruists would not first go to climate.David Roberts:But you think they're wrong about that, that climate is a worthy target of giving and philanthropy? What is the effective altruism justification for focusing on climate?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, okay, so I think the effective altruism justification for caring about climate has two different aspects. One comes from thinking about humans alive today, or humans alive in the near future. So obviously, I think we know from the literature on climate impacts, that vulnerable populations in the Global South will suffer the most from climate change, and helping them can be quite effective, also because solving climate change is related to solving some other really big problems, in particular air pollution and energy poverty. So, if you think about clean energy abundance as one possible solution for climate change, that would actually solve all of those issues.David Roberts:Right. So you're solving three problems in one when you solve this problem?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that's the first piece. I think the second piece comes if you think about global catastrophic risk or if you think about the importance of geopolitical stability and good international cooperation. If you think about how climate change can go wrong, how climate change can cause migration, international attention, etc. I think that's another set of reasons to care about climate change, just making the world in general less fragile, more resilient, and trying to reduce geopolitical pressure.David Roberts:Yeah, because they say climate is a “threat multiplier”, right? That's the term that you use. So in a sense, by decreasing the threat of climate, you are also decreasing all those other risks. Johannes Ackva: To add one little bit of nuance here, I'm not saying to effective altruists: “do more on climate, do less of these other things”. I just want to be very clear about this. What I gave you is what I see as the strongest case for caring about climate change, but it is true that there are other risks of similar order of magnitude, in terms of risk, that we're spending a 100th or less of the attention on. So I think it's probably right to think about climate not as the most neglected issue, globally speaking.David Roberts:So even you would say, from an effective altruism point of view: while climate is worthy of attention, there are other risks worthy of attention that are getting less attention than climate. Is that what you’re saying?Johannes Ackva: I think that's what I would say if we only think about the importance and neglectedness of those problems. There is, however, another dimension. And I think that's also really important in making the case for climate. And that dimension is tractability, or the ability to make additional progress, and I think climate looks extraordinarily good on that dimension compared to many of those other problems that I mentioned for a couple of reasons.David Roberts:Tell us about that then. Tell us why, in terms of tractability (meaning there's progress to be made), there's “low hanging fruit” available, you might say. Why should we think that climate philanthropy in particular can produce results?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, great question. So I think there are essentially three reasons why I would believe that to be true. The first one is that attention to climate overall, like societal attention including policy, economics, etc. is actually really high, and is at an all time high. We're now spending about a trillion or so in the global economy, and climate policy has been a really important part of Biden's agenda, and has been really important in Europe for a long time. So, there's a lot of attention to climate, I think that's the first piece. The second piece is that a lot of that attention is not spent optimally, in terms of the ultimate goal (or, what I see as the ultimate goal) of acting on climate, which is reducing climate damage as much as possible. And there are some very predictable biases. For example, the US and Europe maybe represent around 15% of future emissions, so effective climate action should always think about global emissions, but there are lots of political incentives to focus locally. There's lots of ideological issues, there's lots of special interests, so a lot of the attention on climate is not spent optimally. That's the second piece. And the third piece comes if you think about climate philanthropy as a whole and the role that climate philanthropy can play. If you conservatively assume that you can only shift how the public response is improved by something like a 10th of a percent, or something like that, that can still be extraordinarily valuable. So essentially, it’s about leveraging the attention on climate to try and help steer the climate momentum that exists in a way that’s more useful for global decarbonisation.David Roberts:Right. So you’ve sort of got the raw material there, you've got the attention and the will to do something, and you think a little bit of nudging in a better direction could have a big positive effect.Johannes Ackva: Yeah.David Roberts: I want to focus in on one of the things you said, and this is a quote from one of your papers: “the goal of high impact climate philanthropy is not to maximize emission reductions, but to minimize climate damage”. It might not be obvious to people what the distinction is there, so explain that a little bit and explain what those two different approaches would imply?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, no, that's not obvious at all, and it wasn't obvious to me for a long time. I only really fully grappled with this last year when I wrote the paper. So, I guess the first intuition when thinking about maximum impact and climate philanthropy would really be: okay, we want to maximize emissions reductions. But, there's something particular about the climate challenge that I think makes this intuition wrong, and that’s the fact that climate damage is highly nonlinear. So, if we think about a 3 degree world, this is much worse than twice as bad as a 1.5 degree world. Again, a 6 degree world is much worse than twice as bad as a 3 degree world. If we think about it in terms of a concept like the social cost of carbon, the social cost of carbon at different levels of temperature is very different. It's much more valuable to avoid an additional tonne of carbon in the 6 degree world than in the 1.5 degree world. And this is standard climate science and I would say this is really one of the most uncontroversial facts about climate. But the key thing here is that we actually “know” things that must be true if we're in a 4 degree world compared to a 1 degree world. For example, if we're in a 4 degree world, Zeke Hausfather, the climate scientist, has said “we're not in a 4 degree world and renewables have succeeded beyond all expectations.”David Roberts:Right.Johannes Ackva: This means that in this 4 degree world, there are solutions or hedges which can be extremely valuable. One of them would be, for example, advanced nuclear, which to some degree is a hedge against failure of renewables. It might not play a big role in the best case world, right? Maybe we’re in the best case world where renewables succeed beyond all expectations, but if not, there's an extraordinary hedging value from those kinds of solutions. Maximizing emission reductions will not lead you to this conclusion, whereas minimizing climate damage  leads you to other kinds of conclusions.David Roberts:Right. So if you're trying to maximize emission reductions, you would just go for the cheapest, most obvious reductions available now, which will generally be renewables or something like that. But it sounds like you're describing something more like trying to reduce risk rather than emissions.Johannes Ackva: Yes.David Roberts:And risk rises nonlinearly, so you think philanthropy should be hedging against failure, hedging against the failure of mainstream approaches basically. Does that sound right?Johannes Ackva: Alright, let me answer this in two parts. First, it's not really about time. It's not really about spending now versus long term. It's not about spending on renewables now for the cheapest buckets, it’s more about thinking about what correlates with different climate futures. So for example, if you think about one thing that's often described as very cost effective: forestry, avoiding deforestation. Having agreements between Europe and Brazil to avoid deforestation, that’s very cost effective in the best of worlds where international cooperation and the quality of agreements is stronger than it actually is right now. If we're in that kind of setting we're not going to have a lot of climate damage. So, even though that might maximize emissions reduction in expectation, it wouldn't minimize damage. So it's not about the timing, but what correlates with different kinds of scenarios. So, what I'm talking about is always counterfactual impact, and what to do given what everyone else is doing. So I'm absolutely not saying we shouldn't focus on renewables, or we shouldn't focus on natural climate solutions. It's more that given we have a large focus on this now, what should we do next? And then, my argument would always be about the value of hedging against the failure of mainstream solutions, because right now we're in a situation where mainstream solutions get a lot of attention. We can also see the success of that, right? Future emission trajectories have gone down a lot because of the success of renewables, more than I think most people appreciate. So there have been really big successes, and if we think about how things can go wrong (how “s**t can hit the fan”) it’s not because we spent 1% less additional climate philanthropy attention on renewables, it's because something goes wrong there or something goes wrong with another solution. Let's say international climate policy falls apart, which looks more realistic now than a couple of months ago. If something like that happens, this is how we get into those worst worlds, right? And so we want to hedge against those worlds, we want to look at solutions that on the one hand are robust to those worlds, and on the other hand provide explicit hedges and protect against failures that are likely to occur in those worlds.David Roberts:Right, right. And another big piece of this (and this is something I've run into a lot of times when I talk to both individuals who are thinking about what to do with their money, but also foundations and people who have access to big pots of money), is that unlike some altruistic endeavors you could imagine – like buying mosquito nets – this is the cliché example but mosquito nets for children in Africa – you can calculate pretty firmly and clearly exactly how many lives you will save per dollar spent. But when it comes to climate change, the problem is so big and sprawling, it's so long term and it's so unclear what will work and what won't, that this sheer wall of uncertainty is daunting to people and often pushes them toward those climate solutions that are more short term and tangible and measurable. But you're counseling against that approach, so talk a little bit about how climate philanthropists should think about uncertainty, and what uncertainty means for their giving.Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I think that's right. I think the worst thing you can do on climate is try to avoid uncertainty. I sometimes say, “It's much better to probably have a large impact than to certainly have a low impact.” And there’s a tradeoff, if you optimize for certainty there's this huge trade off to be made there. And the reason is, as I think you alluded to, that climate is incredibly complex, right? There are three or four intertwined systems. How much will economies grow? How emissions-intensive will growth be? How will the climate system react to this? How much damage will it cause? So it's a situation of vast, vast uncertainty and not only in the climate response, but also on the solutions side. I mean, you've covered this a lot. If you think about the debates about 100% renewables, if you think about the debates about how far electrification will go, there are a lot of debates where there's really large uncertainty. And those uncertainties will not be resolved in a time frame that is action-relevant, they will be resolved when it's too late… Right? David Roberts:Right. Johannes Ackva: So you have to think of this uncertainty as a fact of the situation. And we need to make decisions under this deep uncertainty, where we don't know anything for sure. So I think the way to deal with this is to think about, first of all, what do we know? What can we conclude from this? And I think there are two or three key facts that guide a lot of my thinking and my grantmaking. If you think about one thing that I mentioned before, the nonlinear climate damage, higher failure at higher warming levels is disproportionately worse. So I think that's really important. The other piece is that there's already a fair amount of attention on some of the mainstream solutions. And then the third piece is, what do we know about those uncertainties and how they might resolve? So, if we think about electrification or the success of renewables etc., if all of those things resolve positively (and positively here means “okay, they're resolving in a way that has minimal climate damage”), that's pretty good. In those cases, additional climate philanthropy will not be very valuable. If those solutions resolve negatively, those are the worlds that contain the most risk. So let's say a world with lots of growth in emerging economies, breakdown of international cooperation, and some limitations to getting renewables over 50%. These are the worlds where by far the most risk is, even if those worlds are not very probable, and I would not say those worlds are the majority of my probability mass, but they're the majority of the worlds that I care about because there's so much damage in them. So that's where this comes from, hedging against the worst case and thinking about the structure of how different uncertainties relate to each other. I can talk a bit more about that as well.David Roberts:One of the points you make that I think is really good and worth emphasizing is that even if we can't measure, in an absolute sense, what effect particular solutions or particular giving strategies might have, we can draw conclusions about their relative impact. One set of solutions versus another. And those conclusions are what you need to be able to act, right? A prioritization of solutions, not necessarily final answers about what they'll do, but just which are more likely to have positive effects. Johannes Ackva: That's exactly right. Yeah.David Roberts:I want to get back to one of those uncertainties. But first, I want to talk about (to get a little tangible here), one of the things you pointed out. There are some great charts in your reports about, you know, how you say that climate philanthropy is on the rise and there's been quite a bit of money flooding into this space in recent years, but there are two key imbalances in where money is currently being spent. One of those is that most of the money is going to the US and the EU, even though as you say they are together responsible for maybe 15% of future emissions, and the other is that most money is going to clean electricity and natural solutions, i.e. trees and reforestation and the like. And you know, as you say, it's not that those things are bad. But, there are spaces being neglected, and this whole notion of neglectedness plays a huge role in all the effective altruism stuff I've read. So, tell us a little bit about why you think those imbalances are bad, and what spaces –important spaces in particular– you think are most neglected these days?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, just to be clear, I think the case that I want to make about neglectedness is not that we're overspending on renewables and trees. I think that the case is much more that we're underspending on a lot of other sectors. If we think about where the next dollar should go, it should probably go to those other sectors. I guess the first piece of this is about the geographical distribution –that about 15% of future emissions at most will come from the US and Europe. And if you think about affectable emissions, that share is probably lower, because in a world where US and European climate policy is above average binding it means that if you reduce an emission, and if you're in a liberal state in the US or if you're in the EU, the additionality of that is rarely 100%. So, the share is actually lower because there's policy already determining this.David Roberts:Yeah, yeah. I want to pause and put an exclamation point on that because I think it's an important point. If you’re in a place where emission reductions are in statute, it's arguable that your additional reduction thrown into that pot is not going to do anything additional since the reduction is going to happen anyway, by statute. So that's where you fail these additionality tests: when you're operating in a place where the trends in law and regulation are already mandating what you would be trying to do anyway.Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's disproportionately the case in those jurisdictions, I think that's the first piece. Obviously I'm not saying that only 15% of climate philanthropy should be focused on those regions, because if we look at climate attention and if we look at ways to shape future emissions through climate leadership, through innovation, etc., the US and Europe do play a disproportionate role. So it wouldn't be right to say what we should be aiming for is 15% for those regions. But, we can still see various systematic effects. I think the reason that there's so much spending on the US is not because someone decided, “okay, this is the impact maximizing solution”. The reason is because most climate philanthropy is from the US, and most people find it much easier to donate to an American focused organization. The reason that is problematic, or the reason that I would say this leaves impact on the table, is because there are dynamics related to future emissions growth (and in particular carbon lock-in) that are dependent on where you are in the world. So, they're not the result of global innovation, they're the result of infrastructure decisions, policy decisions being made right now. And, a lot of those 85% of future emissions come from regions that are very strongly growing right now, and are making a lot of infrastructure decisions about how to build grids, how to build new coal plants or not, which will have consequences for decades into the future. So those are really high leverage points for intervention, and there's very little attention paid to these in total. And if there is, it's very focused on a couple of key sectors and key solutions. And then you have situations where (for example, if you look at climate philanthropy targeted at Indonesia, Indonesia is one of the places where coal is growing the most) there's fairly little attention paid to this. You will find that in many of these sectors, there are large parts of future emissions that receive very little attention, and it's probable that if you looked a bit more closely, if you started to do some early philanthropic work, you would find some quite high impact or high leverage points because early engagement is often much more impactful than later engagement.David Roberts:Right. So the first dollar there is probably gonna have more impact than, say, the millionth dollar in the US.Johannes Ackva: Yes, that's exactly right. Crucially, the millionth dollar in the US is easier to fundraise for than the first dollar there….David Roberts:Right, right. So, in terms of clean electricity, I sometimes think (and I go back and forth on this), that there's almost too much talk about clean electricity being a done deal, that we can move on from it now and focus on other things. But you know, when I hear that, I want to point out that clean electricity is on a positive trajectory, but not anywhere close to the slope it needs to be on or the speed it needs to be on. It's not, by any means, a “done deal”. So what's the justification for turning attention away from clean electricity, which I think you and I agree is probably going to be the bulk of the solution. What's the justification for looking elsewhere in your giving?Johannes Ackva: So, at no point would I suggest we turn away attention from clean electricity. It's more like we’re in a space in climate [philanthropy] that is strongly growing, and the question is where to put additional money right now. If you look at those clean electricity numbers (and by the way, of this clean electricity funding, 90% is renewables and I think 90% of that is solar and wind), this philanthropic funding has played a huge role in triggering the policies that led to cost reductions. So, this has been hugely impactful, this was absolutely the right priority to set. But if we think about, for example, super hot rock geothermal or innovations in geothermal which are also renewable, also about clean electricity, they receive a very, very small share of that. I just talked to the Clean Air Task Force yesterday, they have a program on super hot rock geothermal, which is essentially the “geothermal anywhere” solution, right? The solution that will make geothermal available location independent.David Roberts:Potentially a huge, huge resource.Johannes Ackva: Potentially a huge, huge resource, yeah. And potentially, exactly attacking this problem that I think is the bottleneck problem in clean electricity, which is firm sources or balancing. Right? So you had Jesse Jenkins on the show. If you think about it, that [advanced geothermal] could have a huge impact on clean electricity, but there's like a 1 million or so philanthropic effort to make it happen, right? And at the same time, we're spending something on the order of 600 to 700 million on clean electricity in general. So, I agree with you that clean electricity is not solved, but the thing that can reduce risk there is not the priority of current clean electricity philanthropic spending, geothermal it’s instead probably a bet of around 1 million philanthropically right now. And if you think about advanced nuclear, or something else, it's probably something like 10 million. So, within these categories, these are what I think of as huge imbalances. I think the other part is also, what's the role of philanthropy? The reason I think it was great to invest philanthropically really heavily in wind and solar until maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and that this would have been an absolute priority, is because this really helped unleash the policy change which then led to the technological change, which leads to a trajectory change in emissions and future emissions. But we're not in that moment anymore, right? We're not in the moment where solar and wind are niche industries. At this point, these industries are growing. And, while I think there are really hard problems to overcome there, if I think about philanthropy as catalyzing early change, I don't really see wind and solar failing because the next 10 million of climate philanthropy goes towards other solutions, let me put it that way.David Roberts:Right. So we have some clean technologies that are on a positive trajectory; whether they’re going fast enough or not, at least they’re on a learning curve. And then there's a bunch of other climate technologies that are widely expected to be needed, but are not on those trajectories at all. They're not on the learning curves at all. So to draw an analogy to what you were saying earlier, the first dollar spent on getting one of those technologies on a good trajectory will have more impact than the billionth dollar spent accelerating the wind and solar trajectory.Johannes Ackva: Exactly, exactly. And I would say tremendously more impact. I would say the differentials here aren’t like two times, my best guess would be more on the order of 100 or 1000 times, because there's essentially nothing happening. Super hot rock geothermal is essentially (I mean quite literally) putting this idea on the map. Building coalitions in government, getting innovation funding for this, connecting the different industries to research labs, connecting it to people who could implement it, etc. So this is very early stuff with a really outsized impact, potentially. And I mean, we’ve seen similar things like carbon removal, where it's been clear from the scientific literature that we're definitely going to need carbon removal if we want to get to 1.5 degrees. I think that’s been clear of carbon removal since 2015 or so at the latest, right? And this has taken time to sink into policy discussions. And philanthropy, or NGOs that are philanthropically funded (in this case, I want to mention another grantee of ours, Carbon180) are quite important in early field building, early attention building, etc. and can play a really huge role. And now we have a stimulus in the US, or an infrastructure investment bill, and it makes a real difference. It’s clear there's going to be a huge climate component, but the organizations that are going to be present there are shaping this, so it makes a difference that there is an organization that is really strong on connecting the science to the policy needs for the most neglected technologies, this makes a difference.David Roberts:That gets us to innovation. My impression is that one of the things that almost everybody in the effective altruism movement who's thinking about climate agrees on is that innovation is a good target. But the mirror (I don't know if this is the right analogy) image of innovation is carbon lock-in. So we were talking earlier about uncertainties, and one of the key points you make is that not all uncertainties are additive (meaning you just sort of multiply one uncertainty by another by another and just get bigger and bigger and bigger uncertainty bars); some of them are negatively correlated. So talk about how that plays out in terms of innovation and carbon lock-in, those are two key concepts here.Johannes Ackva: Yeah. When I think about future emissions and what will determine those, I think there are these two really big trajectory-changing dynamics. One of them is innovation, as we've seen with solar, as we're seeing with electric cars. Really radical changes which were early decisions and geographically quite specific decisions, not global decisions, can make a huge dent on global emissions, changing the trajectory for decades to come. So this is the innovation piece.David Roberts:Just to pause there, because you make this point well in the paper, one of the key players in the early innovation in solar was Germany. And as you say, if Germany had been approaching this problem from a, “how can we maximize emission reductions per dollar” approach, they never would have spent on solar. It was an extremely inefficient way to reduce emissions at the time when they were spending, but it catalyzed this trajectory, and so the indirect effects were huge in terms of emission reductions.Johannes Ackva: Yeah, the short term solution would have been to buy Russian gas, this would have been the much cheaper way. And I think this is really why we shouldn't ever evaluate climate actions by their local short term effects, we should always evaluate them by their global long term effects. So this is the innovation dynamic. And then, there's this countervailing dynamic which is carbon lock-in, which is infrastructure decisions and capital investment decisions into new coal plants, new steel plants, etc., that determine or really strongly influence emissions over decades to come because once this asset is built the decision about how much to produce is much, much lower [in influence] than compared to like, just like “okay we're just gonna have this high emitting asset there”. So if you think about these two dynamics as competing, then you see that on the innovation front, pushing an innovation forward five years is often much more valuable than just five years of reduced emissions because it can act at the lever points, like, before. Let's think about how the world would look if we’d had cheap solar and wind when China started to expand, the world would look very different today. So there's these huge, huge lock-in effects. So of course, there are these two dynamics. And again, uncertainty, my friend uncertainty is here. If we think about the ultimate potential of acting on those two mechanisms, on the one hand trying to avoid carbon lock-in and on the other hand trying to accelerate and improve the success of innovation, the relative potential of those two theories of change is negatively correlated. What do I mean by that? So, there's a world where carbon lock-in is relatively benign, let's say it turns out that we can get renewables so cheap that it becomes easy, renewables, storage, and we solve all of the attendant problems, right? Let's say, we're in the very best case world. And in this case, maybe it becomes realistic that we're retiring coal plants early or we're replacing them with something that we're working on is repowering coal, maybe we can replace the heat source and coal plants with geothermal or with advanced nuclear. This is a world where carbon lock-in has relatively less influence because retrofitting is easy and premature retiring becomes possible politically and economically. The maximum impact of innovation will be in this world, a world where avoiding carbon lock-in is relatively less important.And this is important, of course, because there's also this other world where it's not true, right? Where we’re maybe going to get all of those innovations, but you know, those innovations will not fully realize their potential because lock-in is really severe. There's a lot of infrastructure, political clout, invested capital,  that leads to a situation where we have new, low carbon solutions but we're not adopting them at scale. So, those two dynamics are negatively correlated which means one of them -- if we're on the more bullish side of innovation, maybe if we now invest in innovation and carbon lock-in and maybe in that case the carbon lock-in investment is less valuable. The other thing goes the other way, right? If carbon lock-in is more severe, then investing in [avoiding] carbon lock-in is more valuable. And if we're in a situation (and I think this is the situation we're in) where we’re really genuinely uncertain about those two theories of change and about the relative value of additional investments, I want to diversify.David Roberts:Investment in innovation versus investment in avoiding carbon lock-in?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I'm sorry, I meant philanthropic investment here. David Roberts:Right. JASo yeah, I'm genuinely uncertain between those two solutions. But again I think about the nature of climate damage, and I'm reminded of the fact that my goal is not to maximize emission reductions but to minimize climate damage, and now I have these two really big uncertainties that are negatively correlated. So in this situation, investing in both of them can actually be impact maximizing because of this structure: if one succeeds a bit more; the other fails a bit more. That's a more robust investment, given the shape of climate damage and given how much worse it is to fail, if that makes sense.David Roberts:Right. So each is a hedge for the other, in a sense.Johannes Ackva: Yes. And I think something similar applies to investing in accelerating decarbonisation and investing in carbon removal, for example.David Roberts: One of your conclusions you come to, and this is a quote too, is that “the plausibility space for high impact climate philanthropy primarily contains solutions and approaches that are considered controversial, speculative, or remote”. So this is where your logic takes you, it’s that if you're counseling people where to give their climate philanthropy dollars you're probably counseling them not to give to the sexy, popular solutions that everybody's hyped about, but to some of the more obscure and controversial stuff. Spell that out a little bit.Johannes Ackva: Yeah. I mean first of all, this quote was written in December, actually November, at the end of last year under the impression that climate philanthropy and climate philanthropy foundations had essentially doubled within a year, with the Bezos Earth Fund playing a huge role. And these dynamics are essentially, to a large degree, reinforcing the existing foci of climate philanthropy: increasing the emphasis on clean electricity on the one hand (particularly renewables); and on the other hand, natural climate solutions.David Roberts:As a side note here, do we know where Bezos’s money is going yet? Has it been laid out where his giving is going?Johannes Ackva: So it's evolving, but we did include it in our November 2021 analysis. We used the data from ClimateWorks for the 2020 baseline, and then we looked at all of the Bezos grants that were made in 2021 and tried to account for those. And that's what’s included in the comparative charts we have in there. The main takeaway for me was that, by and large, the Bezos commitment (at least the early Bezos commitment) increased spaces that were already relatively well funded. It also increased funding in other spaces, but in absolute terms this was more or less increasing those existing emphases. David Roberts:So if you were counseling Bezos, or whoever's controlling that pot of money, you are going to tell him to channel his money away from those things, basically?Johannes Ackva: Again, it’s always about the margin. So it depends on what everyone else is doing, but given what everyone else right now is doing and given how climate philanthropy has been increasing really strongly and over a really short time, it's not that there are a lot of great funding gaps left for popular solutions. I think that's very implausible to say at this point. So yeah, that means I would say: if you're looking for the highest impact opportunities, trying to look at things that are controversial or not on the radar, etc., is probably the way to go. Stuff like super hot rock geothermal, stuff like carbon removal, stuff like advanced nuclear… solutions that are not solar, wind, electric cars, and trees. And not for the reason that those four aren't great parts of the decarbonisation puzzle, they are, but they are the ones that we all know and we all like and that we are all already invested in heavily.David Roberts:Right, we’re back at hedging. So, the strategy you come down on in terms of recommendations is robust diversification. Does that just mean what we’ve been discussing? Sort of, hedging by putting some of your money at the margins outside popular solutions? Or, if not, what do you mean by robust diversification?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, so I think there's a couple more dimensions. The robustness here is robustness to uncertainty. I think as we've mentioned before, there are really large uncertainties that will remain on all relevant timescales, right? Like how far technologies will go, how emissions will evolve, what will happen to the Paris Agreement, etc. Part of it is about choosing a portfolio now, which hedges against the failure of mainstream solutions - based on the  logic I laid out before. Damage is much worse when the mainstream solutions fail, and right now the mainstream solutions are, relatively speaking, much, much better funded than some of the hedgier solutions, and for systematic reasons. So that's part of it. The other part is within your portfolio, trying to diversify in a way that takes into account what I mentioned, the negative correlation of the uncertainties. Because again, you're not trying to maximize emission reductions, you're trying to minimize damage. So you're complimenting your focus. That's what we’re doing with our focus on, say, accelerating decarbonisation, which we do with grantees like Clean Air Task Force, Future Cleantech Architects, TerraPraxis. These are people working on different pieces of that puzzle, then we’re combining this with a focus on carbon removal: Carbon180 would be our recommendation in that space. So, there's this negative correlation there. And right now we're trying to take the next step into looking at different theories of change and diversifying there, always driven by this idea of the importance of robustness against the worst worlds where the majority of damage is concentrated.David Roberts:It's not really entirely different than a sort of financial investment strategy. Johannes Ackva: No. David Roberts:It's a portfolio approach for the same reasons.Johannes Ackva: It's a portfolio approach for the same reasons, right. Essentially, if you're doing this in financial terms, what you're saying is, the marginal utility of money is decreasing, right? So, you're not trying to maximize your income, you're trying to maximize your well being. If you're a millionaire, getting to 1 versus 2 million is not as valuable. So it's exactly the same logic, yes.David Roberts:Okay. And one of the things I found really interesting in your work is that you end up really recommending advocacy and public policy. Advocacy, as opposed to, you know…if I'm the Bezos Fund, I could make strategic investments directly in early stage companies, I could make investments directly in research or found a research center or something like that, but you end up pushing for advocacy. In other words, trying to get policy paths, trying to change public policy. Why do you come down there?Johannes Ackva: Yeah. So first, a clarification. I should be clear about this in my writing, and I'm trying to be clear here. When I say advocacy, what I really mean is trying to attract large scale societal or social mobilization. This can be like changing policy etc., but it can also be changing behavior of large corporate actors. So that's one piece. And this is not only “on the Hill” lobbying, this also does and can include stuff like doing research on new technologies, the viability of new technologies, and putting things on the map (just to clarify this a little bit).David Roberts:Advocacy, broadly construed.Johannes Ackva: Advocacy, broadly construed. Not only Beltway lobbying. So, if we think about why we’re focusing on that, I think there are two or three answers. I think the first one is that even if you take the most expensive sum of climate philanthropy (right now it's on the order of around 10 billion), this is still at most a 100th or so of the overall effort spent on climate.David Roberts:Right, compared to public money. Johannes Ackva: Yeah, compared to public money. So, this is one reason. If you think you only need to have a small multiplier (it’s not like I'm not saying you got a 100x multiplier), it’s still likely that given those numbers, focusing on advocacy can have an outsized impact. There's also literature on that, which shows that this works for other fields. I think the other key part of the answer, which I think is the deeper answer, is that ultimately solving climate change is a policy problem, and it requires a huge amount of policy. Technological change is not a garage factory thing, right? Technological change is fundamentally the result of government policy and government incentives being correct, and public investment and innovation, etc. And this is not only true for innovation, right? This is also true for other parts, like for rolling out technologies. So for every garage entrepreneur there's a policy behind that, that usually came before. So in that sense, I think public policy is really crucial for essentially all parts of the climate challenge. And if the policy is set right, the private action, and the research, etc. will follow. So the causal primacy –what I would call the causal primacy – really lies with making sure that political conditions are as good as they can be.David Roberts:I'm sort of curious about how philanthropists respond when you pitch this, because we've talked about uncertainty but if I'm Bezos, I'm an executive. I'm used to quantification and results, I want to see numbers. And if I want that from my climate philanthropy, I can spend on a forest and then I can see the forest and I can measure the tonnes from the forest, or whatever. Whereas advocacy, even broadly construed, is so uncertain. What could move politics is so unclear. This is very much the central dilemma of climate change: what can move public policy and what can get things moving? So if you commit to that, you are very much taking on the risk, the possibility, that you could be wasting your money: you could spend a bunch of money on advocacy and it could just not do anything. I think we've seen, unfortunately, in the last year or so, an enormous, enormous amount of really well organized and funded climate advocacy that is starting to look like it is not going to come to anything. And I can imagine if I'm a rich philanthropist, looking at that and saying “screw that, I'm just gonna go get some verifiable tonnes where I can”. So, how do you address that, and how do people react when you pitch this?Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that's a great question, there's lots in there so let me try to answer all of those different aspects. So, the first one is that I'm not making it easy for myself saying that. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and executives that have, I think, as you outlined, very different intuitions on that. There are people that want to do impact investing or that want to do stuff that's fast and certain. And me saying “let's invest on this policy thing that's highly uncertain” is not the thing that maximizes the giving I can influence. It's a position I take because I believe it very strongly. And I think that's also an additional reason why we should think it to be, relatively speaking, underprovided.David Roberts:Right. It goes against a lot of intuitions.Johannes Ackva: Yeah, and against a lot of intuitions in particular of new climate money. So if we think about new climate money coming into the philanthropy space, a lot of that is coming from people who got rich in tech. They apply their own mental models and their own success stories, so for them it's much more natural to do impact investing, or start their own company, than to say we're going to do this policy advocacy thing. So again, if you think about this, this is once again one of these psychological factors, one of these systematic features that should make you expect that advocacy is underprovided (relatively speaking to its impact). Because, while it's much more uncertain, even if it's highly effective, oftentimes you will not know it. Because the best advocacy is the advocacy where an organization will influence a policymaker, and they will never talk about it publicly, because talking about it publicly would destroy the entire impact. The whole point of it is that the policymaker thinks they came up with it themselves.David Roberts:Right, it's thankless. Johannes Ackva: Yeah, it's thankless work. But that's why it's so crucial to support it. And I think one thing I would disagree with a little bit here is saying there's been this huge effort and nothing came of it. We also invested hugely in the wake of Biden wins here in the US advocacy space, and I wouldn't say nothing came of it. There is the infrastructure bill there, there is the Build Back Better plan. The infrastructure bill is not what we hoped for, it would be much better if Build Back Better had passed as well, but there is a lot of stuff in the infrastructure bill that's helping with relatively nascent solutions. So I don't see that all of our bets there were a failure.David Roberts:Right, well, maybe I was too cynical. And I think you could say, even if Build Back Better ends up not passing, which is very much a possibility at this point, advocacy was successful in causing Biden (and really the Democratic Party in general) to prioritize climate, which is a long term effect. It's not necessarily measurable by just what gets passed these past two years. Johannes Ackva:  Yeah, absolutely. And also, these philanthropic investments are still small compared to investments in direct technology, or what we're spending overall on climate change. So I think one really shouldn't be too cynical on advocacy at all.David Roberts:By way of wrapping up, let’s pull this back to (because I know a lot of listeners ask) a question anybody who writes or talks about climate change in public gets asked a lot. I'm sure you get it a lot, and it’s about individuals who want to do something but don't know what to do. You obviously get a lot more leverage affecting what Bezos wants to do than the average Joe off the street, but nonetheless, it would be nice to have guidance for “normal” people. And I think there are a lot of the same dynamics here in terms of uncertainty in the sense that individuals think, “well, if I buy an EV, there's a measurable impact, it's not huge, but it's certain and I did it”. Whereas tossing money out to an advocacy group can feel a little bit like throwing dollars out into the ocean and then never knowing what came of them. So, is your pitch to individuals more or less the same? Or, to put the question more simply, what should individuals do? If they have climate money to spend, how do they maximize their impact?Johannes Ackva: Yeah. The first thing I want to say is that I don't think consumption choices or behavior change and giving is an either or. So for myself, I'm a vegetarian, I actually don't have a driving license because of climate reasons. David Roberts:You also get to live in a country where that’s possible.Johannes Ackva: Yeah. And I do my fair share of lifestyle changes. At the same time, I don't believe (and this is not only because of my professional role, but also just in general because I'm a middle income person in a rich country), this is anywhere close to the maximum impact I could have. And the reason for that is twofold. If you're a typical middle class person in the Western world, in the US let's say, you're emitting something like 11 tonnes or so, something on that order, per year. And again, you can reduce that to zero, but it's really hard to reduce that to zero. Even if you did reduce it to zero, which would take really extreme measures, a lot of that reduction would actually not be additional for the reasons we alluded to before. David Roberts:Right, because policy is in place already. Johannes Ackva: Yeah, so I think that's the first thing. And the second part is: reducing emissions by 11 tonnes per year is actually really unambitious if you think about what you can do. It’s kind of like saying your responsibility is only towards your own emissions, not towards the emissions related to the fact that the West got rich on fossil fuels. So, it doesn't really make sense as a benchmark either, even from this perspective. So that's the first part. The second part is if you focus on effective philanthropy, you can probably avoid a tonne of carbon for $1 or something. Even if you're 100 times more pessimistic than me, if you're doing lifestyle changes and also donate $1,000, you already have the same impact with your philanthropic investment. And of course, you don't need to stop there, right? There's no natural bound on what you can do philanthropically, while there is a very natural bound to what you can do with your lifestyle changes.David Roberts:Right, yeah. One of your charts that really made an impression is where you chart the tonnes of carbon impact of various lifestyle changes. And you grant that in the chart, if you buy an EV and it inspires 10 other people to buy an EV, even if you 10x all your lifestyle choices, you're still not going to have anywhere close to the impact you would have, the direct impact you would have, by giving your money to a climate organization – a climate advocacy organization basically. Johannes Ackva: Yeah, again, I guess I would add the caveat here: a climate organization that tries to maximize impact at the margin.David Roberts:Right, a good climate organization. Johannes Ackva: But one thing I really want to stress in this case, because I think it's the most common misunderstanding, and the thing that makes people really uneasy, is: I would really not think about this as offsetting. People sometimes ask me, “how much do I have to donate to a charity to reduce my impact,” and this is really the wrong mental frame. The mental frame that I want people to take is really different. It's more about, not offsetting, but acting morally in the world and in accordance with your values and trying to have a positive impact. The other thing is that for me, donating is not an offsetting choice, it's a political action. So in the same way as going into the streets, participating in a protest, or calling your representative. It's in that bucket of activities. It's also structurally similar in that these activities will always have more impact because they're addressing the problem. There are multipliers to be had here, and the same kind of multipliers that you can have in your civic engagement apply (probably somewhat stronger), that is, the same kind of logic applies. So if you think that going into the street or calling your representative is higher impact than your lifestyle choices, and I think in almost all cases this will be true, then you should believe the same about philanthropy and you shouldn't see it as offsetting at all. It’s a form of political action.David Roberts:The whole focus on offsetting is such a weird artifact of Western individualism. It's such a bizarre way to approach the problem of climate change. Like, “if I can just eliminate my tonnes, I'm good”. It just doesn't, it makes no sense in the context of climate change as a global problem.Johannes Ackva: No, no, it absolutely makes no sense at all.David Roberts:In conclusion, let’s say I'm an individual, I'm hearing your message and I'm convinced and I want to give to a good climate organization. Is there somewhere I can go where you lay out which climate organizations you think are good and effective, like a guide to individual giving? Is there somewhere people can go for some help?Johannes Ackva: What we, as Founders Pledge, have on this is a Climate Fund where we’re trying to make the best commitments – philanthropic commitments –- we think are possible. The logic that lies behind this is explored in our reports, which we publish on our website. For example, one of them that we’ve discussed a lot today is the Changing Landscape report from last November. You can go to founderspledge.com and find the report there, and we can also include the links in the show notes. The charities that we’re highlighting right now are: the Clean Air Task Force, with a focus on neglected solutions in decarbonization; Carbon180, with a focus on carbon removal; Future Cleantech Architects in Germany, which is focused on innovation in hard to decarbonize sectors, with a European focus where there’s less attention philanthropically to innovation but a lot of policy action; and then TerraPraxis, which is focused on advanced nuclear.David Roberts:What if I’m on the other side of things? I’m in a climate organization, a climate advocacy organization, and I want to get on your list to make the case that I’m a worthy recipient of your funds. Is there any formalized process for that, or do you guys just go out and look, or is there some application thing, how does that process work?Johannes Ackva: So, what we’re trying to do, or what we layed out today and what we lay out in our reports, is that we’re really trying to understand systematic things about the space and then find the organizations that are doing high impact things in the most neglected areas. So we don’t have an application process as such. That being said, I’m happy for people to reach out to me on johannes@founderpledge.com, but this is not our usual process. Our usual process is to dive into the field, understand how it's changing, where the margins are, and try to support solutions at the margin that we think of as great bets for counterfactual impact.David Roberts:And I promise this is the final question, it just occurred to me, say you do an analysis and you find a neglected space that you think could be high impact and there is no organization devoted to that space, have you ever thought about trying to spin off or create organizations to fill those spaces? Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s absolutely something we’re open to doing. Until now this has been a little bit beyond our capacity, but I think we have been doing a lot (that I also think of as high impact – a high impact solution in general) is to support organizations that are either one or two people strong, because those are the organizations that do not have the bandwidth to apply to large foundations for funding. So this is actually a really important part of our strategy, to support those kinds of organizations. And we’re taking high risk bets, we’re very risk tolerant. We’re not expecting an organization of two people to have the same strategic plan. We’re making bets on people, we’re making bets on working on neglected solutions.David Roberts:Yeah, diversification. Alright, well thank you so much Johannes. It’s been really interesting reading your work and watching the logical step-wise process by which you go through the space and think about the shape of the space and the shape of the uncertainties and everything. It’s quite clarifying and interesting, so thanks so much for coming on.Johannes Ackva:  Yeah, thanks so much for having me. 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, Dr. Ye Tao discusses his vision for combatting climate change by using fields of mirrors that reflect solar radiation.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsGeoengineering — using large-scale engineering projects to directly cool the Earth’s atmosphere — is an intensely controversial topic in climate circles. On one hand, such schemes strike many people as dangerous hubris, interfering with large-scale systems we don’t fully understand, risking catastrophic unintended consequences. On the other hand, there is good reason to believe that even a wildly successful program of decarbonization will not be enough to avoid devastating levels of heat in the atmosphere.Dr. Ye Tao was early in his career as a researcher at Harvard’s Rowland Institute, working on nanotechnology, when he became gripped by the problem of climate change. As he dug into the research, he concluded that even rapid decarbonization — especially insofar as it reduces the aerosol pollution that temporarily cools the atmosphere — would leave the Earth roasting in levels of heat hostile to most life forms.As he reviewed available options for carbon capture and geoengineering, he realized that none of them were safe or scalable enough to do the necessary cooling work in time. So he came up with a technique of his own: mirrors.The MEER project — Mirrors for Earth’s Energy Rebalancing — is a nonprofit established to advance Tao’s vision, which involves covering some mix of land and ocean with fields of mirrors. The mirrors would reflect solar radiation, and thus heat, back up out of the atmosphere. If 10 to 15 percent of developed agricultural land could be covered with mirrors, Tao has calculated, it would return Earth’s heat to safe preindustrial levels, providing a range of local benefits to agriculture and water in the meantime.It’s a brash idea, somewhere between crazy and obvious, and I was excited to hear more from Tao about why he thinks it’s necessary, how it would work, the materials that would be required, and how the MEER framework changes the way we view carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Alright. Ye Tao. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming on.Ye TaoYeah, thanks for inviting.David RobertsYe I have to confess when I first invited you on the pod, I had not yet really done a deep dive into into the MEER Project, and I was just sort of thinking, "Oh, a bunch of mirrors. How novel. That sounds fun. Let's talk about that." But I've spent a while now digging in and listening to more of your presentations and reading more, and there's really a lot going on here. There's a lot going on here. The mirrors are at the end of a sort of chain of reasoning that in many, many ways contradicts conventional wisdom about climate change.So I do want to get to the mirrors. I'm excited to talk about the mirrors, but let's do a little background building first. So I want to start with, it seems like the key to understanding your whole framework here is the distinction between CO2 and heat. We sort of conflate carbon and heat. When we talk about climate change, what's the problem? It's more carbon, and carbon causes heat. How do we reduce heat? We reduce the carbon dioxide emissions. We sort of have those coupled in our mind. And you say it's important to decouple them. So talk a little bit about why we need to keep them conceptually distinct, and then also decouple them in terms of the physics of the system.Ye TaoOkay, yeah, that's a good place to start. It's true that we created this problem by emitting CO2, and it's important to shut it down as quickly as we can manage, practically. And in the Earth system, everything is basically linked. So it's only natural that when you perturb one important component to a very significant extent, such as CO2 concentrations, you should expect some downstream consequences — and the most urgent of which is overheating of the planet. And heat is really the driver of weather patterns and precipitation patterns. So when you have excess thermal energy that's really different from the state Earth was before the CO2 perturbation, that you can expect downstream extreme events and also perturbation to the biochemical cycle.And if we look at the responses of different organisms and plants, insects, and mammals, and how they respond to individual perturbations in CO2 versus temperature, universally they really suffer when temperature gets ramped up to a few degrees above their normal temperature niche values. But in terms of CO2, essentially most species, like 90% plus or more, are actually not perturbed really by the current increase in CO2 levels. So basically, we initiate this avalanche by burning CO2. But the real environmental stressor that's really creating havoc are a combination of overheating and the resulting drying of land and moisture.David RobertsSo what we talk about as the effects of climate change are the effects of heat, basically, our heat playing its way through the system. And is it safe to say then that we care about CO2 in the atmosphere more or less only as it relates to heat? Only insofar as it brings more heat, right. Because in and of itself, as you say, it's not, I mean, I'm sure there's some level of concentration that's dangerous, but the levels of concentration we're talking about are not dangerous in and of themselves. Is that fair?Ye TaoWell, we'd have to be a little bit more careful and include a timeline. I would say, like in the near future, next 50 years, assuming that we're emitting and growing economy on current trajectory, then the predominant parameter is heat. That's going to basically shut everything down before we're able to continue. But if we were, somehow, we're able to manage to prolong this fossil fuel economy then by the 2070s, 2080s, ocean acidification would then also become a potentially dangerous environmental stressor for marine ecosystems. But the logic is that it's very highly unlikely for society, or civilization, to really survive to that point on our current emission trajectory.Therefore, we really need to focus on both decarbonizing safely and also dealing with heat. So I mentioned that we initially started this heating process by turning up CO2. And that there are many parameters in Earth system are interlinked. But it's logically just not correct to say that the best way is to use this single CO2 knob to address the heat or moisture. There are other knobs that are higher leverage, essentially, for the same input in resources, energy, and time. And we're stressed on all those fronts. There's much better ways to address the most imminent danger of environmental overheating than looking at conventional CO2 or methane mitigation.David RobertsRight. So CO2 is the knob that turned heat up, but it's not necessarily the ...Ye TaoOnly knob that we have.David RobertsOr most efficient knob for turning it down. And you go beyond that to say, that even if we switched to 100% renewable energy tomorrow, you think we would still pass heat thresholds, that would be devastating. Explain that a little bit.Ye TaoSo currently Earth is on a heating trajectory, and when something is heating, that's because there's more thermal power or more heat that's been put into the system than is coming out. So let's say somehow we could selectively just shut down emission of greenhouse gases, while somehow maintaining economy going, the Earth will continue to heat. The reason is if you make a measurement of how much sunlight is coming in, and how much IR radiation is going out, currently, there is a 1.5 watts per meter squared of power net energy input into the Earth system. So essentially the past emission debt, even in the current state has not been fully paid.So the Earth will continue to heat up, even if we were to shut down. And I need to explain a little bit what this 1.5 watts per meter squared means. So "watts" is a unit of power, basically how much energy gets passed through per unit of time. And "per meter squared" is an average value that scientists, climate scientists like to use to get some common metric. So basically, you have LED at every square meter of land surface on Earth, that's currently how much heat is coming in continuously.So to translate this power into an eventual equilibrium temperature, we have to multiply by a factor that converts this weird unit to a degree unit. And that factor has a value that's roughly one. So it's very convenient. So for every watt per meter squared of radiative forcing or this heating power per square area, we can expect at equilibrium a temperature increase of about one degrees. So therefore, we should expect another 1.5 degrees of temperature increase at equilibrium, if we were to just shut down further damage at this point. So that's point number one.But this 1.5 degrees will not realize instantaneously. It's going to take some time, years, decades, to centuries to realize. And there's different components, different part of this 1.5 will manifest itself over different length scales, but overall, we're looking at order one-degree increase.So that's assuming that we could somehow selectively shut down CO2 emissions. But when we burn fossil fuel, there are other pollutants that are co-emitted, which includes these aerosols.David RobertsI love this. I've been waiting for someone to say something. I've had this question idly in my mind for a long time, and I was so glad that you answered it in your presentation. And it's such a fascinating irony, I guess you'd call it, or paradox or something, and I'm glad to have it measured. So I just want to put a pin in this. So you say if we're burning coal, we're sort of steadily burning coal. And part of what that is doing is putting aerosol pollution in the air, which is blocking some of that solar radiation.So to some extent offsetting the heating of the atmosphere. And if we stopped burning coal, those aerosols fall out of the air quickly. Unlike CO2, they quickly fall out. So whatever heating they were blocking would very rapidly make its way in. So I guess what I want to ask is, would that more than offset whatever reduction in heat you get from the reduction of CO2?Ye TaoThat's an excellent question, and let's go into a little bit of semi-quantitative detail. So I previously mentioned that even overlooking this temporary cooling effect, the Earth is currently experiencing a heating power density of 1.5 watt per meter squared. So this quantity is called the Earth's energy imbalance, basically how much surplus heat we're getting right now. And this value has been fluctuating around 0.7 to maybe 1 watt per meter squared in most of the past 10, 20 years. Except for more recently. In the recent few years, it really went up to maybe 1.3, 1.5, even like last year, based on the most recent measurements.So I won't speculate on why recently there has been an increase in this heating power. Okay, let's leave that Earth energy imbalance aside for a moment and address how much additional heating is currently masked by these aerosols. So the latest IPCC, if you really delved into the technical parts, they put the number at about 1.2, 1.3 watts per meter squared. So it's an important number to remember, 1.2 to 1.3. So essentially, let's now assume that in addition to shutting down the CO2, we also shut down all the aerosol emissions, which comes naturally anyways. We would then induce a Earth's energy imbalance, which is no longer 1 or 1.5, but that number plus 1.2 or 1.3, which brings the total energy imbalance to most likely around 2 watts per meter squared, or somewhere slightly above that.And if we then translate this heating power to an equilibrium temperature increase, it will be like more like two degrees Celsius.David RobertsAnd that's on the timescale of the aerosols going away, like by when?Ye TaoOkay, so the fraction that will be added when aerosols fall out, the 1.2, 1.3 watt per meter squared, that fraction, half of that would be realized very quickly, within a couple of years. So recently, I gave a presentation summarizing a dozen peer-reviewed papers that came out since the first batch of COVID lockdowns. So COVID, despite all the inconvenience it created and all the havoc it created, offered climate science a rare opportunity to really assess and confirm this warming that's hidden by aerosols.David RobertsRight. Because we stopped emitting them pretty abruptly.Ye TaoThat's right. And we know exactly when the measures or rules were put in place. So it's a sort of very controlled experiment.David RobertsRight.Ye TaoAnd there's a lot of most paper, I think all the paper, experimental measurements confirm that, say, in the area of East Asia or China, there was temperature increase over land of about 0.5 degrees just over the very short weeks to months of the 2020 lockdowns.David RobertsRight. That wasn't even a year, right. That was a matter of months. And there was an immediate rise in heat in the area.Ye TaoYes. So when we talk about this global average temperature increase, you have to average over the oceans and land. But of course, the primary driver in that process will be land, because it's the one that's the lowest heat capacity. And that's a component that also responds most instantaneously to an increase ramping up in heating power. And then, this land temperature increase will then drive atmospheric circulation patterns, which bring the warm air to the oceans and also bring the oceans up to temperature. So it's to be expected that the fastest response component is land surface temperature.David RobertsRight. So where does that leave us by 2050? Say we switched to renewables tomorrow and just had the sort of legacy, 1.5 per watts per meter, and then the additional 1.2 that we would get from dropping aerosols out, what temperature, global average temperatures that put us at in, say 2050.Ye TaoYeah, thank you for bringing me back to answering those questions. But now let's remember that the aerosols are masking 1.3 watts per meters squared So essentially, as we decarbonize, we'll lose that component. And now let's just remind ourselves of how much our annual emissions is adding to this heating power. So I'm quoting some presentations, I had to track down the source, but our annual CO2 emissions at about 0.06 watts per meter squared of heating power. So over 20 years, 0.06 times 20 gives you roughly about 1.2 watts per meter squared, which just happens to be comparable to how much aerosols are masking.So in a very simple model of decarbonization, linear decarbonization, from now until 2040 something, we would have avoided creating 1.2 watt of per meter squared of heating, but at the same time, we would have unveiled or unmasked about 1.2. So the two at this point, just magically happens to balance out, which allows us to have very high confidence of the heating trajectory of the Earth system from now until 2040, 2050s. So the two-degree mark will most certainly be surpassed in that decade. And that will happen regardless of what we do on the emissions front. Because of this coincidence of the annual heating contributed by current emissions and how much is currently masked if we continue to have this emissions.David RobertsYou never gave me a temperature for 2050. Is three possible?Ye TaoIn my personal opinion, I think that will be quite difficult to reach due to the thermal lag and things in the system. Like for such a gigantic system, things move slowly. And if you just look at, disregard all the underlying mechanisms, just look at the temperature versus time data, the slope of that changes very slowly. So there's polynomial projections generally tend to work pretty well for these massive systems.David RobertsBut the point is we are definitely going to pass the threshold we have deemed safe, I guess. Is that the tooth threshold anymore? I don't know if safe is the right way to describe under that, but over it certainly unsafe.Ye TaoYes, we have functionally passed the two-degree threshold that's touted as being safe, and because of this predictable trajectory. And also most people have no understanding of the underlying dynamics and maybe just assume that temperature is proportional to current emissions, then it perhaps enables some very few policymakers who may have a scientific understanding to really perpetuate this, essentially, a lie to the public that we can somehow get temperature under control just based on conventional mitigation. It's not really the case.David RobertsOkay, so this brings us around to we need to deal with heat in some more direct, faster way than via CO2, certainly than via CO2 reduction in emissions. So one obvious question is what about CO2 removal? What about direct air capture of CO2? This is, sure you're aware, very hot right now.Ye TaoYes.David RobertsDo you think that could accelerate the drawdown of CO2 fast enough to counter this rise in heat?Ye TaoNo. Before we really start to look at any particular solution, I think we need to really dive and find the core of the challenge, the core of the problem. So the problem is energy imbalance of the Earth system. Meaning there's net power, net heating power coming into our home planet. And we need to be quantitative because this is a very important problem. So quantitatively, the heating power that's heating Earth is roughly 1000 terawatts. A "terawatt" is ten to the twelve watts, which is 1,000 billion. So we have roughly 1 million billion watts heating the Earth system, 1000 terawatts.Okay. Now we're humans, and we think we can modify our environment, but to do any modification, we need to use our machinery, our technology. And our machinery and technologies are powered by energy. So let's see how much energy we have available. The whole of humanity in 2020 was using a power of 18 terawatts. Okay, so the problem of overheating is 1000 terawatts. And we have 18 terawatts of mostly fossil fuel combustion heat to deal with the problem. What does that mean? That means we need to have a cooling system that's 1,000 over 18 times 100% efficient, which is roughly 10,000% efficient.So just to put things in perspective, for an air conditioning that most people are familiar with, for every unit of electrical energy you feed it, it can move about three or four units of heat from one side of the wall to the other side of the wall. So it's only a coefficient of performance of three or four. But here, to move heat from inside the biosphere, the atmosphere outside into space, we need a coefficient of performance of 100. So that's drastically more efficient than just any typical technology that we are aware of.David RobertsSo where does that leave us?Ye TaoSo that basically means, in order to have a chance of stopping global warming, the particular process that you invent needs to have a minimum theoretical efficiency that's much, much larger than 100. Why is that? Because it's not possible to use all of our energy to just tackle climate change, because most of the energy goes into also feeding the population and keeping us warm. So then the question is — this is an unsolved question and I think we're starting just to discuss answers to this question which is — so realistically what fraction or percentage of the 18 terawatts is humanity able to devote to tackle something like climate change?So there is no answer to that that I'm aware of. And leading thinkers in these fields have not really been alerted to the importance of finding that number, because the MEER framework is not widely known yet.David RobertsThat wouldn't be a physical limit, though, would it? I mean, the limits on how much of our energy we're willing to devote to that is not. That'll be a social constraint, won't it?Ye TaoTo a certain extent, with the assumption that somehow social opinions and the societal trajectory could be arbitrarily curved. But there are underlying mechanisms that we are simply not aware of, or we don't fully understand. And there are also physical limits to how much fossil fuel extraction, let's say, if that's the power that used to solve this problem, and how quickly we can build solar panels. There are some kinetic barriers to how much we really can. But of course, these things needs to be investigated in the process of finding how much energy really we are able to devote to this process.But just as an analogy, people have calculated what fraction of current power needs to be devoted to renewable infrastructures to fully decarbonize it, become running mostly on renewables by say, 2050. And that figure falls between, say, 0.5% to maybe 5% of current total energy consumption. But even that single-digit percent investment seems to be difficult at this point. And most of the world is not aware of this Earth energy imbalancing problem that will guarantee global warming yet. So it's not even in discussion. So we would be very, very optimistic in thinking that somehow we could manage to put, say, 5% of our energy consumption to tackle this heat problem or global warming at its core.So that corresponds to roughly one terawatt of power out of 18 terawatts. And if that's the case, we need what we call a heat rejected on investment or cooling return on investment. We need this ratio to be a couple of 1,000 or 2,000.David RobertsRight? How do you get the most heat out of the system per ...?Ye TaoUnit input in energy and the materials.David RobertsPer energy expenditure.Ye TaoBut it's easy to measure things, well, it's possible to convert things at least to the energy base on first inspection, before you even consider the material analysis. So we can apply this framework, or this minimum requirement criterion, to analyze, say, the likes of carbon capture, direct air capture, and won't find that such methods are short of what's required by an order of magnitude or more. Which basically means if we were to invest all of our energy consumption, 18 terawatts, into the process, we would barely really just manage to capture, contemporaneous or contemporary emissions.And it's obviously not possible. So it's essentially an industry that's created that can turn a profit on small scale, but its capacity is only capable of, in the very optimistic sense, address its own emissions in running the process and creating all the absorbents and all the factories that's needed to make it run. So it's a very ideal exemplification of capitalism, basically creating a need out of nothing and asking consumers to pay for it and branding it in dishonest ways.David RobertsOkay, we got to get to the mirrors eventually, so I want to cross a few other things off the list. This is our framework. We have X amount of energy available to tackle this problem. And the way we need to approach it is: how do we get as much heat out of the system as possible per unit of energy we expend? What about these other geoengineering ideas? Like what about sulfur particles in the atmosphere, or cloud seeding, or kelp? Have you gone through the geoengineering catalog and tried to figure out what can and can't reject the most heat?Ye TaoYes, we have basically done a more or less comprehensive analysis of all the proposals out there. And I'm also part of several discussion groups online that the members of which are basically leaders and principal investigators in different startups and companies, or nonprofits, each fostering different techniques and approaches. For example, Stephen Salter is a professor, retired professor, from University of Edinburgh, that I visited actually in person, studied vetting for two days to really understand the latest thinking and design for marine cloud brightening. So I can say that I have a pretty comprehensive understanding of the limitations and capabilities of different approaches.So you asked about solar radiation management, and the only two that's currently being talked about include stratospheric aerosol injection, and there's a marine cloud brightening.David RobertsThis aerosol injection, which let me just interrupt briefly, the aerosol injection, which would ironically be furiously attempting to replace the aerosols that are falling out of the atmosphere as we're reducing coal burning.Ye TaoYes, it's an attempt to perform something similar, but there is important distinctions. So the aerosol that we create from coal burning, they don't go very high up in the sky because they are sourced at the ground, and they're transported by atmospheric circulations in the troposphere. So troposphere is the lower part of the atmosphere, up to a height of about 10 km, so roughly 10 miles in some cases, and thinner on the poles, but it's roughly flight altitude, cruising flight altitude, and much above that, it's called the stratosphere. So the two layers don't really mix very well, which means when you inject particles in the lower part, they fall up much easier, so they're less stable.But if you put things up high in the stratosphere, they stay up much longer on the order of a couple of years, maybe sometimes more. So one of the thinking about why inject into the stratosphere is because it makes the particles more stable, which means you don't have to inject all day, every day, 24/7 because the next rainstorm or precipitation events would have wiped out all your reflectors. So that's why people are thinking about putting them up in the stratosphere. The problem is that we do not have a full understanding of the chemistry or physical transport or nucleation, cloud nucleation, properties of the different particles that are being proposed.We do know that sulfuric acid nanoparticles, or droplets, will contribute to ozone depletion. So that's one known risk. What's not really been studied fully is when these particles eventually fall out. So the way they fall out is they get injected, say, in the tropical latitudes, and they get transported by stratospheric circulation to the poles, and they ring out over the poles. So when they ring out over the poles, they could potentially seed cloud over the poles. So if it's the summer, polar summer, then great. They're promoting some cloud formation, so shielding part of the polar water from being heated up by sunlight.But because the residence time is over a couple of years, so they will also potentially fall out during the winter. And when they do seek cloud during the winter, it's like the cloud acts as a blanket. So they prevent freezing. They could potentially prevent freezing of the Arctic during the winter. So clouds, you can conceptualize that basically as a barrier for energy passage. So which way it's impeding the flux of energy depends on the net vector, or where the flux is going. So in the summer, there's more coming down, so they have a cooling effect. In the winter, there's more energy going out by radiation than they would have a keeping warm, warming effect.And since we do not have the microphysical understanding fully of cult formation over the Arctic, in the event of a large quantity of aerosols raining down there, we do not really actually know the sign of the impact, local impact, in the Arctic.David RobertsAnd that's, I think, a specific version of a more general point, which you said before, which is just, "We don't understand the risks of these things well enough to be doing them." So this is what sort of sponsored your search for a simpler, more direct version of geoengineering. Which brings us to the mirrors. Your proposal, to put it as simply as possible, is to cover a decent swath of the earth's surface with mirrors, and the mirrors will reflect solar radiation back out into space. And with sufficient mirrors, we could reject enough heat to bring the global average temperature down into a safe range, even if CO2 remains high and even rising.Is that a fair summary?Ye TaoYes. The idea for using mirrors, which is a local light management, or reflector device, is very important because these challenges are interconnected. Shortage in food that's coming down the line and the droughts. And local communities are the one that's bearing the brunt of the impact. If we can not only tackle the global problem, but primarily have a very strong local impact, then it's a process that can be tested on small scale, and that can be potentially implemented out of the volition of the local population communities and in a naturally organically, democratic way in its testing.David RobertsLet's talk about then what would I mean, obviously, the global effect of reducing global average temperatures is to everyone's benefit, but what would be the local effects that you could sell a local population on, of creating big fields of mirrors?Ye TaoOkay, so we have preliminary data from the summer season of 2021 to put some numbers on the expected impact. So in our very small mirror field in New Hampshire, Plymouth, New Hampshire, during the months of July, which happened to be very wet. Despite high soil moisture during the measurement period, we could measure up to ten degree Celsius temperature reduction in the regions underneath a single mirror, that's as small as 2 by 2 feet.David RobertsIf you're talking 2 by 2, the directly shaded area is going to move around all day. So it reduces temperature in the whole area of soil?Ye TaoThat's right. So the shade, as you mentioned, it swipes over a region which is on the order of five or 10x the surface area of the mirror itself. And over that region, you can have order degrees of cooling at the surface. And a few degrees can really make a huge difference between complete crop failure to an excellent harvest. So, for example, for every day that your crop spent over 30 degrees Celsius, you can expect a drop of about 1% in yield. And studies generally have only analyzed data that's not too many degrees above 30. But this year, for example, in India and Pakistan, people experienced 40, 50-degree days over weeks.So these extreme weather events and their impact on crop, we just don't really have enough data to really put a number on it. But most likely it's not going to be linear. So maybe for every degree over 40, it's more like 10% drop or even more. So if you can somehow manage to reduce local field temperature by five degrees to ten degrees, we can more or less locally just delay these devastating impacts.David RobertsSo is the idea that the mirrors are ... tell me what this looks like. Are the mirrors over the land on, like, stilts or something? Or how would you, I mean, if you have a field of crops, where are you putting your mirrors to get this effect?Ye TaoYeah, so those parameters are currently being investigated in a more extended field experiments in Concord and Plymouth, New Hampshire. So we're looking at the impact on soil temperature and moisture and the local air temperature, as a function of a coverage pattern and the coverage of fraction. So we're looking at between 5% coverage, up to 25%, 30% aerial coverage. And just based on how the Earth rotates, we know that the shadow scans along the East/West axis. So we are looking at configurations where we have columns of mirrors lined along the North/South axis and playing around with parameters of inter-column spacing, and also a bit inter-row spacing, at this moment.You can have various designs for field-applied mirrors. You can have each, say, square or rectangular mirror supported by a single rod that's planted into the soil. So that's what we're using for its simplicity in our experimental measurements. But of course, you can also have an array of rods between which you can tie even a flexible polymer based reflectors, which would save how much glass mirror you need. And if different materials become limiting, then you can use ones that are readily available.David RobertsIsn't this something that PV people are currently investigating? I mean, agri-PV or whatever the heck they call it. Agrisolar?Ye TaoYes, agrivoltaics.David RobertsYeah, agrivoltaics. They're busy investigating these same questions, aren't they? I mean, it's somewhat similar.Ye TaoYeah, there are similar questions that are being investigated, with the important difference that when you put PV panels, while you can provide local soil cooling and shading, you're actually increasing how much heat is produced inside the atmosphere. Because PV panels are extremely light absorbing and dark, so it would create a higher air temperature. So in regions that are already stressed by air temperature, if the temperature is the main stressor rather than moisture, then it would become a net negative sooner. In the case of mirror, the shading impact is similar, but it also has this air-cooling impact.David RobertsRight. And I'm trying to get a sense of scale. I don't know how to put this together in my mind. How much coverage by mirrors are we talking before you have a regional effect? Do you know what I mean? Like, if I'm on the next farm over, do I ever get cooler? Or are these strictly local effects? If we had half our square footage of our town covered in mirrors, would the entire rest of the town get cool?Ye TaoYeah, there's actually some data, not from this field, but from the field of scientists, engineers trying to address urban heat island effect that provides some hints to the length scale, correlation length scale. And if you have a neighborhood that's significantly brighter than the neighboring one, then the cooling effect extends to, on the word of quarter mile, hundreds of meters around this area. So you can create essentially what are local oases.David RobertsRight?Ye TaoSo that's the other interesting idea of mirror of this local solution because it potentially can create these local environments that are still habitable, even if the global average temperature has increased way beyond what's sustainable.David RobertsRight.Ye TaoSo it's almost like essentially oasis in a desert. And I think it's an open scientific and engineering question as to whether such oases could be created and on what length scale, and eventually, like, what length scale of these habitable islands do you need to enable local biodiversity to persist? So these are interesting, multiscale, interdisciplinary questions that potentially we could answer once the mirror framework becomes mainstream.David RobertsAnd you envision mirrors out in fields or on top of buildings or over parking garages, or all the above?Ye TaoYeah, all of the above and more. So another project we have ongoing this summer is to look at water-saving potential when you float mirrors on top of water bodies, let's say reservoirs. So Deutsche Welle, the DW, German television, just released a video, or documentary, about heat, the recent heat stress in Pakistan and India. And they mentioned that about 60% or 70% of the fresh-water gets lost during a distribution system because they're flown in, like, canals or aqueduct that's open top. So just imagine if we had covered that with mirrors to reduce the evaporative loss and conversion to latent heat, we could potentially significantly alleviate urban water stress.And our experiment from last summer already qualitatively demonstrated that water saving impact. And this year, we have added new string age sensors to monitor the weight of the little bins and buckets that we use to simulate a water body to more quantitatively understand how much water we can save in the process. So it's saving water and also cooling the planet at the same time. So it's like multiple benefits.David RobertsHere's another question I'm sure you get from every audience you talk about this with. I'm trying to imagine a city or just any large swath of land that is close to completely covered in mirrors, and it just seems like flying over that would be dazzling. I mean, I don't know if there would be heat reflecting up or light in people's eyes, or is there any danger at all in covering the ground with mirrors in terms of, like, the airspace above it?Ye TaoOur experimental site in Plymouth, New Hampshire is right beside the municipal airport. And the administration really looked into the problem and concluded it's not really a problem. Why is that the case? So even in the highest coverage that we would realistically deploy, which is around like say 20% of land surface area, we at most would increase basically ground albedo by about 0.1 or 10%. So what the pilot would actually see is, okay, there is the sun in the sky which is providing say 100% of the downwelling short-wave radiation. And then from this mirror field from below, it would add maybe 10%, 20% percent of what's coming from the top-up.And because the mirrors are not going to be precisely controlled in direction up to 0.001-degree precision, the different beams of light from each individual devices will go in every which direction, more or less scrambled. So the pilot will not really see a coherent image or reflection even from the mirror field.David RobertsSo the beams won't come together at any point. So there wouldn't be any heat either, I guess then.Ye TaoYeah. So there's no concentration of radiation energy in space, so no birds will notice it. So we have watched the birds landing on these mirrors, and also turkeys going through the fields. They are not really concerned because to really get them to point in the same point demands a lot of engineering, and that's the focus of many different companies, just to how to create such focal point reliably.David RobertsSo I've talked with several of them. Well, let's talk about the simplicity, then, because that brings us to the subject of materials, which is a huge piece of this. One of the things you say, one of the sort of premises of the project is, "We need to find a solution that can reject as much heat as we need to reject using materials we have available to us, currently." So that sort of excludes any sort of fancy fabrication or engineering or rare materials or scarce materials. So talk about what mirrors are made of, and how much of that stuff there is.Ye TaoOkay. So that's a very natural flow of things. So first of all, we have to establish that energy-wise mirrors can provide that leverage. We won't go into details today, but yes, we have established that that's feasible. And next is do we have enough material to construct all of them? So the initial stages of the project we had focused on considering soda lime glass as the main material that goes into both the supporting structure and also the planar reflector, because the technologies already exist, and we essentially buy from commercial suppliers, currently, for our field experiments. And the advantage of glass in this application is that they essentially don't degrade.And the ones that we have also even survived minor hailstorms from last year. So we are pretty confident — and also snowstorm. So we're pretty confident that, in most parts of the world, these things can last for decades, at least to centuries.David RobertsThe glass can last. But isn't the reflective surface somewhat more vulnerable?Ye TaoOh, so we just thinking about that problem, we have designed our prototype to be such that the reflector layer is sandwiched between two glass layers, top and down, so that they are protected by impenetrable glass from chemical intrusion. Of course, there's still some work to be done for edge ceiling, but that's a minor engineering material science development that's totally manageable, given enough resources.David RobertsAnd you're just talking about "glass" glass, right? Plain old glass. We're not talking about any special bulletproof or industrial or whatever.Ye TaoNo, we're just relying on solid lime glass, which of course is not as clear or transparent as, say, high-quality, pure fused silica. But for the extra, say, two 3% transmission, you would have to increase your expenditure by orders — that doesn't make sense. For something like this, we just use what's mostly readily available in abundance — so the lime glass.David RobertsAnd there's no conceivable shortage of lime glass?Ye TaoNo, actually, that's something I need to point out. So our initial thinking was, "Yes, we do have enough reserves in soda lime glass to implement the full project out of glass, and to basically stop further global warming. We can do that. We do have both the energy and the material to do that." The energy consumption for a all-glass framework is 3% of global energy consumption. So which is, again, in the slow single digit, which is optimistically feasible.David RobertsAnnually?Ye TaoAnnually ... well, I mean, it's a power consumption, so it's 3% of annual energy consumption.David RobertsAnd you're talking about just manufacturing mirrors.Ye TaoManufacturing glass and mirrors, and transporting and implanting them. Because most of the energy is used in the melting process, the rest is basically negligible because the melting process is the most energy-intensive step. So the bottleneck for a all-glass solution is not in the reserves for making the material, or in the energy needed to power its manufacturing, it's actually in the speed at which we can make glass. So it turns out that we need slightly more than an order of magnitude higher annual glass output than currently exists, in order to do this. So that's a huge problem.David RobertsRight.Ye TaoSo that's why we started recently to think, "okay, we cannot really expect humans to really coordinate to such an extent that we just decide to ramp up one particular industry by ten times. What — can we do something in the meantime to still keep the project going and also keep it readily scalable?" That's when we start to consider replacing the planar reflector part, using reflectors based on PET, polyethylene terracethalate, thin film plastic. The advantage of this material is that you can make thin films that are very thin but still tensile, quite stable over multi feet length scales, and they're stable even down to thicknesses of a few microns.So when there are a few ten of microns, they are already very robust. So even though the energy intensity for making these polymers is roughly one or two orders of ... higher than making glass for the same volume, but because you can really make the polymer film is much, much thinner than you can make glass. Glass needs to be a few millimeters in thickness to be stable, whereas these can be 100x thinner and still be stable. So the energy penalty, by a factor of ten, is more than compensated for, by using less material of the polymer.And these polymers, they degrade mostly via oxidation and weathering due to UV radiation and the photo-activated processes in the atmosphere. But if we can protect the underlayer using the reflector layer, that should largely attenuate the process. So there is the possibility, but enough research to make these films much more environmentally stable. And if they can last for more than five years, based on our calculations, the system would be able to deliver the energy rejected or cooling return on investment ratio of 1,000 or 2,000 that's required for the process to be viable.David RobertsYeah. And I would think if we globally decided we suddenly needed to be manufacturing enormous quantities of reflective surfaces, I would imagine there's lots of innovation to be had there, just in terms of materials, in terms of scale and processes and everything. If it ever got going on that scale, I'm sure there would be ways to bring down material costs.Ye TaoYeah, I'm sure. So we need to mostly just alert people to this seemingly simple but actually quite versatile framework. And we certainly have enough pet for the process. So we have been looking into how much goes into landfills, and it turns out that what's currently going into landfills, which is roughly 20 megaton per year of PT plastic, that amount is more than sufficient to implement the whole project. And how much aluminum cans that are going to landfills is 7x more than what's needed to implement the mirror framework. Right now. The only remaining puzzle is still this glass part, because it's still our understanding that the part that interfaces with the soil needs to be made of glass for chemical durability and zero-emission requirements, and currently rejected or buried glass bottles, wine bottles, champagne bottles, and container bottles is at 150 megaton per year. And that's only sufficient for about 10% of mirror needs.So finding a sustainable material, for making this support for the reflectors, is a current challenge. So we're looking at other systems, like, maybe pressure-treated bamboo that's more durable, or some sort of composite that combines recycled, upgraded, reused materials. So that part is an ongoing research, but we're getting very close to being able to finance the mere framework in terms of energy material, using what's currently discarded, the resources in landfills.David RobertsAnd you mentioned too, moving manufacturing over to being — because currently, I guess, glass manufacturing is mostly fossil fuel. You've talked about trying to drive that with solar.Ye TaoYeah, that would be quite ideal, and it's certainly feasible. So it's already been demonstrated in 2018 by research group Paul Schur Institute PSI, close to Zurich in Switzerland. But the solar program there got shut down like a couple of years ago for reasons that I don't understand. But it's certainly possible, and if we can harness that — but anyways, I don't think energy is anything of a concern. What's needed is really policy and understanding. Like methane emissions, fugitive methane emissions from landfills, more or less, is sufficient just, if properly channeled for furnaces to make glass for the mirrors.That alone is sufficient for the process. So it's a combination of if we can solve several problems at the same time.David RobertsOne thing that I wanted to ask, sort of straightforwardly, is it seems like one of the implications of this research is that it is better to put up a mirror than to put up a PV panel. And it is better, as a matter of fact, to manufacture and put up mirrors than it is to manufacture and put up renewable energy. And you could even say that if we rejected enough heat with mirrors, CO2 would not be nearly as urgent a problem, and transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables, would not be nearly as urgent of a problem. Is that all fair?Ye TaoNo, that's not correct. I think the conceptual distinction to make is that energy provisioning and global warming are two separate challenges. Energy provisioning is try to make the 18 terawatts that we're currently using carbon neutral. Global warming management is how to get rid of the 1000 terawatt of heat. So they're on completely different scales of challenge. In a sense, the renewable energy challenge is even easier, I guess, because it's also like at the more advanced stage of discussion compared to the global warming excess heat management problem. Again, here there's a natural tendency to link the two problems because energy provisioning created the problem, therefore, we have to solve the global warming problem by addressing energy provisioning. But that's not conceptually correct.David RobertsWell, I guess what I'm wondering is if we have this knob, this relatively cheap knob that we can turn to turn down heat, why do we care if our energy provisioning is carbon intensive?Ye TaoWell, I mean, there is some limit, eventually, of physiological intolerance to CO2 that we know. So yes, it's a few decades down the line, but we know that the fossil fuel industry has been successful in the past decade. So who is to say that they won't continue to be successful, if we don't counter them with as much determination as we have shown, at least in the activist and academic fields. So we certainly need to decarbonize that. There's no question about that. So these are two separate problems.David RobertsGot it. And so as a final question, and thank you for sharing so much of your time. I guess I'd like to know — all this right now is really early. I mean, most of it is just sort of noodling and thinking about it and conceiving and trying to model it and work out the math. How do you envision, or do you envision, it starting to translate into reality, and then I guess, secondarily, how big would it have to, I mean, how much surface area are we talking about before we start feeling global temperature effects from it?In other words, like how big of a head of a steam does it have to get before we start getting global payback from it?Ye TaoTo more or less keep the climate at current levels, we need to implement these refactors over maybe 15% of currently used agricultural land.David RobertsThat's a lot.Ye TaoAnd it doesn't have to be just land that's currently cultivated. Yes, it's a lot. However, we remember that when you put them into the land you most likely will actually increase per area yield. Then it feels more manageable. And because these agricultural fields are already snatched surface that's highly engineered, there is a little concern for biodiversity impact. And if you can provide also local cooling shade and more moisture, it might actually foster some local rebound of insect population and the soil microbes. And it's also entirely possible that at high enough coverage, one could expand arable land into currently area that's currently too hostile for agricultural work.David RobertsLike de-desertification? Wait, there's got to be a better way to say that.Ye TaoWell, yes, it would contribute because water is usually the limiting resource. So in some borderline regions, where if you just had a few on average half a millimeter per day of net water accumulation, which could be afforded by the demure rays, then you could convert some of these areas into new habitable zones. And there's evidence for that in megaprojects taking place in China, both under the concentrating solar power plants and also their large-scale PV fields. That previously barren land is now producing grass and becoming grassland, that sheep herders are leveraging and duck herders are leveraging to produce protein for the local population.David RobertsWhat about the economics? We should mention that MEER is a non-profit and run by volunteers, and it's all open source, and this is all — nobody's going to make money from all this. But at the same time, it's hard to imagine something spreading over the entire globe unless it makes money. So is the effect on, if I'm a farmer, is the effect on my crop yield sufficient to pay for the mirror? Do you know what I mean? Would it be an economic transaction for me, or is there an element of government needed, or is it philanthropic in the end, or is there an economy to be made here?Ye TaoSo we have not done the economics assessment for that problem. But it's something that we have thought about and will performing in the future, mainly because we have not fully obtained the full impact of the parameter space of moisture and temperature and air temperature perturbations. It's only when we have those figures can we then look at the growth functions of different crops and their light requirement, moisture requirement, to start performing that analysis. So our ongoing experiment this year and next year in the field to get those very basic radiation perturbation temperature moisture data is quite necessary to enable that assessment.But we do have precedents that's already in the field. Many people use, or farmers, use shades or like sort of greenhouse, but really structures covered by partially transparent white plastic in order to reduce how much light arrived at our crops. Because in some most lower latitudes, below 40, solar noon is basically too intense for most plants to survive, really, especially single canopy crop field. So naturally, there's a need to reduce how much light comes down. And farmers have been willing to buy these plastic-based sheeting to cover their crops, and we don't expect the mirrored version to be much more significantly, more expensive.So, for example, if you look at PET sheeting on Alibaba before and after metalization, metalization is the process of putting on thin layer of metal to make it like a mirror. The prices differ by maybe 10%, 20%, because most of the cost comes from the polymer production and the film manufacturing, by process of thermal and blowing them and cutting them and rolling them. So it seems like just at a qualitative level, changing the current partially transparent white shading to a reflective film, maybe with different ways to put them up, shouldn't be a huge change in what some farmers are already spending to keep their land arable.David RobertsSo you can imagine a market, and I guess also it's obvious, but worth pointing out, that heat solutions, solutions to heat are going to be much more in demand in coming years than they are now. So I imagine the problem of shading crops will become more acute as time goes on as well.Ye TaoCorrect.David RobertsAnd people will be looking for solutions.Ye TaoYeah, and also not only heat protection for crops but also for humans. And one of our projects is a humanitarian project trying to deliver these affordable mirrored sheets, or mirrored tiles, for implementing on roofs to help people in Pakistan and India, and parts of Africa, so that they can actually survive during these extreme heat events.David RobertsRight. I would imagine it would do an enormous amount to just keep a single structure cool. I mean, that's like life or death difference.Ye TaoYes, a couple of degrees. Sometimes it just said one extra degree. That's really the last straw that crushed the camel.David RobertsAlright, well, thanks for coming on and talking about this. It's fascinating. So what's the next step? You guys are doing some early research. Is there next big milestone?Ye TaoNext milestone is, basically, include getting more concrete and precise data in the field and also demonstrating or testing cooling in urban heat island settings, and more or less just an educational effort. Because even among people working in this domain of climate mitigation, only a very minor minority are really scientifically trained, and engineering trained, in a multidiscipline fashion that they are able to think from this more top-down perspective. So sometimes people are really excited about their own projects, for example, carbon capture, that they know all details about how the sorbent works, the kinetics of those processes, but they have not had the chance to really zoom out and see, "whoops, even if everything were to work 100%, as I expect, it's still not enough to really tackle the Earth energy imbalance."So really teaching people about what's the core problem, we're trying to confront, is one of the future focus over the next year. So we'll be updating our websites with these educational texts. So a lot of time is actually spent trying to translate university-level basic science writing into 8th-grade compatible writing material. And sometimes it's creating more time sync than we like to spend.David RobertsI know that struggle. Alright, well, thanks so much. Thanks for taking the time, and I'll be following the project.Ye TaoThank you.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

Chris Hayes, MSNBC host and political commentator, reflects on the seismic shifts in American politics since 2015. He discusses his evolving beliefs post-Obama, the fragility of democracy, and the surge of authoritarianism. Hayes examines how voter behavior and media influence have shaped political narratives, alongside the challenges posed by misinformation. He highlights the complexities of governance in a multiracial democracy and emphasizes the need for hope amidst chaos. The conversation unveils critical insights into the future of progressive ideals and the Democratic Party.

In this episode, policy analyst Danny Cullenward of CarbonPlan talks about the disconnect between California’s ambitious climate goals and its actual practical plans for achieving them.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsCalifornia has long been known, nationally and internationally, as a leader on climate policy. The sheer scale of its economy and the stringency of its emissions targets have made it a model for other states with climate ambitions. As a role model, its successes (and failures) reverberate far beyond its borders.So it matters a great deal whether California has a practical plan to meet its aspirations. This year offers something of an answer, and … it’s not great. Volts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Every five years, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) issues a “scoping plan,” laying out how it intends to meet the state’s targets. The last one, in 2017, raised serious questions about whether the state’s cap-and-trade system could do the emission-reduction work that the state planned to require of it through 2030. This year’s draft scoping plan (there’s still time for public comment) answers none of those questions, and instead, looking out to 2045, raises new questions about whether carbon-dioxide removal (CDR) can do the work the state plans to require of it.That’s a lot of questions. To hash through them, and get a sense of just how prepared California is to meet its climate targets, I called up Danny Cullenward, a long-time policy analyst in the state. (Volts fans will remember him from one of the very first Volts posts.) He is currently policy director at the nonprofit CarbonPlan and a research fellow at American University’s Institute for Carbon Removal Law & Policy. Cullenward and I discussed what policies have worked to reduce emissions in California, whether the cap-and-trade program can do what’s asked of it, why the current scoping plan leans so heavily on CDR, and whether there’s still time to improve the plan before it’s locked in for five years.Without any further ado, Danny Cullenward. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Danny CullenwardThanks for having me on, Dave.David RobertsDanny, you were the first interview I ever did for Volts a couple of years ago. And as far as I know, now you're the first return guest.Danny CullenwardAnd the first to pivot to audio. This is fun.David RobertsYeah, the first to pivot to audio. I'm sure this is the kind of accomplishment you used to dream about as a young man.Danny CullenwardIf I were still an academic, it would be going on my CV.David RobertsAlright, so the purpose of our conversation here today is to get a handle on California and climate, sort of where it's been, where it says it's going, and whether it is in fact prepared to go where it says it's going. Before we get there, though, let's do just a little sort of scene setting, a little background. I think everybody hears about laws coming out of California all the time. California is doing this, doing that, and it becomes a little bit of a blur. So let's just sort of clarify what are the targets to which California is committed by statute, and sort of what are its other targets which are less statutory.Danny CullenwardI think that's the formal legal definition. That's great.David RobertsSemi statutory.Danny CullenwardWell, so there's a reason people talk about California and also why people, I think, sometimes get confused about exactly what's going on. And the reason that it matters is California was one of the first states to move forward on some of the macro climate policy issues, and many states are either copying or learning from its experience. So what it does turns out to matter a lot to sort of what other people start to do. I think the story begins in earnest in climate policy with the passage of AB 32. Our famous climate law back in 2006.David RobertsUnder Arnold.Danny CullenwardUnder Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a progressive Democratic legislature came together, found common ground on this bill, did a couple of things.It set a target to reduce emissions back down to 1990 emissions, by the year 2020. And it empowered the climate regulator, the California Air Resources Board, with the authority to undertake new regulations, including a cap-and-trade program, as well as to coordinate with other agencies, like our clean energy regulators that had already been pushing on renewables in the past. And that sort of set up the meta-framework and delegated the planning exercise to this regulator. So that's target number one. Target number two is about a decade later. In fact, one of the same principal legislators, then-Senator Fran Pavley, led a bill called SB 32, which codified a target of 40% below 1990 levels by the year 2030.So both of those are statutory targets. They're legally binding. The regulator is obligated to plan to and meet those targets. And then in 2018, we had the passage of SB 100, our zero-carbon grid bill. That was much celebrated. At the signing ceremony for that bill, Governor Jerry Brown issued an executive order that said, let's go carbon neutral by the year 2045 on a statewide basis as well. And it's under the auspices of that executive order, and some more recent executive order and direction activity from the current governor, Gavin Newsom, that the state of California is thinking about its long-term climate goals.So we have statutory target for 2030, and we have non-binding aspirational executive orders for the post-2030 period.David RobertsSo, just to be clear, those executive orders are hotatory. Is that the word? They're meant to inspire action, but they have no legal force, there's no penalty.Danny CullenwardThat's right. You can't create new policies or programs from those executive orders that aren't separately authorized by existing law. And it's really easy to say, "That that's dumb. It means they're nothing." On the other hand, the statutory targets we have followed from earlier executive orders, so there's a history in this state, and in many other jurisdictions, you set the aspirational goal and you codify the parts of it you can, you sort of push ahead and you iterate in ratchet. So I don't want to discount the importance of that. But the practical takeaway is that nothing can be done to implement those targets other than talking and using existing authorities.You can't create new law with an executive order.David RobertsRight, so the legislature will have to follow up on that. So the first target you mentioned was by 2020, that was returned to 1990 levels. Did California hit that?Danny CullenwardNot only hit it, hit it a few years early. So it's a good story. And getting down to 1990 levels, maybe two things to say for your listeners. 1990 is a baseline that was really common to talk about 15, 20 years ago. We now talk about baselines like 2005, that's just sort of an artifact of when people locked into all of this. It doesn't sound like a particularly impressive target, in some respects, that's true, but at the time it was set, we were looking at emissions going ever up, and the idea that they would flatline and come back down a little bit was actually really ambitious at the time.And the state met it a couple of years early, which is great. Could talk about why. We got a little lucky. We also worked really hard, and we got there a couple of years early.David RobertsLet's briefly talk about it. So I'd like to get a sense of sort of — there's these two families of policies in California that have been passed in pursuit of these targets. There is the cap-and-trade system that was set up, as you say, by the Arnold Bill. And then alongside that, there's this sort of more sector-specific rules and regulations and investments, sort of, I guess what you would group under "industrial policy". So you have this sort of price-based mechanism on one hand, and then these sort of more old-fashioned regulatory tools on the other hand.So what has worked to put California ahead of schedule for its 2020 goal?Danny CullenwardMaybe the other thing to mention here is for these macro state targets, like the 2020 target and the 2030 target, AB 32, that original climate law asked the regulator to come up with what's called a "Scoping Plan". So every five years, the regulator is supposed to put together an official strategy. We're in the middle of a process for updating that strategy. And so you can look to those strategy documents to answer your question. And the first such document that was put together, basically, said that the expectation was that about 80% of the work to get to our 2020 target would be done by regulations and what today we now call things like industrial policy.David RobertsThat was in what year the first Scoping Plan came out?Danny CullenwardIt should have been December of 2008, end of 2008.David RobertsGot it.Danny CullenwardAnd the state said 80% regs 20% cap-and-trade. And that's a combination of policies that I think reflects the historical role that traditional sector-specific regulations and industrial policy have played in cutting emissions. Think renewable portfolio standard, think CARB's leadership on mobile source emissions, trying to set rules for cleaner cars. Those are the kinds of efforts that have historically delivered the tons. And the initial plan was about 80% in that traditional route and put on top of that an economy-wide carbon price that would do some of the lifting, but maybe not the lion's share.David RobertsAnd did that prediction, I guess, in 2008, turn out to more or less accurately reflect what happened through 2020?Danny CullenwardThat's a place where I think there's a little bit of nuance. So if you look at the data in terms of how we actually got to our target early, it turns out that there was a substantial boost from the financial crisis, right? So, like, the world economy collapsed, and people stopped driving. We didn't have like a boom time, and that exogenously pushed emissions lower. When you look at the sectors where the work has been done, it turns out that we struggled to keep pace in the transportation sector, struggled to keep pace in the industrial sector, but our electricity sector decarbonized much more quickly than even the optimistic plans in the original Scoping Plan suggested.And that's a combination of the fact that renewables and efficiency have performed in some respects better than we thought and moved faster than we hoped. It's also a reflection of the fact that at the time the plans were set, California was importing a lot of coal power. And it's a long story, but they eventually created a process by which the utilities in the state stopped importing that coal power. So we shed that liability from our books, and it's that electricity sector transition, moving off coal and starting to move on to clean energy, which is just beginning to really show up in the inventory.That's where the real progress has come. The rest of the sectors have struggled and electricity is most of the work.David RobertsGot it. And so you hit the 2020 target early. The 2030 target is 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. Is California on track to hit that target?Danny CullenwardI don't think there's a case to be made that we're anything close to it right now. I think it's entirely feasible and doable, but I don't think we're on that track right now. And part of the reason why reflects a pretty big shift in the state's official strategy for its climate policy. So I told you that the first Scoping Plan in 2008 said 80% regulations, 20% markets.David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardTo make a long story short, there was a crisis in the cap-and-trade program starting in about 2016. The program was only authorized through the end of 2020. There was a crisis about the state of supply and demand in the program, the upcoming expiration of its clear legal authority, and that was ultimately resolved with a bill that passed in 2017 to extend the cap-and-trade program to 2030. So now we have the authority for cap-and-trade aligned to our state goal.David RobertsRight. I remember that fight. That was Brown, wasn't it? Who?Danny CullenwardThat was right. And I think it's fair to say Governor Brown had a singular role in that bill and that approach. So the bill passes and extends the authority it requires for state constitutional reasons. It needed a two-thirds vote, which is extraordinarily difficult to pull off anywhere.David RobertsEven in California.Danny CullenwardEven in — anywhere.And it led to a number of concessions to industry. So it shut down the ability of our local air pollution regulators to regulate CO2. It shut down the ability, at least temporarily, of the state climate regulator to regulate CO2 emissions from the oil and gas sector, including refining and production, other than through existing policies and the cap-and-trade program. And it led to a compromise in the implementation of the cap-and-trade program that made it a not particularly strict policy. Now, if you want to make a plan that's 80% regs and 20% cap-and-trade, a "not particularly strict policy" can maybe deliver that right.But that's not what the climate regulator decided to do. So they decided in 2017, in their most recent Scoping Plan.Like just in the wake of the program being renewed through 2030, right?That's right. So the cap-and-trade legislation said, "You got to finish your Scoping Plan, and here's some of the constraints on that planning process." And in that plan, the regulator adopted a set of policies, or a set of strategies, that would put that emphasis much closer to 50/50 for the year 2030. So it was a pretty big departure. And if you ask an economist that sounds like a good thing. If you ask a political scientist, or somebody in the policy scene, "What's going on?" There's a lot more questions.David RobertsRight. This is a classic real-world running of this sort of experiment, this long-running sort of dispute. I'm sure listeners are probably familiar with the basic outlines, but then you sort of have economists who are like, "Pricing is the most efficient way, über alles. Absolutely. The cheapest way to do this, and most effective." And then you have sort of people from the political realm, you might say a political scientist, who point to, "Well, in the past, what has worked? And in the past what has worked are these more blunt weapons, these sort of regulations and mandates and investments," and things like that.So it's interesting that California is really running a real-time experiment. So now in 2017, for its Scoping Plan, it says, we're going to put these on more or less 50/50 basis.Danny CullenwardLet me pause you right there. Yes. And then, here's maybe the most interesting part of this. So the plan is settled at the end of 2017, the rulemaking to implement the program doesn't finish till 2018. So ask me in 2017 what I think about this. I say, "I might have some concerns about the balance. I don't know if that's the wisest approach, but you can absolutely design a program to deliver in that way if that's what you want to do."David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardAnd we can come back to this, to the extent this is interesting, but the design of the program in 2018 was a pretty universal sort of shift in a direction of not really addressing the supply-demand balance in the program very explicitly. And I think it's fair to say some decisions were made that led to consequences, and these consequences were warned about. A bunch of us in the either academic or nonprofit world raised concerns about there being too many allowances in the program to get to our goal. My colleague Chris Bush and Justin Gillis even had an op-ed in the New York Times, like, for you to get an op-ed in the New York Times about cap-and-trade minutiae.David RobertsYeah. Allowance numbers.Danny CullenwardIt's a pretty rarefied thing. Make a long story short, the critics who raised concerns about this said, "Wow, we've modeled the program. We think it's going to end up with too many allowances."David RobertsAnd so just wait, just pause there. Just to spell that out a little bit for listeners, you need an allowance to emit a ton of carbon. And the idea is, if you get too many allowances in the system, they just become cheap. You can start buying them up and hoarding them. Basically, if there are too many allowances flooding the system, it removes what incentive there is to reduce emissions. And instead, you can just start buying and hoarding cheap allowances to protect yourself, and because, to steal a little bit of your thunder here, but because California allows banking, which is buying allowances and saving them for later, this opens the possibility that regulated entities in California can take advantage of these super cheap, oversupplied allowances.Buy a bunch, create a big reserve of them, and then when or if prices ever go up, they're just going to have these giant stores of cheap allowances. So even if the price goes up, they'll still be sort of insulated from having to take action. That's the worry about too many allowances.Danny CullenwardYeah, and I like to analogize it. I don't want to in any way cast aspersions on making these programs work right. Which, again, I think is something that is a nice idea, and I work on every day, despite writing a book about why it's unlikely to work. But think about it as a cap-and-trade game, as a game of musical chairs. And so the players that's the pollution, the chairs, that's the number of allowances in the program. And players can exit the game if regulations are successful or technology improves. And the question is, how many chairs should you have in the game?And if the regulator guesses wrong or gets the number wrong, for whatever reason, you can end up with too many chairs. And the basic rule of a cap-and-trade program is a player's got to have a chair at the end of every period. You got to have the right number of allowances to match your emissions. And if you don't, you're out. You got to figure out a way to close that circle. So it's really hard, turns out, to estimate how many emissions you think are going to need to be covered in a cap-and-trade program.You have to guess at the future of the economy. You have to guess at the performance of each sector. You got to guess at macroeconomic conditions. You got to guess how fast you think the grid is going to decarbonize. It's hard to do right.David RobertsLet's pause here to make a note that the original economic attraction of cap-and-trade, and of pricing carbon generally, is supposed to be that you don't have to guess those things, that the price will do the work for you, that the price will sort of reflect our aggregated information about those things if it's just allowed to run. But it turns out, as you point out in your book, and as many other people have pointed out, if you've got a big system that covers the energy sector, you're not going to take chances. In practice, you're not going to let it do whatever the market does to it, right?It's energy. It's too core to the economy to leave it up to that. So what ends up happening is regulators end up fiddling and fiddling and messing and shaping and capping, and they end up designing it to the point that it just becomes a sort of backdoor command and control mechanism, which was the whole point was to get away from that. So it's like you end up with the worst of both worlds somehow.Danny CullenwardYeah, I want to tell you a positive story about how to fix it and all that at some point, but it is ridiculously complex. And I think the main insight is that when you ask an economist about this, they say, "Well, you don't have to worry about this." The reason is they're thinking as though you had this policy in isolation, in an idealized setting, and in the real world, you only ever see these instruments evolve alongside strong complementary policies. That's the label we use. We call the things that do most of our work "complementary policies" reflecting the sort of economist worldview on that.But good economists have been thinking about this for a while. I mean, there's many to reference, but Severin Borenstein at UC Berkeley and his colleagues wrote a really great paper looking at the California program and saying, "Wow, I mean, there's so many policies that directly affect emissions subject to the program." There's only a small piece of the puzzle that is responsive to these prices, and you end up trading, as we say in the book, you end up trading the residual, and there's more volatility the more work these other policies are doing. There's also more political stability the more you rely on these other policies.So everything kind of points into a direction where the program looks bigger than it is and is also really complicated to manage empirically and effectively. So I'm trying to be sympathetic here. Like, it's hard to do it right. I'm not saying, "Oh, everybody screws it up if they just listen to the smart people." It's actually really hard to do.David RobertsYeah. Because you have all these other complementary policies that are reducing emissions, but every little bit that they reduce emissions has an implicit effect on the pricing in the cap-and-trade system. So you sort of have these two symbiotic things, one of which you're directly controlling and one of which you're sort of obliquely controlling. Yeah. And you end up having to — it just seems like, and you're right, we're perhaps being too negative too early here, but it just seems like ...Danny CullenwardSave it, Dave.David Roberts... A giant Rube Goldberg mechanism created just so you can say you did something market-like. The final product bears virtually no resemblance to any market or market mechanisms. But it's just like the symbolic value of saying, "We did a market thing," has prompted all this work and complexity just to make this thing appear to be playing a big role.Danny CullenwardOkay, I got to push back on you. That is both too cynical and not cynical enough. Here's the optimistic case for this. You actually want markets to work, if you want to deliver some cost-effective reductions. There's value in having markets discover cost-effective reductions. And in the real world, if you manage this carefully, given all of these constraints and all these concerns, there's actually value in that secondary supporting role. So you sort of articulated case, "Oh, this is all smoke and mirrors." It actually could be important to do this right, admittedly at a lesser scale than the textbook econ solution suggests more.David RobertsExplicitly as a "sopping up the remainder" policy rather than a sort of "main workhorse" policy.Danny CullenwardYeah. And if politics improve over time, if industry wants to come to the table to talk about cost-effective ways to get things done, it becomes a venue where you could have that conversation and have that conversation potentially be real. The more cynical take, and this is something I expect we'll come back to, is that the presence of a market-based program that can be described as an idealized outcome also becomes a shield against reform.David RobertsYes.Danny CullenwardAnd people will point to it, and they say, "You already have this economically efficient program that's designed to do all the work, so you don't need that next industrial policy. You don't need that higher ambition. Why would you remove allowances from the market and raise consumer prices when it's already designed perfectly?" It becomes a very dangerous thing when the idealized case is made, and that's typically made by industry and by regulators when they're sympathetic to either the concerns of industry or the challenges of reform that I think are practical and real.David RobertsRight. So if you have in place this system that you are claiming is an economically efficient way of mopping up emissions, and then you propose some further sector-specific industrial policy, it's very easy for industry to come along and say, "No, you don't need that. We already have — look, you already said you have this perfectly economically efficient plan in place. Why would you need to do anything else if you truly have this plan in place?"Danny CullenwardAnd just for a second, if they're right, if that program was designed perfectly and you're not worried about long-term dynamics, you just assume a relatively simple econ framework here, they might have a point. And the problem is the programs are rarely designed that sufficiently, and you also have all sorts of other market failures that sector-specific policies might want to address. But they do make a point which, again, is really compelling to lots of people and is worth paying attention to. If you did this right, it would take away some of the rationale for some of the sector-specific work.And I think it's a mistake to say, "Oh, that's not a legitimate argument." From a certain point of view, it can make sense. The tell is that we've rarely designed programs that are strict enough to deliver on that outcome.David RobertsYes, this is the key. I think you can imagineer a program that does all these things they say it does, but it doesn't seem like a coincidence that no one's been able to implement a program like that in the real world. In the real world, these programs are always compromised and oversupplied with allowances with all these blind spots. This is the whole sort of political economy point, right?Danny CullenwardYeah. And just again, not to put too fine a point on it, but that's okay if you work with it and you understand it and you put it in the right size box and you say, this is the classic example, is, "would you rather California have a $30 price on carbon or a zero dollar price on carbon?" And I will take the 30, please. But I don't want to pretend that 30 gets me to net zero, and I want to hold both of those ideas in my head at the same time.David RobertsRight, okay. So this brings us to the present. California is, in 2017, sort of shifted its emphasis to a sort of half-and-half industrial policy and cap-and-trade program road to the 2030 target. It is not currently on track to that target because of some of the large and still unaddressed problems in the cap-and-trade side of things. That's where we stand now. So then into this situation enters the current Scoping Plan, which was just released. I guess they do it every five years. They did 2017. So the 2022 Scoping Plan was just released.Danny CullenwardJust to clarify, it's the draft that's been released, so this is the only opportunity for public comment. It's not locked in, but we'll talk about what's going on.David RobertsRight. That's important later. The draft Scoping Plan for 2022 has been released. Now, you might think, given what we've discussed so far, that the 2022 Scoping Plan would be singularly obsessed with whether the cap-and-trade program can in fact, do 50% of the work, can in fact, do what they want it to do. Given that a. there's a lot of long-standing, very loud, persistent critiques of that program. And two, that it doesn't seem to be working currently because they're not on track, you would think that the Scoping Plan would be preoccupied with "how can we tighten up cabin trade, so that it really, does this work we say it's going to do?"That turns out not to be what the Scoping Plan does at all. In fact, the Scoping Plan, as you pointed out in a piece you just wrote last week, devotes all of six pages to the 2030 goal, which is currently not on track to be met. And as far as I can tell, does nothing to revise the basic shape of the cap-and-trade program and doesn't really, as far as I can tell, address any of the long-standing critiques of the cap-and-trade program.In other words, this Scoping Plan tells us very little about how California is going to go from "not on track" to meeting 2030 to "on track". Is that fair?Danny CullenwardYes, that's fair. So this is over 200-page planning document. There are six pages that address cap-and-trade and the 2030 target.David RobertsThat's wild. That's wild. It's only eight years away, Danny.Danny CullenwardYeah, I know. They don't even discuss, you reference the concerns and criticisms. Let me just give you just a couple of statistics. So if you look at the official greenhouse gas inventory by which we measure progress towards our various targets, the most recent pace of reductions is about 4.5 million tons per year we're reducing. And that's good, it's something to celebrate, but we need to increase that by almost a fourfold rate to get on track for 2030, to get to our existing statutory target.David RobertsSo what, like 16? What's the target number?Danny CullenwardThe target number, we're in the low 400s, 400 million tons CO2 equivalent per year. And we need to get down to about 259 million per year by 2030. We need to be falling at a rate, like, if you take our 2021 provisional estimate, we need to be falling at about 16.7 million tons per year, and we're falling sort of four to 5 million tons per year. So there's a gap there. That is absolutely in the technical world, that's an achievable. We can do that. We know how to do that if we really want to do that.But there's a gap. Second thing I want to introduce is we actually have a lot of evidence. We talked about back when the cap-and-trade regulations were finalized in 2018, there was a big debate, and there was some criticism. So the people who wrote their numbers down in public documents who said, "Here's how many extra allowances we expect to see at the end of the third compliance period." We just got data six months ago on that. And based on those allowances, those extra allowances, we have concerns that the program maybe can't get us to 2030 on track with our goals.So the people who did that, it turns out they got pretty much exactly right, and we saw the surplus allowances at those levels. So I'm the vice chair of the Advisory and Oversight Committee for this program, and speaking just in my personal capacity today with you, we in our annual report for the advisory report, looked at the number of extra allowances, and there are about 321 million that came into the post-2020 market. In the 2017 Scoping Plan, which did this first analysis of how to get to 2030 and how big the cap-and-trade needed to be to get there, they estimated around 236 million tons of reductions would need to come from cap-and-trade.So we've banked more allowances, that is to say, private parties bought and are holding on to more allowances than the entire cumulative reductions expected from this program in the last plan. So when I tell you that only six pages sort of hint at this stuff, and they don't even reference the advisory reports, the data, the documents, the public peer-reviewed papers, that should really strike you.David RobertsSo just to put a fine point on that, regulated entities could get all the way through 2030 using nothing but already banked allowances, not making any further reductions at all. Is that fair?Danny CullenwardThat's a possible outcome. I don't want to say that's the most likely outcome. It depends on sort of your view about both the number of players in the game. We know the number of chairs and the regulations if we're thinking about this as the musical chairs game, and that is possible. And so my colleague Dallas Burtraw, who's the chair of the advisory committee, was quoted several times in the press saying, "That's a possibility." It's wickedly complicated to try and model it all, but basically, we're talking about a surplus of 321 million when you're looking at creating kind of a deficit of 236 million.So it's the wrong direction for sure.David RobertsAnd even if they only do half the emission reductions needed, that's still super bad. I mean, ideally, you'd have few to none excess allowances floating around in your system, right?Danny CullenwardIf you wanted emissions to fall roughly in line with program caps, you wouldn't expect to see very large banks emerge or at least you'd want to have some long-term continuity in the program. I want to flag the cap-and-trade program is only authorized through the end of 2030.David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardWe'll get to this like what's going on in Washington. Washington has authority to do both climate and cap-and-trade way out farther into the distance. And so there's some really interesting issues that come up. You might look at our market and say, "If we're just trying to solve for 2030, we have way too many allowances."David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardYou could also look at our market and say, "Well, if we were trying to solve for also 2045 or 2050, maybe it's appropriate to be in the kinds of conditions we're in." The problem with that statement is that we don't have the legal authority to do that, and we can talk about this, but it proved impossible to get a simple majority vote on just a climate target last year, and you need a two-thirds vote to make the cap-and-trade program also follow.David RobertsYes. And given the sort of harrowing concessions Brown had to make to get that first two-thirds vote, one can only imagine what would be required to get it past 2030.Danny CullenwardYeah, and it's tough because again, if you're a proponent of these systems — and again, I want to support, like using them well and right, that's a good thing. But you're probably also pretty challenged by what's increasingly sounding like double speak about this from the regulators. Because think of it this way, if this conversation gets deferred a couple of years, and we're having a conversation about what a two-thirds vote looks like in 2024 or 2025, that's going to be an even harder conversation. If there's a big bank of allowances and relatively low prices, and you say, "Well, what if we extended the program and massively increased prices?"It's not like that challenge gets easier by putting it off.David RobertsYeah, I mean, this is sort of another aspect of the political economy of these programs, is they need to be able to get more expensive. That needs to at least be an open option. They're not working correctly unless they occasionally get more expensive. But no politician wants to go out and propose a reform explicitly to raise prices on people.Danny CullenwardAnd that is also why when people declare victory on the backs of the idealized perception of these programs, it becomes even harder to advance climate progress. Because now you're not only stuck trying to convince a reformer to make that argument, but you have often the government, and usually major industries saying, "Actually, it's fine the way it is."David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardSo the number of people who are sort of against the climate reform trajectory increases, including political stakeholders who are just trying to think about staying in office or managing competitiveness, it's tough.David RobertsAnd so tell us also ... you found a discrepancy about how the sort of baseline emissions scenario is calculated, that also looks like it's padding the results slightly. Can you explain that real quick?Danny CullenwardYeah, so if you want to model the role of the cap-and-trade program, and I told you that it was expected to require almost half of the work from cap-and-trade in the previous 2017 Scoping Plan, you need to model what you think business as usual emissions are going to be, given all of the other non-cap-and-trade policies. So what's the clean electricity policy, the vehicles policy? When you add that all up before you think about the effect of cap-and-trade, what does that all look like?David RobertsRight. So in other words, what is the remainder that cap-and-trade has to wipe up?Danny CullenwardIf you just pretended we didn't have cap-and-trade, and you had a good model that could give you a crystal ball outlook for the emissions trajectory without cap-and-trade, these Scoping Plans, they say, "cap-and-trade will close the gap." You basically want to model what you've got without cap-and-trade, and whatever else you need to do, that's the role that's implicitly assigned to cap-and-trade. So if you model that, we can have a conversation about how big this needs to be. And so in the six pages, there's some discussion about, well, we've got a new scenario, a new version of that line for emissions, and it's lower, so we're not going to need as much from cap-and-trade.David RobertsSo that's saying we're going to get more out of these conventional industrial policy policies than we thought.Danny CullenwardYes. And to be clear, it's not like there's a bunch of new policies. There's a couple of things that have come online in the last few years, but it's not like they're proposing a bunch of new policies. They're sort of saying, "Since the last time we checked in, we have a few more policies, and the outlook looks pretty good." So that sounds like good news. And if it's true, it is. Vis-à-vis reducing the reliance on cap-and-trade. I want to flag, that does not fix the problem of having a lot of allowances when you want the program to cut emissions.David RobertsBut the less work you're asking it to do ...Danny CullenwardThe more manageable the problem becomes.David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardSo that sounds great. And so I decided, I download the spreadsheets because that's the kind of person I am. And I started looking at the spreadsheets, and I was like, "Something's not right here." And I pulled the inventory data, again, from the climate regulator. They say, "What's the pollution look like in our state from the climate side?" And the scenario that is being offered as evidence for we're doing better, our emissions are going to be lower, and so we're going to rely less on cap-and-trade. Don't worry.That scenario is like 12, 15 all the way up to potentially 27 million tons per year lower than the actual inventory data where we have it. So the story is completely inconsistent with the regulator's own data, and it's worse. I dug into the sector-specific totals because you could imagine that the outlook for transportation is different post-pandemic. I work from home now, I didn't use it. No, the difference is in the building sector, which does not change, and the industrial sector.David RobertsWhich is the one that's hardest to get at and slowest to change and has least policy aimed at it.Danny CullenwardSo all the modeling in this plan is done with a proprietary analysis through consultants. There's not a lot of documentation, and on this scenario in particular, there's really nothing to clue us into what happened. So all I can do is sort of hold up a mirror and say that "the numbers are off." And the delta between the story and the inventory numbers is bigger than the purported improvement in 2030 that should make us comfortable that we don't have to worry about the cap-and-trade program anymore.David RobertsRight. The upshot of which is just that California is proposing to rely on cap-and-trade even more than it says it is, by a big chunk.Danny CullenwardI would summarize it slightly differently. We don't really know what's going on. Nothing has really changed in terms of the policy portfolio, and no one's proposing to make any changes now. The regulator, to their credit, they've said, "Hey, we're willing to have a conversation about the cap-and-trade program, we just like to have it next year." And so there's nothing here, and nobody's affirmatively changing. And it's not like the role is bigger, or something like that. It might be smaller, but we're still not having a conversation about "how do we more than triple our emission reductions, given a plan that relied about half on this program, and evidence that this program is not designed to perform in that way right now."And again, for proponents, if you're somebody who wants to see this program play a bigger role and do a bigger job, you also know you got to think about a two-thirds vote in the legislature to extend it past 2030, which would fundamentally change the way you would answer those questions, right? If you're planning for 2030 versus for 2045 or 2050.David RobertsIn retrospect, just making it ten years at a time was not great, was not smart, which Washington learned from. Before we move on to the other parts of the Scoping Plane, let's briefly talk about Washington, because Volts listeners will know that Washington has recently passed a whole raft of great clean energy and climate policies, a bunch of sector-specific stuff. But alongside that, Washington is proposing to create a cap-and-trade system more or less mirroring California's and to connect it to California's, to become part of California's market, which some folks might remember way back in the day when California was first setting up its market. This was always kind of the thought that it was going to be a big West Coast thing, that there were going to be all these players attached to California's market, but they sort of like dropped off one at a time, leaving California and Quebec now?Danny CullenwardThat's right. Ontario later joined for a brief periodDavid RobertsVery random, but then Ontario bailed too.Danny CullenwardBut they're not there anymore. Yeah.Right. So now it's California and Quebec, but Washington is proposing to join. So from my hometown point of view, the dysfunctions of California's cap-and-trade system very much matter for Washington. So spell that out a little bit. Like, what is the danger that Washington faces here?There's a couple of things. So one thing to say is, again, there are a few sources of climate policy and climate institutional leadership at the subnational level in the United States. And California is one of the really big players in that space. And so even when people set out to do their own things, they often borrow or learn from and adapt various things we've done. So it's always important to think about what we're up to, not because we're the center of the universe, but because a lot of what's happening is either following or learning from things we're doing.David RobertsOne of the reasons that smaller jurisdictions that come along and want to do something good on climate will copy California's work is that California, sort of legendarily, has a robust administrative capacity. One of our favorite subjects here at Volts, and specifically CARB is sort of unique. So maybe just say a quick word about why California ... ? What is it about California's system that enables it to put together these things out of scratch, such that other people sort of come along behind and want to copy it?Danny CullenwardI think that's exactly it. So we have large and reasonably well-sophisticated regulatory bodies in a number of spheres. And in fact, one of our problems is we have so many that coordination can be an important challenge. We'll come back to this actually because part of the flavor here is California — there was a debate when AB 32 was being set up in 2006. "Should we give one agency the quarterbacking role, the lead in all of this, or should we distribute it across agencies?" California went with the sort of quarterbacking model, where the Air Resources Board is primarily in charge of this, although, as we mentioned, a lot of the progress has been made in electricity. And you should be looking at our utilities regulator for that.David RobertsYes, but it is worth saying that CARB is huge and powerful relative to virtually anything you find in almost any other state.Danny CullenwardAlmost anywhere else. Right, exactly. And so there's scientists, there's engineers, there's lawyers, there's a big administrative capacity.David RobertsWhich, like, Washington does not have, just doesn't have the size and money to replicate that.Danny CullenwardAnd that's exactly right. And so what's so interesting right now about subnational American politics is I think we're seeing much higher climate ambitions become popular at different times, and so you're seeing sort of higher watermarks for the level of policy goals and integrity. But many of the states, like Washington, where I would describe frankly, your current goals as better than California's, but you all don't have a regulator that has the same capacity. And so it's not just that people are looking for inspiration. Let me contrast this really quickly. California says, "Let's have a zero carbon electricity grid, a renewable portfolio standard with a technology-neutral back end. Let's amp that stuff up on steroids."Many states have utility regulators that are capable and sophisticated enough to emulate those policies if they want so that policy can diffuse without worrying too much about institutional capacity.David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardNot so with a cap-and-trade program, which is phenomenally complex. And I mean no disrespect to the regulators in Washington state, but there's just far fewer per capita in total. So the significance of this is that you literally need essentially hegemonic, regulatory actors to govern these systems. And this is the opposite — you and I've talked a little bit about the East Coast states and their cap-and-trade program called RGGi, where they're fairly egalitarian, and everybody sort of cooperates on an equal basis. This is really a centralized infrastructure that California is the biggest market by far.The size of your emissions footprint is less than a 6th of our market. So you are a smaller player in economic terms. And that means both the capacity difference between the two states and the relative economic importance of our decisions and situation have enormous influence over whatever you all decide you want to do.David RobertsRight. Washington doesn't have the administrative capacity to cook up a system like this from scratch. But does it have the administrative capacity even to manage a mirror of California's?Danny CullenwardI don't want to comment directly on that because I don't think there's any reason to doubt it. And I also personally couldn't run one of these by myself, so I don't want to sort of stick myself in their shoes. Look, copying the DNA of the structure of the market should be feasible. The system is called the Western Climate Initiative, and there's actually a private corporation called WCI Inc that runs a lot of the things, like the auction platform, the various mechanics and pieces of this. Those are services that can be contracted for reasonable costs.So I think there's a case to be made that a lot of this can be done. The question is, do people want to design around a common program? Do they want to design around similar programs that are managed separately? And there's a lot of politics that go into that. I don't think that administrative capacity is necessarily the biggest problem. I would not say it would be fair to say out of whole cloth, with no example to learn from, could the relatively small Washington Department of Ecology stand up a program completely on their own? In a vacuum, that would be a much bigger lift. But the question of what might they design, given the example, experience, text and operating experience of all of the different players, including California, that have worked with these systems, I think is very different.David RobertsRight. So then let's get back to the substance, which is if California's program is flooded, is oversupplied with allowances such that it has this incredible slack in it, what is the danger for Washington if it hooks up with that program?Danny CullenwardSo the danger is that there are potentially too many allowances here, such that — if Washington were to design a strict standalone cap-and-trade program, it would be a more robust program. It would almost certainly have higher prices. And so if you're a regulated industry in Washington, you're probably pretty pro-market link because that means you can hook into our market and try and buy some of those surplus allowances which will tend to raise our prices, but will tend to depress the prices up in Washington, so it'd have the political benefit of reducing prices. It would have the environmental consequence of potentially our excess allowances, rendering your program unable to meet your own goals, depending on how carefully those issues are balanced.And that's why this link issue, which I want to be very careful not to prejudge, it's so complicated because the design questions all interact with the decision around, "do you link to California, and does California either reform or extend its program or not?"David RobertsRight. And is the size of Washington's market enough to materially impact that level of oversupply, or are we kind of a drop in the bucket there?Danny CullenwardIt's a great question. I've seen some initial efforts to start to model the program, but I haven't seen anybody directly grapple with that question. So given several hundred million surplus allowances and statewide emissions on the neighborhood of 60 million tons per year up there, what kinds of deltas and credit flows would lead to consistent outcomes or inconsistent outcomes? I get the sense people are studying that privately, but I haven't seen a lot of good public-facing analysis on that.David RobertsRight. So the danger here is just Washington replicates California's system, and then thereby inadvertently replicates California's inability to hit its target because of the weak cap-and-trade system.Danny CullenwardYes. So that's the climate nightmare. And then the super cynical, scary version of this is, "Isn't this better than nothing?" And I think the answer to that question is still, "Yes." So where in that spectrum of better than nothing and actually on track with what we're all trying to do, can we land this thing?David RobertsThat's where the whole climate space lives, isn't it? That delta between what we ought to do and what we can do.Danny CullenwardYeah.David RobertsWhat's better than nothing versus what's needed?Danny CullenwardAnd I think what's so complicated about this is, like, we've probably lost two-thirds of your listeners just talking about cap-and-trade. And here you actually have to get this far. We're almost to the point you're going to have a conversation about what your opinion should be about this.David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardAnd that's really different than, like, I would like 100% clean electricity or zero-emission vehicles. Where putting aside the fact we've had a lot of problems trying to actually do that well and robustly and in a big tent fashion, it's a lot easier to tell a regular person who's motivated to fix climate what direction they should be pushing in here.David RobertsRight. Or just more EVs?Danny CullenwardLike EV good, clean energy, good.David RobertsYeah, exactly. These sectoral policies are very sellable or explicable in a way that cap-and-trade is not.Danny CullenwardYeah, and again, I think if we were orienting this conversation around, trying to have a more honest conversation about what are the options and the consequences, it might be easier to do some of that. And part of what we're dealing with right now is just the complete inability to just speak plainly about what's going on, which only makes it harder to have the sort of pro-climate conversation.David RobertsRight. So now that we've lost two-thirds of listeners, let's leave behind cap-and-trade momentarily and talk about the rest of this Scoping Plan. Returning to the Scoping Plan, so there's 200 pages of it. Six of those pages deal with the looming 2030 deadline, for which the state is not on track. So then there's all the rest of it. So a lot of the rest of the Scoping Plan turns to this aspirational 2045 target of carbon neutrality. And it proposes to get to carbon neutrality not exclusively, but a big chunk of getting to carbon neutrality in 2045 it proposes to do via carbon dioxide removal, CDR.So tell us a little bit about the scale of CDR that is being sort of proposed here in this Scoping Plan.Danny CullenwardSo carbon dioxide removal is a very scary monster that is coming to take your children away, and you should — I'm joking because it's this ... I've been working on carbon dioxide removal pretty hard for the last couple of years and people say, "why are you wasting your time on that? We need to cut emissions and deploy solar and wind and efficiency and storage and EVs and build the national grid." Those things are all true. But one of the reasons I focus on it is because it's like this perfect prism for refracting all of climate politics into its factional squabbles.And I want to again say two things that are almost the polar opposite of one another and both true. There's almost nothing that exists today that's real, that's permanent, that's delivering carbon storage that is even remotely comparable to the atmospheric and oceanic consequences of burning fossil fuels.David RobertsYes.Danny CullenwardAnd we're also going to need way more than, I think, easily a gigaton per year globally by mid-century. We can spend too much time fighting about those numbers. But it needs to get very big very quickly from approximately zero, which applies a very big scaling. And so you can look at any long-term net zero plan and say, "There's none of this, it can't possibly be real to rely on any of these carbon removal technologies," which I think is a huge overreach. And you can also look at these kinds of plans and say, "Wow, you're relying so heavily on an idea."David RobertsYeah, theoretical future technology.Why are you not making equally heroic assumptions about cutting emissions and doing other things right?Or about the falling prices of solar or the falling prices of batteries? Like, if you want to get your heroic assumptions in there, why not make heroic assumptions about the stuff that's actually reducing emissions?Danny CullenwardSo if I told you that somebody and a big important player had put out a plan that relies, pretty substantially, for almost a quarter of its net zero goal, on a sort of speculative set of technologies with no detail on what they are, how to deploy them, and was taking no near=term action and deferring this conversation on the basis of some incomplete modeling, you'd say, "that sounds like an oil company." And it also sounds like, I want to be really clear, I want this to be better, but it's also a perfectly fair description of the draft Scoping Plan. So we have here, these are numbers that I think are meaningless to people who aren't in net zero land, but we've got some pretty massive reliance on carbon removal, maybe up to 100 million tons per year assumed by 2045.That equates to something on the order of a 75%/25% split. We're about 75% reductions in emissions and about 25% carbon removal to get us to net zero. Just to compare this, when people talk about net zero, the state of New York has codified a 2050 climate goal that says at least 85% reduction, so higher than our 75%.David RobertsIs it also proposing to mop-up the remainder with CDR? Like, is there a little bit of CDR mop up in all these state ambitions?Danny CullenwardYeah. And this is part of I mean, again, if you think about this from a physical climate science perspective, we don't know how to get everything to zero.David RobertsYeah, right.Danny CullenwardAnd even just N2O emissions from the agricultural sector, that alone is reason enough to think about carbon removal. So yes, there's always going to be some, and we need to rip that band-aid off and stop being scared of it. We also need to be able to say that and say when is way too much.David RobertsRight? You want a goldilocks amount of CDR in your long-term plan? Not none, but not too much. So New York has very little, it's going 85% reductions at least in 15% remainder by 2050.Danny CullenwardThe California legislation that tried to codify our 2045 net-zero goal would have said at least 90%, 9-0. And your state, Washington, has a codification of at least 95%. So compare that to the approximately 75%, 76% that's in the preferred scenario. And that should give you some sense. Like this is not aiming for the moon. In fact, this is airing pretty heavily on not cleaning up the mess first.David RobertsRight. So ironically, Washington and New York have more ambitious emission reduction goals, long term-emission reduction goals than California. California's is commensurately lower emission reductions and commensurately much higher reliance on CDR.Danny CullenwardAt least in this draft plan. Yes.David RobertsI guess I just want to know why. Because if Washington's setting this goal and New York setting this goal and all these states are coming along setting these goals, I mean, they feel confident that the technology will be there for those things, or at least see a pathway to those technologies. Why is California ending up the most cautious in its long-term plan? Just like, what explains that?Danny CullenwardSo I don't want to over-index on the outcome because I think, first of all, it's hard. And I think anybody who's closer to putting pen to paper, and where the rubber meets the road, is going to run into challenges that these bills, which are just sort of codifying targets, haven't had to fully address. So I want to, on the one hand, defend the challenge here, and on the other hand, the reason that the number comes out so much different in California is that the California regulator literally did not include a scenario that resembles any of those others. So they didn't even look at, like, "Well, what if we tried to get to where Washington wants to go or New York wants to go?" And they could say, "Oh, we looked at it, and here's why it's not so good."And we could have a conversation there. But just sort of like reforming the cap-and-trade program, they didn't talk about about it.David RobertsSo there's no sort of numerical or analytical explanation for why they didn't do this. There's no modeling of an alternative scenario where there are higher emission reductions.Danny CullenwardThere are four scenarios that are studied, alternatives one through four. The first two alternatives look at a 2035 net zero target, which is we can get into this if you want, but is so aggressive. It's, I think, not a realistic conversation. And I worry.David RobertsThat's a little weird. That they like why they do that.Danny CullenwardWell, I worry that this is kind of the cynical versions of your Goldilocks story because they picked a scenario that's right in the middle, by choosing a couple of scenarios that realistically nobody was going to implement.David RobertsYou choose your ends and you can determine what your middle looks like, right.Danny CullenwardAnd Alternative 4, the one, they didn't pick, they picked Alternative 3 in the draft. Alternative 4 has even more carbon dioxide removal and even fewer emission reductions at the end. So they didn't study a 2045 target that resembles the New York, the Washington, or even the proposed legislative California version. So they just literally didn't look. And that's an area where, again, I should mention that the posture of this document this is drafted by staff after a series of public engagement opportunities. It will go before the board of the Air Resources Board, which is the politically appointed decision makers who oversee the staff.And it's one of the things the board could say is "Hey, why don't you include a new alternative or modify one of your alternatives, so that it looks like one of the other climate leaders that's out there?"David RobertsSo California has released a Scoping Plan that says very little about the 2030 target, despite the fact that there are extremely well-documented concerns, about whether that 2030 target is in reach or whether current policy can get there. Says virtually nothing about that. Then says about the 2045 target kind of this other magic asterisk, like, we'll get 75% of the way there, and then CDR will do the rest. When we talked earlier, you sort of made this point that, in a sense, CDR is playing the same role for the 2045 target that the cap-and-trade program is playing for the 2030 target, i.e. it's just sort of like hand waving away the remainder without a very close look at how it's supposed to happen.So it seems like this is not a solid basis upon which California can launch its extremely ambitious coming years, crucial coming years. It seems like this needs revising. It seems like what you'd want is a beefed-up consideration of 2030, and at least an effort to model greater emission reductions, through 2045, rather than so much CDR. So let's just talk a little bit then about the sort of mechanics here. This is a draft Scoping Plan. There's going to be a public review comment process, and then what happens?In other words, if Californians of goodwill want this to be revised and improved, what should they do, and what is the hope, and who has the power to cause it to be revised? How would it all work?Danny CullenwardI think I'm supposed to say vote in November. Isn't that the standard answer to all?David RobertsGet out and vote!Danny CullenwardGet out and vote.David RobertsOh my God.Danny CullenwardWell, I mean, if you're concerned about these issues, there is a public comment period open. You can quickly Google the California Air Resources Board 2022 Scoping Plan. You should find information about that pretty quickly. But the process here is that for the next several weeks into sometime in mid, late June, the comment period will be open. And then at that point the board will hear the program, they'll hear from the staff about what's in the proposal, they'll start to review feedback, and a number of things could happen. So the staff have indicated that they want to see a vote on this program by the end of the year, to clear this up and move on to the next priorities.In theory, the board could say, "Hey, we've heard some concerns here. We think some of these concerns are well founded. We'd like you to go back," and, for example, include a scenario that talks about deeper emission reductions by 2045, or include more than six pages on 2030. Or align your planning, say, of the electricity sector to some really great work that's ongoing joint between CARB and the Public Utilities Commissioner and the Energy Commission, where they're trying to grapple, I think, in much more technical detail, with how to actually develop a clean grid that builds out the energy needs we need as we electrify everything.So maybe instead of assuming we should expand our gas capacity, which is what the draft plan proposes, maybe we should think about the more careful modeling to figure out what likely gas prices are going to be in a world that has a war with Ukraine. And does it make sense to build that out right now or not? So the board could provide direction to the staff to revisit.David RobertsSo the board has the power to say to CARB staff, "Go take another whack at this with these specific things in mind." It has the authority to do that.Danny CullenwardYes, they have the authority to do that, that's for sure. And the plan doesn't become final until the board votes on it. And so I think the board's reaction to what happens in the next several weeks, month or two, is going to be really important as to whether this thing gets kind of rubber stamped or there's a chance to align it.David RobertsAnd if you were God King of the CARB board, are those the two specific things you would tell them? a. tell me something about 2030. Please reassure me about 2030. And then second, model more emission reductions through 2040. Are those the two big things, or are there other things you would instruct them to do?Danny CullenwardI think those are two of the really important things. The third, I might add, is the one I mentioned about let's really plug into the detailed modeling work that's trying to ask what that zero carbon grid should look like, because that may be more robust than what we're doing. That may be a way to help us get to the lower emission scenario. But I think those are two or three concrete actions that, they don't require you to invent a new plan out of whole cloth, but I think they'd be really constructive. I'll be honest, the 2030 question is so hard because we spent five years not talking about it.And that was frankly, one of the lowest moments for me as a professional is realizing when that deal was done, we were going to lose five years because the technical people could see the consequences, and it would take a long time before they manifest, and now the problem has gotten harder, not easier. So I don't know how to solve that.David RobertsAnd if you complain back then, you're supposed to let it play out. And like you said earlier, industry can just come in and say, "No we settled this." Right? Like if you're going in and pushing for reforms during those five years, industry just comes in and says, "no we settled this. We got the cap-and-trade thing in place, we don't need any more of this stuff." So it not only sort of you not only go quiet about cap-and-trade, you end up suppressing discussion of other stuff too.Danny CullenwardAnd this is why it's really important for other people to pay attention because — I'm glad we still have a cap-and-trade program. I'm going to try and upset everybody here, like, it's good we have one, it's better than nothing. We can make it stronger. It can play an important role. I don't think it can ever play the idealized role that some academics think it should and industry proponents cynically use to manipulate to their political advantage. But I also think the sort of emerging Leftist critique that all markets are bad and everything is evil is not particularly helpful on this either.Although I also want to recognize, like when I talk to my friends in the environmental justice community, they are the ones who bear the brunt of people saying, "cap-and-trade solve this problem."David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardAnd that's real.David RobertsBecause those refineries that the local air pollution authorities are now no longer allowed to regulate because of cap-and-trade are located in those communities.Danny CullenwardYeah, when it comes to CO2, they can no longer regulate them. That's right. So we've shifted so much attention away from air quality to climate, which is good for climate and if we could use climate policy to solve both problems it'd be a win for everybody. But the practical reality on the ground is when we say cap-and-trade will do more than it's capable of doing politically, we sacrifice both the climate impacts and the political priorities of disempowered communities, who basically don't get the airtime and nobody's talking about the local pollution permitting.David RobertsCalifornia has a large and robust environmental justice movement. Are they losing their minds in response to the Scoping Plan? Because it really seems like their nightmare for CDR to be given this giant role and for cap-and-trade to be utterly unreformed. It just seems like, are they on the war-path about this?Danny CullenwardSo I want to let the environmental justice community speak for itself on this. But I think talking to them I learned something a long time ago. You might remember the first time we worked together was when you were covering some of my research on how these electricity imports, letting our coal imports out of the cap-and-trade program, sort of shedding liability. It was called resource shuffling. And it was kind of an inside deal to make it easier to meet our targets and potentially lose some outcomes. And I went from being somebody who was fairly welcome on the inside of these policy conversations to being told to take a hike.And I looked around and I realized it was me and the EJ folks. And I stopped for a minute and I listened. And I don't mean that I'm like some woke, White climate guy who gets all this, but I mean, I actually listened to what are they saying. And it has been striking for all of the criticism that EJ groups get about being technically unsophisticated about issues X, Y, or Z. There's no question if you compare a community group against the world's leading chemical engineer, that the chemical engineer will have more particular things to say about carbon removal.But time and time again, they're noticing process flaws that are designed to shunt the conversation to particular political outcomes. And they were the first people in the early part of the Scoping Plan process to say, "We can't get anybody to disclose the modeling assumptions. We don't have the capacity to review them or the time. They've given us three weeks to respond to basically the draft technical analysis, and we can't discourage the assumptions."David RobertsWell, if there's any community in the US that has good reason to be alert to procedural shenanigans, retrofitted to achieve particular political ends, it's them.Danny CullenwardBut I think we've ignored that in this broader conversation. And I'm doing my part to listen, including when they say things that are totally counterintuitive because sometimes it turns out they figured it all out. And I'm just really struck by that. I mean, I worked — very recently, there was a story that came out yesterday on the role of dairy digesters and the low-carbon fuel standard that Jessica Foo wrote for Grist. And it was this phenomenally complex piece of reporting. She brought me all these moving parts, and I read u,p and I was trying to follow her at every twist and turn.And it turns out, the EJ groups had fully documented it in comment letters weeks before I had come to it. And the number of times that happens, and it's not, like, visible in the elite, technocratic circles, is really striking. And I think, I think that's something to reflect on, and also to let the EJ groups speak for themselves. They have an advisory committee that has public positions they're developing on this, and we should take a listen.David RobertsYeah, it'll be interesting when they come out with something. I can only imagine. So what do we know about the, in terms of what you can say maybe publicly, but what do we know about the CARB board and its political sort of orientation? Is there appetite for reform of the kinds you're talking about on the board?Danny CullenwardI'm hopeful. You know, that's ultimately a question for for the board members to decide for themselves. But but I think what's been kind of interesting is that you know that the previous chair of the Air Resources Board, Mary Nichols, is is a singular figure in climate policy history. And I think it's fair to say, during her second tour of duty as board chair under Governor Schwarzenegger and Brown, she had a fairly clear sense of what she wanted to do. And the agency moved ... there was a very clear sense of cohesion around that. And in some respects, the staff are many of the same individuals from that era.But there's a different board, there's a different board chair, and a number of the newer board members have a strong either progressive climate or environmental justice orientation. So they need to decide what it is they want to do and why. And it's not for me to speak for them, but I do think there are different board members now than there were five or ten years ago, and that tension is there.David RobertsIf there were a time to sort of try to insert into the process and change the course CARB is on, the sort of Nichols path-dependent course it's on, it would be now, right? I mean, this would be the time to do it.Danny CullenwardI don't want to make it into it like a personality issue. I think the main point I was trying to suggest is that for an outside observer to talk about CARB as a fairly singular entity. That was a sensible description of seven years ago. And I do think that there are important voices that are emerging on the board that may be different sometimes than what staff want and potentially more aligned with other stakeholder groups on the outside. I think that's a good thing as it relates to the possibility to improve the outcome here and not simply set up ...My big worry is we'll have a non-binding plan for net zero, that will sort of socialize a very heavy reliance on carbon removal, that will socialize not cutting as many emission reductions as we want, and declares, sort of in passing, that 2030 is solved. And now, does it matter if there's a non-binding plan to that effect? You could say, "Oh, it's just a non=binding plan." Well, what happens when somebody brings that to the utility regulator and says, "Why are you guys pushing this hard? Here's this plan to do even more than you're doing? Says we're fine."And I just worry that people underestimate the impact for those sorts of things, and I worry it will underestimate our credibility for doing real actions. And I just want to highlight maybe a couple of things that are going on in the state since we've been really critical.David RobertsBut let me just jump in here. Yes, this is my final wrap-up question, and you've touched on it in a number of ways running up to now, but sort of as you said at the very beginning, as we both said, California is kind of the 800-pound gorilla in the state climate game. And anyone who's paying attention to national politics knows that, once again, here we are saying, "Oh, we're going to go to the States. The federal government is going to be lost to us. There's going to be no progress at the federal level. We're going to have to do this at the States."Just real deja vu of this conversation. So if that's true, California is the big state actor, the one with sort of historically the most ambitions, with the most administrative capacity to make plans and form policies. So just talk a little bit about the implications here of California's success or failure on this larger kind of go-back-to-the-states strategy.Danny CullenwardSo obviously we need to push at all levels. So I don't want to say, "Oh, the states are going to take care of it," because it's not enough, and nothing's ever enough. But we've got the best of times and the worst of times. I think you can point to some things that are really not working, and I do that a lot because when they get copied, it screws up other things as well. We're also doing a bunch of things that are working, and I think it's important to think about those. I think the potential to go deep on individual sector policies. CARB continues to be, that the Air Resources Board continues to be one of the most important vehicle regulators in the world, and we need to be really thoughtful about that as an important focus.David RobertsEnormously influential, right? I mean, whatever, a dozen states follow along?Danny CullenwardMore than that, I think, yeah, it's the only state that can set stricter emission standards for mobile sources than the federal government. And, of course, the Right-wing legal machine will attack that, and we will have to defend that. But that continues to be an important area. We really did launch the first large-scale, 100% clean electricity policy, our SB 100 bill, that many states have now copied, and that's been profoundly beneficial. And we have many sector-specific policies, whether it's trying to organize offshore wind, trying to think about the buildout of clean electricity and accelerate the pace of grid deployment and clean energy deployment.There's a lot of efforts to push that further in the legislature and in the administrative branches. And we have right now a massive budget surplus, a good chunk of which the governor is very intentionally directing, and explicitly directing around climate priorities, many of which are great. So you can see everything when you look at us. And the thing that worries me is we have sold the story that we figured it all out, rather than we're one of the places that is doing the most to figure it out. And we will have some wins and some losses, and people who copy us uncritically will miss that.NGOs, who promote simplistic tales of what we've done, will sell the wrong story to other people and will also miss the opportunities to move forward in this state. So I'm actually pretty hopeful that there's a lot of great things going on. But as always, fixing the cap-and-trade program is one of the hardest ones, and I still continue to try and do it.David RobertsYeah. And the flip side of cap-and-trade maybe being weaker or more flawed, than is understood outside the state, or even understood within the state. The flip side of that is just the extraordinary success and power of these sectoral policies. And this is sort of conventional wisdom, maybe more so a couple of decades ago, but the sort of conventional wisdom in US policy circles is that, "oh, we're trying to move away from command and control," overly intrusive this and that to market-based policies that are less smaller government hand. All this very conventional wisdom. I just feel like it's so important for people who are following the actual unfolding of policy and the unfolding of emission reductions in the US to just say aloud, again and again, it is these old-fashioned sectoral policies that are the workhorses, that are working, that have proven track records at this point.Danny CullenwardYeah. I mean, if you're an industry that's, that's trying to get started, like, we, many of us want to start the offshore wind industry in California, that's a very good thing. You need typically legislation, you need regulatory coordination. You see that the interest in geothermal development and lithium mining down in the Salton Sea area. It's not a surprise that you see new industries that are trying to create themselves, and create the infrastructure around themselves, working directly with the government to figure that out. And of course it's going to take a lot of private capital and a private sector interest to do that.But it is not a surprise that there's a coordinating role for the government in that work.David RobertsRight. And there's more to it than just turning up the carbon price dial and hoping for the best.Danny CullenwardYeah. And again, I'm not here to say don't do any of that stuff. It's better to have one than to not have one. And the key thing is to realize that it's really hard to turn that dial, and there's reasons not to, especially around affordability, rely on it too much. So tell me where you want that price to be and design a program to get you there. It could be a tax, it could be a cap-and-trade program that's well designed to get you to a particular set of outcomes, and then rely on it for that boost, for the revenue it brings in, for the little kick it gives to all the sectors it covers.If you rely on it to be this magical thing that will deliver at low cost whatever you need, no matter when you need it, you won't get it. Just like if you assume carbon removal will mop up all of your problems, it will fail.David RobertsRight.Danny CullenwardYou need to build it to be the thing that you want it to be and not rely on it as a crutch. So, again, I'm not here to say, "get rid of it, or Washington shouldn't have a cap-and-trade program." What I'm saying is Washington is proposing to adopt California's forest offset protocols into its cap-and-trade program. So all of the widely documented problems in our protocols are planning to be replicated. Why?David RobertsRight. So just a more discerning eye in terms of picking apart what's working and what's not working. Okay, well, this is super educational.Danny CullenwardEat your veggies.David RobertsYeah. Eat your veggies. And I think it's helpful, I think, to get it out there, because things tend to descend into sloganeering. So I think it's good to get it out there that California is both kicking ass and falling short, like, both doing a lot and really not prepared to accomplish all it says it want to accomplish. We can hold both those thoughts in our heads.Danny CullenwardYes. And let's not forget, it's really hard to do any of this, and you need experts to do it. And we got to remember, some institutions are really good at some things, and some things are challenging to some institutions, and we can't lose sight of that administrative capacity issue.David RobertsYes.Danny CullenwardIt's at the heart of all of this. You can't just say, "oh, industrial policy, but I don't actually have a public sector," that doesn't work. Right. You can't say, "cap-and-trade, and I have a monstrous team that's ready to — oh, I don't have a monstrous team. I have a very small team that's going to need to be a taker on a lot of the details." Those are very different strategic considerations.David RobertsRight. Alright, well, thank you so much for this. This is really clarifying, and maybe we'll do it again in five years when the 2027 Scoping Plan comes out.Danny CullenwardAnd we talk about — yeah, yeah. That'd be fun. Thanks for having me back on. I really appreciate it.David RobertsAwesome. Thanks, Danny.Danny CullenwardCheers.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, Abigail Hopper of the Solar Energy Industries Association discusses the trade complaint that has cast a pall over the US solar industry, why she believes it should be dismissed, and the complexities of tariff policy.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsBack in 2012, the Obama administration levied tariffs on solar panels from China, to punish the country for unfairly subsidizing its panels in an attempt to corner the market. In the ensuing years, US imports from China fell off sharply and imports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam rose just as quickly.Early this year, a tiny California-based solar manufacturer, Auxin, filed a trade complaint with the US Department of Commerce, alleging that China is effectively laundering its solar supply chain through third-party countries, thereby illegally circumventing tariffs. It asked Commerce to apply commensurate tariffs on imports from those countries. (Canary Media has extremely thorough coverage of the case, if you want to catch up.)Commerce is investigating. Meanwhile, the industry has been thrown for a loop — imports have fallen off, projects are being cancelled, and projections of growth are being revised radically downward. The tariffs could be anywhere from 30 to 250 percent, which would radically change the economics of big solar projects, and if applied, will be retrospective over the past two years, which means even existing contracts are in jeopardy. The uncertainty has cast a pall over the entire sector.The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has been advocating against tariffs from the beginning and is calling on Commerce to dismiss the complaint. I contacted Abigail Hopper, the head of SEIA, to talk about the merits of the case, whether building a domestic solar supply chain is a good goal, whether tariffs work, and what other policies might be preferable. With no further ado, Abigail Hopper of SEIA. I'm not going to say the whole thing. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Abigail HopperThanks for having me. I'm glad to be here.David RobertsSo this is a knotty and complicated issue we're going to get in here.Abigail HopperIs that the K-N-O-T-T-Y naughty?David RobertsYes, exactly.Abigail HopperOkay, just checking.David RobertsAlso, perhaps naughty, we'll see at the end. So I want to kind of go through it piece by piece, before we get to the tariff dispute, the tariff case that's at issue here, let's go back a little bit and just talk about the tariffs. These date back to Obama, the Obama era. So why don't maybe you just tell us sort of what tariffs are in place, and what is the rationale for tariffs, like when Obama put these in place in 2012? What is the sort of stated rationale? What are they meant to accomplish?Abigail HopperSure. And you already have displayed more knowledge than the average person around the multiple layers of tariffs that the solar industry is dealing with. So, yes, these go back to 2012. And at that time, there was an allegation and then a finding, that China was dumping its product into United States. That meant that the Chinese government was unfairly subsidizing production of solar cells and solar modules and then selling them into the United States below cost. So if it cost $10 to make it, they would sell it in for $5, and the Chinese government would suck up the other $5.David RobertsAnd presumably this is not just, like, unfair or unsporting. This violates some law or treaty.Abigail HopperYes, it violates the trade laws, and therefore the tariffs were put in place to address that unfair practice.David RobertsAnd then there were more under Trump. What did he add?Abigail HopperSo the ones we just talked about, people refer to usually as the ADCBD, Anti-Dumping Countervailing Duties cases, and those are from 2012, and those apply to products coming out of China. In 2017, a case was initiated, and then in 2018, President Trump imposed tariffs. And those are the Section 201. That's the section of the statute it applies to. And those were placed on cells and modules coming from any country in the world. There were a couple of specific exceptions, but generally, any country in the world, these tariffs applied and they started at 30% and stepped down.There's a whole drama around the bifacial modules and that exclusion, I'm happy to talk about. But those were additive to whatever ADCBD tariffs that were already in place.David RobertsSo specifically, then, imports from China would face both of these tariffs added together.Abigail HopperCorrect.David RobertsI mean, the rationale for the first set makes sense. If China is doing something illegal under trade law, that makes sense. But what is the rationale for just slapping tariffs on all imports? That can't be that all importers are breaking trade laws. What's the rationale there?Abigail HopperYeah, it's a totally different theory of the case. It is not a claim based on fault or anyone being nefarious or violating laws. Rather, the finding is, the allegation and the finding is that the US domestic market has been harmed by competition, and they basically need a pause. They need a pause. They need a break. "Give me a second. I got to get it together." And so the best way that one of my trade lawyers explained it to me, as I was not well versed in trade law when I started this gig.David RobertsLittle did you know you were going to get a PhD.Abigail HopperLittle did I know, right. He explained it as basically putting an umbrella over the United States.David RobertsRight.Abigail HopperSo there's this protection, right. And the goal of those Section 201 tariffs is to provide an opportunity for the US solar domestic manufacturing base to recover and to build back.David RobertsSure. But what I don't get is that seems like the mirror image of Chinese subsidies. In other words, that seems like giving the US domestic market an unfair advantage. It seems like that would also be illegal under trade law for the same reasons.Abigail HopperSo it's not illegal under US trade laws, right. It's certainly, I think a lot of people think smacks of protectionism of US industry. There were complaints taken to the World Trade Organization, right, to allege, that the imposition of the Section 201 tariffs violates World Trade Organization rules, or I don't know what they're called there, actually. Whatever, they're not allowed.David RobertsIt literally is just a subsidy to US manufacturers, just like China is subsidizing its own manufacturers.Abigail HopperI think that's a very fair argument to make. I think what we saw, which I think is important, is it didn't actually have the same impact, though, right? Like, there were definitely a couple of facilities that were built in the United States after the 201 tariffs were announced, but it certainly wasn't enough to supply the US market, right. It did not create a robust domestic manufacturing base. And so round two of the Section 201 tariffs just took place in 2021. And in early 2022, President Biden extended the Section 201 tariffs.David RobertsYeah. And I don't think I'm alone here, don't get that. It seems like I mean, you know, we can talk later about the question of a domestic supply chain. I want to get into that. But it seems like a crude and not particularly effective tool. And I had thought that sort of the conventional wisdom was that this is a sort of slightly crazy thing Trump did. So what on earth, what reason did the Biden administration give for continuing these tariffs?Abigail HopperSo the Biden administration gave a couple of reasons. One was that the US manufacturing industry had not recovered sufficiently, and they said, partly, that was due to COVID, right. That as the entire economy kind of was jolted for a year, year and a half, that they too were. And so they sort of lost out on this time of protection.David RobertsRight. So they need a break. They just need a little longer break. They're not quite refreshed and ready yet.Abigail HopperExactly. I mean, I know that feeling.David RobertsYes, I know. I'm very relatable.Abigail HopperI just don't usually get government assistance with it. They did do two important things, though, in the February 2022 decision. One was to exclude from Section 201 bifacial modules that were being imported. That was a significant development.David RobertsTell us what bifacial panels are and why that's significant.Abigail HopperSo bifacial panels are solar panels used primarily, almost exclusively, in the utility scale sector that have the ability to reflect light and create energy from both sides of the panel. So there's material on the back of the panel that allows it to create more energy, and therefore be more efficient and produce more electrons, obviously changing the economics of energy production.David RobertsAnd that's the bulk. I mean, that's utility scale. So that's like the bulk sort of by number, by weight, but that's the bulk of imports. So then what's the rationale there for slapping a tariff on everything except the main import? Like, I'm losing track of what substantive goal is served here.Abigail HopperWell, so the bifacial exclusion was originally requested shortly after the imposition of the 2018 201 tariffs. And at that time, bifacial modules did not represent a large portion of the US market, the import markets. It really was a newer technology that was more in the R&D phase. And so if you think about kind of the theory of the case, the theory of the case is to allow the domestic market the opportunity to really recover and continue to develop. No one in the US was producing bifacial modules. And so allowing bifacial exclusion made sense because it wasn't competing with the US marketplace.And that's still primarily the case. There really aren't manufacturers of bifacial modules, certainly not at scale in the United States.David RobertsSo the original tariffs, the Obama tariffs, the rationale there is that, "China is breaking trade laws." The rationale for Trump's tariffs is, "we want to make room for the domestic manufacturing, domestic solar manufacturing industry to grow a little and get more robust." So before we get into the rest of it, I guess the question here, I have sort of a twofold question. One is, is it the case that once these tariffs were put in place, domestic solar manufacturing grew and flourished as intended? The larger question there is the reason, I think everybody at this point sort of gets this, the reason there's a huge solar manufacturing sector in China is not just because the government subsidizes it, although it does, but it's got cheap materials, and it's got cheap labor. It just has advantages, all the same advantages that got manufacturing offshore in the first place. Is a tariff, of the size being discussed here, enough to close that gap between the sort of costs of manufacturing abroad and the costs of manufacturing in the US?Abigail HopperNo.David RobertsIt's not big enough to close the gap.Abigail HopperNo. The simple answer is that the tariffs alone did not incent the kind of investment that the proponents of those tariffs articulated it would, right. There were certainly a couple of companies that made the decision to invest in the United States, and that's great, but it did not bring the scale of investment that would support our entire marketplace. And so I'm excited about the conversation about what would it take to develop at that scale. But tariffs, I agree with you wholeheartedly that they are a crude and inefficient tool to create domestic manufacturing in the United States.David RobertsAlright, well, we're going to return to that later, but sort of sticking with the tariffs. So the Obama tariffs are in place. The Trump tariffs are in place. Biden extends the Trump tariffs, and then we get this case. This US solar manufacturer, Auxin, files a complaint, basically saying, as I understand it, that China is circumventing these tariffs. It's basically just exporting its materials to nearby countries and then manufacturing the stuff there. And we're importing from those countries. But in all but name, we're still importing from China. Basically, China is using Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam to launder its solar cells and panels, and thereby dodging the tariffs.This is the case Auxin is making. I think there's been a lot of focus on Auxin. And this is, if people care, it's a pretty tiny company, as these things go, does not appear to be particularly robust or growing. There's been a lot of focus on Auxin. But I'd rather just skip all that and talk about the case itself. So I guess where I'd like to start is, just on the merits of the case, is this true? Is China guilty of circumventing tariffs by laundering its materials through these other countries?Abigail HopperNo, it's not, and I can tell you why. So there is a statute, right? There's a statute on point that they have alleged that China has violated. And I think the evidence will show that they have not. And the key piece of that statute says that in order for it to qualify the actions you're described, you described well, to qualify a circumvention, the manufacturing or the processing in the third party country, the third country. So the Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam has to be minor and insignificant. Like, those are terms that are in the statute.David RobertsSo, in other words, those countries would just be taking the material and cranking it out and not really doing, not really adding value?Abigail HopperRight. Like, in my mind, it's sort of like it all gets there, they slap a sticker on the back, and then it's like, boom, now it's from Vietnam and not from China. But that's not what's happening. I do not claim to be a supply chain expert, but I certainly have a lot of them that are consulting for us, as you could imagine. And certainly cell manufacturing, the manufacturing of solar cells is far from minor and insignificant, right. It is a very complex, very technologically advanced process that adds a ton of value to the product. The United States Department of Commerce has determined in four different cases already that the country of origin is where the cell is manufactured.But as they have looked at other cases and considered other claims, they have made that determination, because, "where do you apply the tariff? Oh, you apply it where the cell is manufactured, okay." So the cell is manufactured in these four countries. And so, no, I do not think, and our council certainly doesn't think, that the requirements needed to demonstrate Circumvention have been met in this case.David RobertsBut another way of looking at this, sort of intuitive way of looking at this, is you got these Chinese companies that are receiving all these subsidies from the Chinese government, which is the whole sort of issue here. And then they open subsidiaries in Cambodia, et cetera, and manufacture there. So in a sense, they're not manufacturing in China, but in another sense, they are still subsidized in the way that caused the original tariffs, right? Do you see what I'm saying? Like, the sort of unfair subsidies still seem to apply, even if a Chinese company opens a satellite company in Cambodia, it's still getting the subsidies.Do you know what I mean?Abigail HopperI understand the point that you are making. I don't agree with it wholeheartedly. I think two points. One is that some of the companies that we're talking about that are impacted by this Circumvention Petition are not Chinese-owned companies. They're other companies, like from different countries. And so that's sort of the reality. And then secondly, the petitioners chose to use a specific statute, and they didn't meet the requirements of the statute. If they want to go back and choose a different statute, then we can have a different conversation about whether there is sort of unfair dumping of some sort.But that's not the issue before us today. Like, I get your sort of theoretical point, but we're fighting a battle. And as we have heard a quasijudicial proceeding, we've heard that term so often, and so I'm going to stay focused on the proceeding in front of me.David RobertsRight. The case itself.Abigail HopperYeah.David RobertsSo if there are a bunch of companies involved in these countries that are not Chinese subsidiaries, then the substance of the case is just that they're sort of conduits for Chinese parts and materials?Abigail HopperYeah. That some of the raw materials are coming from China, even if the ultimate manufacturer of the seller of the module is not Chinese-owned.David RobertsRight. So the substance of your side of the case is to say, "it's not true that the manufacturing taking place in these countries is small and trivial. They are adding value, and thus it's not just laundered Chinese stuff." That's the substance here.Abigail HopperCorrect.David RobertsGiven that Commerce, the Commerce Department, which is the one doing these investigations, and I guess you'd call them the quasi-judge and these quasijudicial proceedings, has found this in previous cases, is it your sense that when they get around to ruling on this, they're going to find that again and rule in your favor? Obviously, you probably don't want to handicap this and make guesses and everything, but are you confident enough in the merits of your case that you think you have a pretty good chance of getting a good ruling at the end of all this?Abigail HopperI do. I think that the statute is clear about what the petitioner has to show. The petitioner has actually testified in other proceedings back to those Section 201 cases we talked about. The petitioner has testified under oath that cell manufacturing is a complex and technical and highly value producing process. And so there's not really anyone that's disputing that. So I think we're pretty confident on the merits. Obviously, one of the things we've also been focused is on the timeliness of a decision.David RobertsYeah, we're going to get into that. The situation is that there's this case in front of now, Commerce Department. The schedule is that Commerce is going to issue some sort of preliminary results, or preliminary findings, in August, and then is supposed to issue a decision in January of 2023. Although, as I understand it, they can, if they want to apply for like a 65-day extension, which could push it out into early to mid-2023. So this situation, if they don't accelerate things, like you're asking them to, this situation is going to linger for a while, potentially for a full year.So let's then talk about what are the effects of this case lingering out there. Because one of the key pieces, and I don't know if this is popularly understood, is that if Commerce finds in Auxin's favor, it's not just that tariffs are going to get slapped on imports from these four countries, but that tariffs are going to be retroactively slapped on imports from those four countries for the past two years. Which seems, honestly, to me, crazy like that seems to violate some very core principles of ...Abigail HopperEx post facto?David RobertsOf actual judicial proceedings as opposed to the quasi kind. Like in an actual court, you sort of legendarily cannot retroactively punish someone for something that was not clearly illegal at the time. So anyway, point being, it's not just that future imports from these countries will be slapped with a tariff if this succeeds, but that there's going to be a big retroactive penalty on imports. So what effect is this having on the industry at the moment? And it's just the uncertainty, right? I mean, it's just the uncertainty that's screwing everything up.Abigail HopperYeah, there are so many layers of uncertainty.David RobertsTruer words.Abigail HopperWell, let me clarify one thing. So that you are 1000% right about the retroactivity of these tariffs. There were new regulations that went into place November 1, I believe, November 1 of 2021. And so that's sort of the outside date by which the retroactivity could apply. My understanding is it could apply from the date of initiation, April 1 of 2022. So you can just — that's one uncertainty, right? We know they will be retroactive. How far back the Department of Commerce chooses to go is one unknown. Obviously, what the tariff will be, will be another unknown.David RobertsOh, so that's not a fixed thing?Abigail HopperNo, that's not a fixed thing.David RobertsThere's not some standard tariff here. It's a case-by-case thing.Abigail HopperIt is usually a company-by-company thing. And if a company does not have a tariff rate, then there's a countrywide rate. And that's why you've heard anything from 50% to 250%. That's why when Secretary Raimondo, the Secretary of Commerce, last week testified that if there were tariffs, there might be 10% to 12%. That's why I, in particular, was very outspoken, that that was just wrong. That's not factually accurate. If there are tariffs and a company does not have a countrywide rate, then it will be 250%.David RobertsSo we don't know how retroactive it will be, and the tariff will be somewhere between 30% and 250%, which also seems extremely large dollop of uncertainty there.Abigail HopperVery large dollop, right. I think those are the two biggest uncertainties, right. Then, once manufacturer — so your question to me was, "How is this impacting the market?", right. And we are in mad consensus that the uncertainty is really what is roiling the market, and how that is playing out is that manufacturers are just telling their customers here in the US, "You know what, we're not going to sell you modules. There is way too much risk, way too much uncertainty. We're going to go sell our modules to Europe, or we're going to sell them to Brazil, or we're going to sell them to another country where there's not this crazy policy uncertainty."David RobertsSo spell it out for me. What could happen? Like, if they sell to someone in the US for X price, and then the tariff is imposed retroactively, the customer then has to pay more?Abigail HopperYeah.David RobertsI literally don't understand how that works. If you complete a transaction under the current circumstances, and then the tariff is passed, and it's retroactive, do you then have to sort of reopen all those transactions and redo them?Abigail HopperSo the way that it works is that the importer of record is liable for the payment of the tariff. So Manufacturer A, they may sell their product to a customer for whatever the cost is, but under the terms of their importation agreements, like with the US government, right, their right to import into the US, they're obviously liable for additional duties. And if there were additional tariffs imposed, then the manufacturer will be liable for that additional money. They are going to contract that risk with their customer, right. They're going to say, "Hey, there's a risk here," right. "And so either you, customer, take the risk. It could be 20%, it could be 200%, could be 250%. We're happily bringing you some modules, if you want to take that risk." Obviously, the customer is going to say, "No way, I'm not going to take that risk."David RobertsHow do you even price risk when it's, like, as we're saying, the range of possible outcomes, the uncertainties are so broad, like I wouldn't even know how to put a number on that risk.Abigail HopperWell, I think that's what we're seeing, is that you are not alone in being unable to price that risk. And so the alternative is they're just not shipping here. Every conversation I have had with a customer, a developer, a residential installer, a CNI company, their number one challenge is they cannot get modules. They cannot find modules. It's not a question of "the modules are too expensive," right, because that at least you could make a determination of whether the project can bear additional cost.David RobertsRight.Abigail HopperIt is literally like, "I can't find them."David RobertsYes. Actual prices do help the operation of markets, I've found, like, having a numerical price does ease market transactions.Abigail HopperRight. Did you have to go to special school for that to figure that one out?David RobertsSo then imports have dried up? Projects aren't being built? We're only sort of a few months into this. What's happened so far?Abigail HopperHonestly, I think the entire solar market is a bit in shock at how quickly this has happened, but yes, the answer is yes. Modules are not being imported into the United States. So even if you had a purchase order, it's not necessarily being honored. Domestic module suppliers, obviously, everyone wants to buy from them.David RobertsRight. They must be kind of enjoying this, right? I mean, they must be maxed out.Abigail HopperSo I will tell you what I'm hearing, which is that they are definitely maxed out and, perhaps, some are not honoring contracts, are renegotiating contracts because demand has gone up so much.David RobertsYeah, I'm sure they can get a premium.Abigail HopperAnd a higher price, right?David RobertsActually, I want to take a little factoid timeout.Abigail HopperSure.David RobertsLet's get, just as a marker here, so listeners can get a sense — how robust is the domestic US solar manufacturing industry? In other words, what percentage of the demand for cells and panels and modules in the US could be satisfied by the existing domestic manufacturing sector?Abigail HopperSo it's currently about 25%. So if you think about last year, 2021, we had about seven and a half gigawatts of domestic production in the United States. That includes all technologies. So first, solar technology as well as PV technology that's covered by these tariffs. We installed about 23, 24 gigawatts last year, so roughly 25%. The majority of US production serves the residential market, the distributed market, and so it is not 25% of the utility scale market and 25% of the resi market. I don't actually know off the top of my head what percentage is by market class, but it is a much lower percentage for the utility scale because that's not what is here in the US.David RobertsRight. So if you're cutting off imports from these four countries in question, you're, even best case scenario, if the US domestic solar manufacturing industry is humming along at peak capacity, you're whacking off 75% of your supply, which can only result, I would imagine, in prices from domestic manufacturers going through the roof. Like they could ask, if this keeps going on, they could basically get whatever price they ask, couldn't they?Abigail HopperI mean, they could until the market can't bear it anymore, right? And then those projects won't get built either. I think at some point there'll be a cap. But you are right, it distorts the laws of supply and demand because it's just such extreme pressure on demand. Obviously, there's lots of companies that are looking at supplier module manufacturers outside of those four countries, right, and trying to track back their supply chain.David RobertsHow robust is that? How concentrated is manufacturing in those four countries? Is there a robust manufacturing capacity outside those four countries that are not subject to tariffs?Abigail HopperSo the majority of US imports come from those four countries. There are other places that have manufacturing. Because the US doesn't have kind of — they've not been the majority of our imports. There's not the same kind of quality assurance or kind of bankability or comfort level with performance. And so there's a lot of that kind of work happening right now.David RobertsI bet they're scrambling too. Like solar manufacturers in whatever other country must be excited about this. So projects aren't being built, things are not being imported. Consequently, US coal burning is on the rise for the first time in years. Super exciting. There was an Indiana utility that announced that it's going to keep its coal plants open several years longer than planned because the possible spike in solar prices. It's going to screw up a lot of utility plans, like a lot of utilities are planning big shifts to solar, and this could potentially throw a wrench in all those plans.But let me ask this. The effects we're seeing now, as you're saying, are largely a result of uncertainty, just because no one knows how this is going to go, and there's such a wide array of possible outcomes. So let me ask this. If the case doesn't go your way, if Commerce finds in favor of Auxin, and these tariffs are slapped on imports from these four countries, presumably that would be damaging to the industry, but probably not as damaging as this current fog of uncertainty. So in other words, I'm asking, is the level of damage that's happening right now, that will diminish somewhat just when there's some certainty, right?Abigail HopperIt obviously depends a little bit on what happens. And if Commerce — a 10% tariff versus a 200% tariff, obviously, is a very different outcome.David RobertsRight.Abigail HopperThe situation in Indiana, though, is really compelling for a number of reasons. Because not only, obviously, is it troubling that a carbon emitting facility is going to continue to emit longer than was anticipated. But as you think about other utilities that we're building, they put out IRPs, and they put out a whole plan, and then they did RFPs to find lease cost resources, and those were solar and storage usually combined. Now we're impacting reliability, right? We're clearly talking about carbon, which is critical, we're also talking about reliability, and we're talking about rates to customers. And so the beauty of the growth of solar is that we can impact the market.And the challenging part is that we're going to impact the market. If you take this fuel source out, or make it uneconomic, it's going to have an impact on ratepayers and reliability. And that thread, I think, is something that hasn't gotten quite as much attention, right? People think, "Oh well, half-built solar projects in the middle of the desert, well that's not ideal." No, that's not ideal. But so is like new generation not showing up when it's supposed to, right?Think about what's happening in South Carolina. That nuke is not showing up when it was supposed to. And that's impacting rates, well, that's a whole different reason, and impacting supply. And similarly, if you take solar and storage, if you either take. It off or push it out two, three, four years, what are we going to use? How are we going to keep the lights on? What's the plan? We had the Senior Vice President of SPP at an event two weeks ago, and he and I were having this conversation, right? As they look at their resource planning from the RTO perspective, and they think about their queue, and then they think, "well, 30%, 40%, 70% of what's in the queue might drop out," because it can't show up, because it's not getting built. That's a problem.David RobertsMaybe 20% of it, maybe 80% to 90% of it.Abigail HopperRight.David RobertsAgain, this is not a small uncertainty band that we're dealing with.Abigail HopperIt's not.David RobertsI think when normal people hear about this, there's a number — I don't know if there are any normal people listening to my podcast. I think when normal people hear about this, they're baffled by a number of things, one of which is Biden's allegedly got this whole of government push for clean energy. It's one of his sort of signature things. There's all these things he's doing to advance clean energy, and then there's this one thing that his administration is doing which could sort of almost single handedly just chop the knees out from under the clean energy push.And it just seems like that's bizarre. Why do that? But it's worth noting here that there are legal like — well, let me ask this, because I've been wondering about this — Once Auxin filed the case, was Commerce sort of obliged to take it up, or did they have discretion on that front?Abigail HopperObviously, they felt they didn't have discretion. They felt like once the case was filed, they had to initiate. We have a very different view of that, but it's water under the bridge at this point. We are where we are.David RobertsRight, but you think they could have elected just to what, just ignore it?Abigail HopperNot ignore it, but just find that an investigation wasn't necessary. The regs clearly indicate this, they also have the authority and could have exercised it to initiate a case and then issue a preliminary determination at the same time. They could say, "You know what, we will investigate, and we're going to issue a preliminary negative determination." Like, we don't think, based on this petition, there's anything here. We'll continue to take a look, right, through the rest of the investigative process. But they obviously chose not to do that either.David RobertsYeah, they chose not to do that. And it's, like, the effects of this, the effects of them taking it on and leaving this uncertainty open are very predictable. So, again, I return to being baffled. I guess, who has control over this? Could Biden do anything? Is there anyone who can do anything other than the people at the Commerce Department? And who are they, and what would you like them to do?Abigail HopperYeah, well, first of all, I share the bafflement of the regular people, or normal people, or whatever phrase you used. I don't consider myself either regular or normal, but I certainly am very baffled. In all seriousness, it is without a doubt the most frustrating and maddening thing I've experienced in a long time in my professional career, right. Just this juxtaposition of rhetoric on the one hand and action on the other. And it is enough to sort of put our hands up in agony, but yet we fight on another day. But it is mind-numbing. I can tell you what certainly should happen based on the statute.If you can't tell, I'm a lawyer, so I'm super focused on sort of what the statute allows. Obviously, this decision process is bounded by statute and being governed by people who are very attuned to what the statute allows and doesn't allow. And what the statute provides is that the Secretary of Commerce, so to answer your question, "Who's in charge," the Secretary of Commerce will make a determination about whether this Circumvention Petition is meritorious. And there's five things for her to consider. I talked about one of them, which was whether the processing was minor and insignificant. Even if you were to determine, "Yes, all of these elements have been met and there is circumvention," there's a fifth factor, which is, "Is the imposition of tariffs appropriate?", right? And appropriate is one of those words that lawyers love.David RobertsYeah, exactly. You can sneak a lot through that door.Abigail HopperYeah. I think it's — like Congress wrote this statute, right. And they know what the word appropriate means and sort of the discretion it conveys and it gives the Secretary of Commerce. And so I think, as the Secretary of Commerce is thinking about what is appropriate, reflecting on what the President, as you said, what the President's signature policy platforms are, how critical addressing climate is to all of us as humans. Obviously, the economic impact that this has, there's a number of things that we think she should be considering as she determines the appropriate remedy for any finding if she were to make one.David RobertsSo in theory, she could look at this and say, "Yes, there's some circumvention happening, but slapping a giant tariff on it would screw up this administration's, one of this administration's central goals, so we're just not gonna." She theoretically has the discretion to say that.Abigail HopperYes, she does. The statute allows her to say that. We don't think she'll get to that point because we don't think the first factors are met, but even if she were to get to that point, she still has the discretion to determine it's not appropriate. Your second question about can Biden kind of, I don't know if you use the word overrule, but ...David RobertsWell, can he do anything?Abigail HopperNot really. I mean, I think the President kind of always has ability to overrule his cabinet secretaries, but no one is expecting that he would do that.David RobertsLike legally, he's supposed to allow Commerce to be independent on this, right? I mean, that's the sort of idea.Abigail HopperYeah, that's the idea. That's the idea.David RobertsIt's moments like this when I think back to the Trump administration, and I think, "I wonder if Trump would be restrained in interfering with such decisions by norms and precedent." So what do — you have asked Commerce to basically accelerate this process and basically issue an early decision saying, "we're tossing this out." Commerce, as far as we can tell thus far, is not taking you up on that. So at this point, are we just sort of locked into a process where we get this preliminary decision in August and then a final decision in January? Is that schedule fixed at this point? Or do you think there is still any open possibility that they might push it up or accelerate it?Abigail HopperYeah, so I don't characterize it personally as an early determination, right. I think the statute allows them to take up to 150 days.David RobertsRight.Abigail HopperBut there's nothing that says they can't act sooner. And in fact, as I said, the regulations allow them to issue a preliminary determination on day one. So all we're asking is that they look at the precedent of their own department, right? They look at what they have decided in prior cases and use that information in a timely manner to get to a more rapid decision. So, so far, I'm sure, you know, there's been an opportunity for people to comment on the investigation, there's 30-day period, and now there's been an opportunity for Auxin to respond and rebut those comments.And we've actually asked the Department of Commerce to take those 60 days, 30 days, 15 days, and another two weeks to review everything and act by the end of May. So what is it? It's May 19 today. I'm looking at my computer. So no, it's certainly not fixed in stone. We do not think that we should all just resign and wait until August. We're going to keep up the pressure because as we talked about, it's having such a huge impact on the market, that a decision earlier, rather than later, would be extremely helpful.David RobertsOkay, so let's turn now to the sort of substantive question, or kind of the philosophical question. Does SEIA agree with the basic idea that it would be good for the US to have its own freestanding, more or less, independent domestic supply chain for solar technology?Abigail Hopper100%. Yes.David RobertsBut, I shouldn't get diverted on this, but I wonder about that. Everyone seems to agree on that. And I just wonder why though. I mean, I understand that there's this larger issue of, like, manufacturing got offshored from the US, and our manufacturing sector is hollowed out, and we want to build it back up. But why solar specifically? The world is full of products where the supply chains are concentrated in particular countries, and we just don't worry about it. It's just part of sort of like specialization. It's part of the sort of advantage of capitalism is specialization, and we get the cheaper products out of it.And we don't worry that, when it comes to toasters or whatever, that we're vulnerable because our supplier of toasters, because toaster manufacturing is concentrated, might cut us off from toasters. They could, but they probably won't because they depend on our toaster money. That's what trade is. We're not vulnerable to suppliers. Suppliers are also vulnerable to customers. It's a two-way relationship. So I guess I just wonder, why do we need a domestic solar manufacturing supply chain?Abigail HopperYeah, it's a totally fair question. I think I feel strongly that we need a domestic manufacturing supply chain for the following reasons, and I should not have said 100% quite so quickly. I think you characterize it as — I don't think we need exclusively 100% domestic supply chain. I think we're always going to have a global supply chain. But I do think it makes sense to bring back more domestic manufacturing to the United States. And I think that for a couple of reasons. I think one, certainly the last two plus years, the challenges that COVID has brought with supply chain, the increasing price of transportation, sort of the vagrancies of workforce in other countries as things are happening, we all saw, solar included, how depending on supply from a particular part of the world or a particular country, it's a risk.It is a risk that perhaps we hadn't fully realized or fully experienced before this.David RobertsAnd just tossing this in there too. There's the whole slave labor question.Abigail HopperYeah, that was going to be number two.David RobertsYeah. Sorry to cut you off, but I was like, "Oh, God, I don't want to forget to, I don't want to forget to mention that." I'm doing devil's advocate a little bit, but obviously this is a counter consideration.Abigail HopperBut if you think about it, certainly, obviously slave labor and forced labor has zero place in the solar supply chain. And I think we've done a number of things which I'd be happy to talk about. But if you think even a little bit more generally, the integrity of the supply chain, the carbon intensity of a supply chain, kind of all of these different attributes that customers are caring about more deeply than perhaps they did five years ago or ten years ago, I think that really lends itself to a more transparent and onshored domestic supply chain. So I think there's that.And then I think third, it does go to customers, right? Customers do want Us manufactured product, and if we can invest at scale, like the at scale part is really important, I think we can continue to get the price down, right, even for those customers. Customers say they want US manufactured products until sometimes they see the price, and then they think, "Oh, maybe I don't need it." But scale, scale, scale, scale.David RobertsThis gets to, like, I guess the broadest take on this issue, which is just that it seems like there are two kind of incommensurate impulses we have here. On the one hand, we don't want slave labor. We don't want exploited labor. We don't want people cheating in international trade. We want domestic jobs. We want domestic supply chain and all this. But on the other hand, it's just inarguably true that the US's progress, thus far, on clean energy has depended on inexpensive solar from abroad, where it's manufacture cheaper with cheaper labor. And of course, that's great for solar installers in the solar industry and everything, but it's also great for climate.We want the transition to clean energy. So it just seems like those two are in tension here. And I hear people arguing from both sides, and either side seems to sort of find ways of dismissing or talking around the other side. But it seems like there's just no way around it. Like there's no way to solve that equation. Like, you're either going to have a more robust domestic manufacturing and more US made panels, that are more expensive, or you're going to continue basically taking advantage of cheap manufacturing, and cheap labor abroad, to more rapidly install solar.It just doesn't seem like there's a neat way of resolving that basic tension. Am I wrong?Abigail HopperI think you might be wrong.David RobertsI hope I'm wrong.Abigail HopperI just don't think that, sort of past this prologue, is really applicable here. If you think about how our industry is going, I mean, I really believe it's going to grow exponentially over the next decade and the next two decades. And so things that seemed uneconomic and not scalable in 2015 are going to be very doable in 2022 and 2025, right. So there's just this change in norms. I think one of the things we've really been focused on is trying to figure out what the US does really well in the manufacturing space and harnessing our energy and our time and our resources on those things.And then there are things that other countries do really well. We don't have to recreate every wheel here, but we should figure out what's the most efficient.David RobertsWell, yeah, this is one of the things, even if it turns out US manufacturers are really good at, say, manufacturing panels, the raw materials are almost all coming from China, right? Like, the rare minerals, all the early processing steps.Abigail HopperCurrently they are, but we have a lot of capacity to produce polysilicon here in the United States.David RobertsBut do we want to? Like, a lot of that sort of basic mineral mining and processing business is really gross, and, like, China is doing it for cheap. So even if we develop a robust panel manufacturing industry, which would be great, we'd still, if you choose to look at it this way, would be dependent on China for the raw materials. Unless we also move that over here. But it's just not clear that these sort of low rungs of the manufacturing chain are some great prize. Do we want that in the US?Abigail HopperWell, I think you have either intentionally or unintentionally stumbled upon sort of the bigger question about the clean energy transition, right. And like, yes, we all want solar panels and wind turbines and batteries, but are we ready for the mining and the manufacturing and all the other pieces that go along with it? Same with EVs and all that stuff? I think there's a real question about whether — I am on "camp yes," just for the record. Like, yes, we do want that stuff, and we need to be cognizant of the entire supply chain, but sort of embrace the fact that if we want to have solar panels, we're going to have to use polysilicon, and that means we're going to have to mine for metallurgical grade silicon.Right. Like, these things don't just happen by Fiat, they are actually manufactured and mined.David RobertsRight. Somebody has to do them, and we want them done well, and we want them done equitably, and we don't want them to be done in a way that exploits workers. But it seems like one thing we could do is, since we're a large market, we could just do things like buying standards. Like we'll only buy raw materials from mines and processors that can demonstrate that they pass some basic standards, stuff like that.That would take care of the sort of moral concern, and it still wouldn't require standing up a mining and processing industry in the US.Abigail HopperRight? Yes. We're actually working on a whole standard setting certification at SEIA.David RobertsSo say you do want to, as you do, and I think most people do want to, enhance the US domestic solar manufacturing industry. Why are tariffs — I mean, that's basically, despite what the sort of technical justifications are generally, politically, that's the motivation for tariffs, I think, the reason they get away with them — why are tariffs the wrong tool to do that?Abigail HopperWe have a decade of experience to show that it just doesn't work, right? Like, if it worked, that would be a different conversation. But we have been tariffing product coming into the United States, and it has not resulted in domestic manufacturing. We have not talked, but we certainly could talk about the domestic manufacturing incentives that are in the Reconciliation Bill, right. The pieces that pass out of the House of Representatives.David RobertsThis is where I want to conclude the conversation, then. So if we agree that we want domestic manufacturing, and tariffs don't work, which I think is ... I had thought that was sort of conventional wisdom, kind of common knowledge, but as I've been reading about this, sort of like, I keep seeing tariff defenders popping up out of the woodwork. But if we think tariffs are not the right instrument to make that happen, what is the right instrument? Because I just want to make a quick point here, which is that when we talk about this, I feel like people are a little glib about this, and I think people underestimate the distance between where we are now and a robust domestic solar manufacturing chain is not a small thing.The idea that just like boosting the price of imports alone, it's a little bit like the carbon tax discussion, right? Just making fossil fuels a little more expensive on the margins is not going to have the motive effect of building an industry, right? Like, if you want to build an industry, you got to build an industry. It's a very big thing to do and requires big policy to do it. And people who say they want it, I'm not sure everybody's fully reckoned with the size of the task.Abigail HopperRight. Yeah. I agree with what you just said. I think that if we really want to bring domestic manufacturing to the United States, then we do need to embrace those big, bold ideas. And our thinking, and obviously, having spoken to lots of manufacturers, is that they need some certainty, right? It's not rocket science. If you're going to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a manufacturing facility in the United States, you're going to want some market certainty.David RobertsYeah. That's not a small unit of investment.Abigail HopperNo. Sometimes I share your frustration. Most folks doing this work are rational, economic actors, right? And they're making kind of risk-reward calculations. Anyway, they need some certainty. And there's nothing particular about solar that needs certainty, right. If we were talking about pencil manufacturers, right, they need certainty. But looking at what passed out of the House of Representatives and what we worked on really closely with them, it really is a long-term demand driver, right. So long-term extensions of the investment tax credit, so you know the customer base will be there. It is an investment tax credit for the actual investment in the facility and then a production tax credit.And it's not just modules and cells, but also things like trackers inverters, so covering more of the real high-value pieces of the manufacturing base of production tax credit. It's also woven into the ITC regime requirements for domestic manufacturing to keep your refundability, your direct pay, as the years go on, and then an adder for domestic content. And so that, in my mind, is the whole of government, or at least the whole of the tax code, perhaps, approach.David RobertsWhat's Ossoff's thing that deserves a mention in here? That's law now, right? That passed? Or it's in the BBB?Abigail HopperYes, it is in the BBB. It is what I just described. The investment tax credit for manufacturing investment and the production tax credit for the production. That's Ossoff's bill. So it's passed out of the House. It's sitting in front of the Senate waiting a vote, as you know. That's not where you wanted to land.David RobertsWell, avoid the Senate if at all possible, but apparently it's not very possible.Abigail HopperNo, I don't think that's ...David RobertsDo you think, or does SEIA think, that what is in the House version of the Build Back Better Act is to scale with the goal of building a domestic manufacturing industry?Abigail HopperI do. I think when you ... yes. And when you then add that to some of the assets of the department of energy, things like the loan guarantee program, things like the R&D spending at Cedo and other offices, and the advanced manufacturing initiatives, that — all of those tools that we have at our disposal, plus the national labs, right, plus universities. As you said, this is an ecosystem that we need to build. This is not just like, "Oh, someone goes stick a factory and fill in the state." It is a thoughtful and strategic ecosystem that needs to become sustainable and self-reliant at some point.And so, yeah, I think that what is contained in the House provisions of Build Back Better, including Senator Ossoff's SEMA, is going to be significant. We put out a press release a couple of weeks ago about the manufacturers that have articulated ... once that passes, they'll be making announcements and breaking ground on manufacturing facilities. So it's not just kind of theoretical. It's companies that have capital at the ready and are looking to the US government to signal a long-term policy certainty, so they can make those investments.David RobertsDo you have any I mean, getting into wild speculation here, but if Commerce finds in Auxin's favor and slaps these tariffs on these four countries, and we get something like the Build Back Better Act, or something like, whatever we get, if those things limp across the finish line, any idea how that would balance out?Abigail HopperAgain, it depends on the level of the tariffs, but I think it would be sort of classic, like one step forward, one or two steps backwards, right. It would be just an incredibly lost opportunity if we were able to get provisions passed, and then handicap ourselves with tariffs.David RobertsRight. So the most unanswerable question of all: what the hell is going on in the Senate? And are you, I assume, SEIA is up there lobbying or whatever. Do you have any insight into Senate dysfunction that anyone else doesn't have? Do you have any handicapping of the possibilities here? What the hell is going on? No one knows what's going on. Do you know what's going on?Abigail HopperI know that myself and my team are up on the Hill lobbying literally every single day, and having conversations with all of the names that you read in the newspaper on a daily basis around what's happening. After that, I don't have a lot more insight than we're all reading in the news clips. They're keeping this pretty close. The people that are negotiating on what is going to happen, either on the clean energy side, specifically, or generally on a reconciliation package. I think they learned some really painful lessons at the end of last year, that, perhaps, negotiating through the press was not a particularly effective mechanism.And so things are close, and I choose to take that as a good sign, right. If there's enough at stake that we're not going to talk about it until there's something to announce, I'm going to choose to view that hopefully.David RobertsSo you're just reading the tea leaves. What color is the smoke coming out of the window?Abigail HopperExactly.David RobertsWell, thank you so much for coming on. This is such ... in an era of screwed up things happening, it's just like, "Do we need this one more screwed up thing happening, really, on top of everything else?" So thanks for coming on and untangling it a little bit for us. And maybe once something happens, who knows what that might be, we can have you on to talk about the aftereffects.Abigail HopperI love that. Thank you for your time.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, Lauren Melodia and Kristina Karlsson of the Roosevelt Institute explain why it’s counter-productive to increase domestic oil and gas production when energy prices rise, and how building out clean-energy infrastructure is the actual best way to address the price volatility of fossil fuels. (PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsAmericans are struggling with two related problems: one, there’s general inflation, which means pretty much everything is expensive; two, there’s energy price inflation, which means that energy in particular (specifically, oil and gas) is expensive.This has led some politicians, mainly Republicans-and-Joe-Manchin, to propose a dual solution: cut back on government spending (to tame inflation) and increase domestic oil and gas production (to tame energy prices). This approach is wrong-headed and counter-productive on both counts. The reasons why are laid out in a new issue brief from the Roosevelt Institute, the first in a series called “All Economic Policy Is Climate Policy” (which, hell yes).Lauren Melodia, deputy director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, and Kristina Karlsson, the institute’s program manager for climate and economic transformation, argue that fossil fuel prices are inherently volatile, and that volatility has serious macroeconomic effects; on the flip side, electricity prices — specifically renewable electricity prices — tend to be far more stable and manageable.It follows that government spending to build out clean-energy infrastructure is itself anti-inflationary; it removes a source of price instability and replaces it with stability. This argument is my favorite kind — it put words to something that’s been rattling around in my head for years — so I was excited to talk to Melodia and Karlsson about the volatility of fossil fuels, why we’ve come to accept it as an inevitable fact of life, and why it is, in fact, a choice that we could make differently. With no further ado, Lauren Melodia and Kristina Karlsson from the Roosevelt Institute. Welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.Kristina KarlssonThanks for having us.Lauren MelodiaThanks so much for having us.David RobertsYou have written this report about energy and inflation. It's one of my favorite kinds of reports, in that, after I read it, I was like, "Oh, well, duh, of course that's true." But it's like it hadn't occurred to me before. It's one of those things where just hearing it stated clearly, I think is very eye-opening. So let's walk through a little bit, the pieces of it, and then we'll get into what it means for policy. So to start with, something I found interesting and didn't really know, which is that these traditional measures of inflation, which are gently sort of like bundles of products through which inflation is measured and tested, exclude energy.Typically, energy is not included in them because energy is sort of inherently volatile and is swinging up and down all the time. And so the idea, I think, is if we include that, it's going to sort of obscure what we're trying to look at. So we'll set that aside and look at another bundle of products, and if they are going up, then it's real inflation. This is sort of how things are typically done. But as you say, this can be somewhat misleading since energy price volatility plays a huge role in inflation, and, specifically, is playing a huge role in current inflation.So explain briefly sort of the role of energy prices in the inflation we are currently experiencing.Lauren MelodiaSure, absolutely. I mean, I think that there's two ways that they're at play, despite the fact that the Fed or certain macro analysts might not want to think about energy prices in the overall inflation rate. One is simply that people spend a lot of money on energy. And so even if the core CPI, Consumer Price Index, or other indicators show that there's price stability, people are experiencing rising gasoline prices. And we've seen over the past year, that really fuel the conversation around inflation.David RobertsConsumers definitely don't hold energy as some separate category, right. Like they experience it as inflation when prices rise.Lauren MelodiaExactly. So if we're talking about rising prices in society and trying to ground that conversation and connect with consumers, people who are consuming the media, your constituents, these are the prices that people are going to be talking about. The other way that they really do influence kind of the overall economy is that these energy price volatility, the changes in energy prices, actually do have a huge impact on our economy overall even if we don't want to be thinking about them when it comes to inflation. And that simply is because energy is foundational to business operations and household consumption.If there's a spike in gasoline prices or other energy prices, it is something that people just have to deal with. You can't delay consuming energy, you have to pay the higher price, and it means that you're going to have less money to spend in other parts of the economy. So we've seen actually, historically, that ten out of the last twelve economic recessions in the United States were actually preceded by a spike in crude oil prices. Meaning that you've got this rise in prices there, people have to pay it, they can't pay for other things in the economy, and it leads to kind of a slowdown of economic growth.David RobertsI want to sort of put an exclamation point on this because I feel like it's super important to understanding the rest of it is. It's not like cars or bread or something, where if the prices rise you can buy less of it or switch to an alternate product. Energy is a non-negotiable. You have to heat your house, you have to run your business. So rises in energy prices just mean you're spending more on energy, which automatically means you're spending less on other consumer categories.Lauren MelodiaYeah, absolutely. One of the concepts we try to really highlight here is the concept of energy insecurity. When the price of energy rises and people just have to pay it, it means that they can't pay for other basic necessities, not to mention other things that fuel economic growth and productivity. Those other things where we've got people out there working, making those things to produce and sell to consumers who have disposable income to spend.David RobertsRight. And can you quantify sort of how big a role energy volatility is playing in the current inflation relative to ... we've seen all these other consumer goods rising in prices, too. So is there some way sort of dividing the responsibility?Lauren MelodiaYeah, I mean, people are aware of gasoline prices rising a dollar or two in their communities. The way that inflation is calculated is based on the change in price of an item, but it's weighted based on how much people spend on that item. So energy prices are one of the biggest ticket items for the average household. The average household is spending roughly 11% of their annual budget on energy consumption. And so that gets weighted in the calculation of what inflation is. So inflation, the number that we hear monthly when the numbers come out is rather abstract.Like last month it came in at 8.3% over the past year.David RobertsRight.Lauren MelodiaBut we can attribute 2.1% of that to energy prices alone, and largely gasoline price increases.David RobertsYeah, you said in the report, gasoline price increases specifically responsible for 75% of energy inflation. So gasoline is the big ticket here. And just, aside from the economics of inflation, gasoline is also probably the single consumer price of which US consumers are most aware, most hyper aware. They see it advertised to them every day. So insofar as part of inflation is sort of the psychology of it, the consumer psychology of it, that is also a big piece.Lauren MelodiaFor sure.David RobertsSo you say, you lay out a couple of reasons why fossil fuels are not accidentally volatile, but sort of intrinsically volatile. Could you lay those out insofar as this is not like a solvable problem? So explain why fossil fuel — what is it about fossil fuels that make their price fluctuations kind of out of our hands?Kristina KarlssonAbsolutely. I think you started that question with the exact takeaway. This problem is not solvable, so long as we are continually reliant on fossil fuels. And that comes from a few things. I mean, the most obvious place to start is that these are hard to find hydrocarbons buried deep underground. They require significant investment in production up front, and they also happen to be located in different places around the world that sort of tie us into a default geopolitical web. And as we can see right now, with Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, geopolitical conflict has a huge impact on our domestic oil prices.And that has been the case for a very long time, not just in current situations. And I think that's very well exemplified in that graph that we share, where we show that ten of the past twelve economic recessions are preceded by an oil spike. A lot of those oil spikes come from geopolitical conflict. And beyond that, I mean, beyond just the fact that there's conflict in this international market, the fact that it is international, and that we are one player in a much bigger market than we would be for other types of goods that we consume, is another part of this volatility.I mean, when we are faced with situations like we are in now, where international conflict is driving changes in our domestic prices, we have very little ability to mitigate those supply chain blockages by boosting our own domestic production.David RobertsI wanted to ask about that specifically. This, I think, is a lot of people's initial instinct or intuition, and not just a lot of random people, but a lot of members of Congress in both parties. This idea is, like, if this international volatility, these international problems are causing oil prices to go up, it makes intuitive sense to people, I think, that if we just produce more of our own oil and gas, we will to some degree protect ourselves from that volatility. And that just turns out to be...Kristina KarlssonNot the case.David Roberts... very straightforwardly wrong. Explain why.Kristina KarlssonYeah, I think there's two things, I think, one, even if we increase our domestic supply, the way that — especially crude oil — is priced is through an international sort of price cartel, which is OPEC. They have a strong price setting power, and any changes that the US makes will still be influenced by the prices that are coming from that organization.David RobertsRight. And if they want, they want to set prices, and if the US boosts its production, such as to lower prices more than OPEC wants them lowered, OPEC is perfectly capable of dialing back production in other places ...Kristina KarlssonExactly.David Roberts... to get the price they want.Kristina KarlssonWe can't beat them.David RobertsExactly. Theoretically, there's some limit. If we were a big enough producer, if we had like 50% of the world's, or 80% of the world's oil, or something like that, there's some size we could reach where we could have a bigger influence.Kristina KarlssonBut we don't want that.David RobertsBut a. we don't have it and b. probably couldn't get it even if we sort of maxed out.Kristina KarlssonExactly. I mean, and the second reason, which is even in this imaginary world where the US becomes the mega producer of crude oil, it's not going to help domestic consumers, because our current domestic producers are very heavy exporters at the moment. Most of our domestic production is actually being exported, even in times of elevated demand at home, even when we're having price crises at the pump in the US, we can't make oil companies choose to sell their product domestically, especially if there's a profit incentive for selling abroad. And that's exactly the case.David RobertsYes. Like taking care of like "Oh, our people, our domestic people are suffering. Let's divert some of our oil and take care of them." It's just not really a thought process that like your Exxon execs ...Kristina KarlssonThey get a lot of undue patriotism put on them because, in these moments, when this is really hitting the fan, we can see where their priorities are. And this ties to the nature of fossil fuels again, which I think will contrast with renewables later on, is that these energy products are transportable overseas. The reason that they are exported so much is because we can. And early on, when natural gas came online in the US it was supposed to be the solution to US energy independence. That was all well and good until liquefied natural gas happened.David RobertsYes. I want to lay this out a little bit because the conventional wisdom, and I think probably a lot of people still have this in their heads, I think, insofar as they're paying attention to energy, the conventional wisdom is: yes, oil is this sort of perfectly fungible international market, and the domestic supply is almost irrelevant to the prices. But natural gas is different. It's harder to transport, it's harder to send overseas. So insofar as we're boosting domestic production, we are satisfying domestic demand. But as you say in the report, the sort of growth of the liquid natural gas technology and industry means that more and more natural gas is starting to sort of mirror oil.Kristina KarlssonAbsolutely.David RobertsIn being international, an international market.Kristina KarlssonRight. I think, we can observe sort of similar skyrocketing trends in exports around the same time between liquefied natural gas and crude oil, which is when the crude oil export ban was lifted and during the time that liquefied natural gas technology was really coming online. And now we're at the point where we are the number one liquefied natural gas exporter in the world, and we are actually exporting faster than domestic production at the moment.David RobertsOh, wow.Kristina KarlssonWhich is very concerning.David RobertsSo we're exporting more than we're producing.Kristina KarlssonYeah, we have reserves, but we are exporting at a pace that is higher than our domestic production, and that is actually causing us to draw down inventories, at this moment, when we are really struggling, to maintain our export commitments.David RobertsSo then this idea, because there's a lot of congresspeople who are real hot on the idea that building more LNG terminals is the way ... like, that's how we can get our "freedom gas" to Europe, so they can stop using the "autocrat gas" and start using the "freedom gas." But that, again, fundamentally mistakes how international markets work. Like the market is fluid. Once the LNG is out there circulating in the natural gas market, it's just part of the gas market. It's not marked. You don't have a little "F" on the "freedom gas," and a little "A" on the "autocrat gas," it just all becomes gas that you buy on an open market.Kristina KarlssonExactly. I mean, it's important to remind ourselves also when we play out these potential scenarios, if we invest further in our own fossil fuel dependence, even if the sake is to export "freedom gas," we are now further entrenching ourselves to our vulnerability to price fluctuations from gasoline, which are still not going anywhere, is just further and further entrenched. The more infrastructure we bring online, the more we are tied to international dynamics.David RobertsRight.David RobertsAnd there's no getting through that, right? There's no level of domestic production at which you outrun that effect.Kristina KarlssonRight. And even if we had the capacity for that level of domestic production, the oil and gas companies in the US would not give it to ourselves. That's the key part.David RobertsMuch like OPEC, they would fiddle with their production based on prices and profits, right. I mean, that's sort of how they work.Kristina KarlssonExactly.David RobertsAnd say a little bit, in terms ... this gets it at some of why sort of fossil fuels are intrinsically volatile. But there are two other pieces. One is say a little bit about speculators. I don't think I had really fully understood this until I read your helpful summary.Kristina KarlssonYeah, well, I think it's important to understand that speculators basically are betting on price changes and making money off of those bets, in the most simple of terms. So it makes sense that speculators love volatile prices because there's a lot to bet on. And oil and gas or commodity futures market is extremely big and powerful. And especially starting in 2000, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act started to really open the floodgates on this. And it was a direct affront to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is tasked with keeping a handle on this. And since then, it's been a huge part of how energy prices are determined.Dodd-Frank tried to reel this in some. But the great thing about it being an international market, is if commodity traders want to continue to do business, they can start private commodity trading desks housed in other places. And that's exactly what happened after Dodd-Frank. And during the past year, the top three or five of these private commodity trading houses, many of them almost doubled their profits in 2021, during a time when people's energy burdens were as high as they could be, when people are tipping into energy insecurity. And they're particularly effective during times of like crisis when energy demand is at its highest.And we talk about the Texas storm example, where people's energy bills were at $15,000. Part of that comes from the energy companies, themselves, price gouging. But another part of that is that these speculators, on top of that, are taking advantage of these times of desperate need.David RobertsYeah.David RobertsAnd whatever you might say about energy prices being tied to sort of foreign events or foreign conflicts or economic fluctuations in other countries, we can't control that, but at least it's legible. Whereas once they start being dependent on speculators, then they're just volatile with no rhyme or reason, which is even worse.Kristina KarlssonRight, exactly. And speculators can make money if the price is going down or up. That's another thing. So it expands the volatility, and I will say and the other part is that it's vulnerable to climate events.David RobertsRight.Kristina KarlssonSo the ironic thing about burning fossil fuels, maybe it's not ironic, maybe it's obvious, is that burning fossil fuels is terrible for climate change. In fact, it drives it. And then we have extreme weather events, we have extreme temperatures, and those weather events and those extreme temperatures jeopardize fossil fuel infrastructure, which means that fossil fuel companies are paying to fix pipelines that have frozen or they're limiting their supply for two months while there are wildfires going on. And the fact is that we're just burning our way into our own demise in this way.David RobertsYes, we're exacerbating the natural volatility, you might say. So as you conclude, and here I'm quoting, "effectively managing energy price inflation, while retaining a fossil fuel based economy, is nearly impossible." And this, I think, again seems obvious once you say it out loud. Of course we can't control fluctuations in the prices of international commodities, the bulk of which come from other places and are traded on an international market. Like, we are subject to that market, and there is no recourse, there's no secret weapon, there's no increasing domestic production ... doesn't get you out of this. Releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve.Kristina KarlssonLike the secret space.David RobertsYes, we tried that, and it was like a blip.Kristina KarlssonThe tool that we typically turn to when it comes to managing inflation ...David RobertsWell, I meant to ask about this. I'm so glad you remembered that. Why won't just the conventional response to inflation, which we're seeing play out now is just for the Fed to boost interest rates, why won't that get at this?Kristina KarlssonWell, I think there's two layers. I think one, that is a very blunt tool that's meant to basically slow down the productive capacity of the entire economy, because it's running too hot, or our demand is too high. So it's already a pretty blunt tool, and I would argue that probably it isn't the right tool for the moment period, but it's not able to deal with specific supply chain issues already. We know this. But the fossil fuel supply chain, especially, is out of the hand of our domestic government to deal with because of all of the reasons that I just stated.So it's already the wrong tool for dealing with supply chain blockages. And then supply chain blockages in the fossil fuel markets are even more so out of our reach.David RobertsRight. So just to sort of put a pin in this part, insofar as your economy is dependent on fossil fuels, you are stuck with a level of volatility that has real macroeconomic effects. Yes, some of which we're living through now, in part. So let's pivot then to my favorite subject, electricity. One of the initial points you make, and this is even sort of, in here we're just sort of bracketing renewables, we're just talking about electricity in general. You make the point that electricity prices historically have been much less volatile for two big reasons. So tell us why historically electricity prices have been more stable.Lauren MelodiaYeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's two main reasons that we point to in this report, acknowledging that the electricity industry is super complicated. The production and transmission of electricity, also, beyond the scope of what we can really outline here. But all that said, the first thing is that the electricity grid draws on a variety of sources. So whereas most cars run on one type of gasoline that you can buy at a gas station, or your home furnace can be powered by one type of oil or gas — when you use electricity, you're plugging into a grid that is drawing on power generated from a wide variety of sources.And so it has built in these mechanisms to kind of balance the desire for consumers to have electricity whenever they want it and all of these different sources generated in all of these different places. So it's just structurally set up to kind of deal with giving people — drawing on a lot of options, not getting stuck in dependence on one fuel source.David RobertsRight. So if coal, for whatever reason shot up, you can shift to natural gas, or vice versa, like, you can move around what you're drawing on in order to keep prices stable.Lauren MelodiaExactly. Yeah. The other big reason, that we bring up in the paper, is just that the electricity industry is much more regulated than the gasoline industry or utility gas industry. I think part of this is because of the uniqueness of how electricity is generated and transmitted. I mean, I think very early on, as it was being developed into this product for consumers, it was clear that we needed the government to be involved in setting what the prices were going to be, because otherwise the cost of entry into the market is so big that undoubtedly there was going to be one company locally that kind of had a monopoly.David RobertsRight, a natural monopoly.Lauren MelodiaExactly. Yeah. And so this is something that utilities in general, very early on, as they were being developed, were understood to be a natural monopoly. So we needed there to be government regulation to protect consumers and make sure that they had just and reasonable prices and equal access.David RobertsYeah. And for all the complaints electricity heads have about electricity sector regulation, which are many, it has, sort of at the macro level, kept certain parameters on the whole thing, kept a certain degree of stability around the whole thing.Lauren MelodiaAbsolutely. I mean, our electricity sector today, it's not running exclusively on renewables, like we argue in the report. It should be. It is drawing 60% of power generated through fossil fuels. And yet, even given that you look at volatility, the average price change in electricity compared to utility gas or gasoline over time, and the prices go up and down far less, and they don't swing as widely or as often.David RobertsYeah, it's a very striking graph in the report, if listeners want to go track it down, showing the volatility of oil versus gas versus electricity. And electricity looks practically like a straight line relative to the other two, which fly up and down, all over the place.Lauren MelodiaYeah.David RobertsSo electricity manages to stay relatively stable, even drawing on fossil fuels, which, as we discussed, are volatile, it has this sort of effect of suppressing that volatility and creating stability. So sort of the next piece of the argument is that even beyond that sun and wind, solar and wind power, specifically, are less volatile.So explain a little bit about that.Lauren MelodiaYeah, well, Kris really got into kind of the nitty-gritty of the extraction and the conflict around pulling fossil fuels out of the earth and producing energy sources with them. But wind and solar look almost the opposite to that. They're commonly available everywhere. Sure, there are some areas that might have more sun, more wind, but we're not dealing with geopolitical situation, where there's a handful of countries that have access to this resource that the rest of the world relies on. Now of course, we know there's been a lot of discussion about the minerals needed to produce the technology to access the sun and the wind, but we believe it's possible to figure out how to fairly and justly distribute those minerals.We're hopeful that we can produce that technology globally and in cooperation. And therefore, once it's set up, you have common, unlimited access to solar and wind. So the thing about the fossil fuel industry is that there's this fuel that constantly needs to be extracted and transported all over the world. And with sun and wind, once you have the technology to capture it, it's just commonly available. You don't have to be transporting it around the globe.David RobertsAnd free.Lauren MelodiaYes, absolutely.David RobertsI want to dwell just for a second on this supply chain question, because this is a common argument made on behalf of sun and wind. There's no fuel costs. It's all raining down on us for free. You don't have to dig it up. And so once you build the technology, the costs are all technology, not fuel. And so once you build the technology to harvest it, you have basically an eternal, reliable source of free fuel. But there are supply chain issues around the technology. So as you say, there are minerals and metals involved in terms of the sort of chips involved.China has almost all the rare mineral processing. So in terms of the supply chains for getting that technology, there are currently at least geographical concentrations. There are sort of players that are sitting in a similarly sort of cat-bird seat, as people who are sitting on top of oil and gas. But as you say, that's a solvable problem, right? The fossil fuel volatility is not solvable. Supply chain volatility is, in theory, solvable, right? Like we've built diverse, international supply chains for lots of things in the past and could do so, again, with this.Lauren MelodiaAbsolutely, I mean I think that the dependence on fossil fuels sets you up to have a permanent need to be negotiating global production and distribution, whereas with renewables, there's an upfront investment. I think that there's a lot of government and international coordination that needs to take place but it's not to the same degree that we have with the fossil fuel industry.David RobertsRight. More like a constricted passage that we're trying to get through, but there is an other side.Lauren MelodiaRight.Kristina KarlssonExactly.Lauren MelodiaThere's no other side with fossil fuels.David RobertsAnd worth mentioning, because we mentioned it about fossil fuels, is that insofar as you can prevent climate change, which sun and wind do, you prevent more volatility in your supply chains in that sense, too. Those are both, I guess, long term effects, but worth noting. And also another in terms of mirror, like you talked about how oil price spikes precede recessions because of this — energy is not something you can choose not to buy, so everybody's stuck with the price rises. But you have sort of the mirror effect with renewables, in that they are constantly reducing household energy expenditures, which free up more money to spend on other things, right?Lauren MelodiaYeah, absolutely. I mean we don't have the best ... we have a lot of historical data when it comes to fossil fuels, both the production and on the consumer end. We have a lot less of that with renewables. But there are a lot of studies that other people have done, that we highlight here, really looking at, "What does it cost to produce renewables now? What's the impact on it on your electricity bill today?" Really trying to parse those details out. And again and again we see that renewables are trending downward in terms of the cost of producing them.So that is something ... there's a long-term trend in them going down, whereas with natural gas we see it trending up. So that's something that can be passed on to consumers.David RobertsRight. And so I wonder if you think, and this is, I guess, somewhat speculative, but as we become more of a renewables based economy, do you think that will reduce the number of recessions? I mean, do you think that will have the effect of mitigating some recessions?Lauren MelodiaI think that there's a lot of potential there. I mean, I think that with the recessions we've seen now that have been preceded by oil price spikes, a lot of that has to do with it being produced elsewhere, and so prices go up, and we're paying for gas that is being captured by producers abroad. But the renewable energy landscape is its domestic production, so everyone can produce it technically. Some countries more than others. Some will have an easier time ramping up. The United States, obviously, one of them. But the idea here is that it's something that doesn't have to be transported because it's commonly available everywhere, and so it's going to be domestically produced largely. Which means that even if there is a price increase, the producers of it are getting that price here in this economy.David RobertsRight. It's still in the economy.Lauren MelodiaSo it has less of a kind of domino effect, in the sense that it's not just a bunch of money getting sucked out of the US economy to oil producers abroad, but it might be getting sucked out of consumers pockets into their local energy production companies. But those companies, the people that work there and own the business, also live in the United States, and they'll be putting that money back into the economy here.David RobertsRight. You're having money circulating the economy, whereas every one of these price spikes of fossil fuels, and I just don't know that people really sort of fully have internalized this, but every single price spike in fossil fuels just has the effect of draining shitloads of money out of the US economy and might as well be lighting it on fire, right? These are just rents we're paying. We're not getting more for our money. We're just getting the same thing for our money. So it's just being drained of blood.Lauren MelodiaI think the other thing that comes into this is, like, Kris was talking about the speculation kind of betting on prices going up and down. Renewable prices, electricity prices are much more stable. And so you can plan your life around that. You can't have, like, "Oh, the price of gasoline went up. We don't know why. We don't have any control over it." There's a lot less of that dynamic at play. So when you have stable energy prices, it's something that you can plan for. It's not something that's going to catch you off guard, and then you can't pay your rent. You can have long-term contracts, consumers can have that.There can be much more education and awareness about what to expect.Kristina KarlssonRight. And we do argue also that for those in our economy that are the closest to being energy insecure, or who are lower-income — and we found more so Black and Latinx — the volatility from fossil fuels can really put you over the edge, and you can't plan for that. And so we say that this transition could also have the potential to be an improvement in energy equity at least. Obviously, we make some stipulations about how the policy design would have to make sure that those consumers had access to renewables. But if we do this in a public-investment-led way, if we move away from tax credits and more towards subsidies, if we make sure that renters who don't have control over what their landlord does in their building, for example, are able to have access to renewables, then this sort of price stability will have an even greater impact on those who spend the majority of their household budget on energy, not the majority of their whole budget, but who spend more so than other groups of consumers.David RobertsSo you can enhance the equity effects. But I think it's worth, I think, emphasizing what you said at the beginning, which is insofar as vulnerable populations suffer more from price volatility, they will disproportionately benefit from price stability, right. So there's an inherent equity effect in all this, in shifting from volatile to non-volatile sources of energy. You're going to have a large equity effect, even bracketing everything else.Lauren MelodiaRight.David RobertsSo let's then talk about what to do with these insights. So the conventional wisdom is that inflation comes from overheated demand running out ahead of supply, and thus, that government spending, like the initial Recovery Bill that Biden and Congress passed, insofar as it accelerates consumer demand, is just going to exacerbate inflation. Sort of the conventional wisdom is that Biden and Democrats are sort of partially responsible for this because of the big spending they did when they first came in. And I think Jeff Bezos sort of expressed the conventional wisdom the other day, when he said that Manchin saved the Democrats from themselves by preventing them from spending even more.He literally used the phrase, "Manchin saved them from themselves." It haunts me.Kristina KarlssonHe cannot pivot into being a pundit now. I cannot take that.David RobertsCan just one billionaire not. Just don't.But the conventionalism is that in times of inflation, the proper government response is austerity — to spend less until supply catches up with demand.Kristina KarlssonRight.David RobertsBut to operationalize what y'all are saying, would require spending a bunch of government money, like accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. You can just sit back and wait for the market to do it. But if you want it to happen in time to have the effects we want, short-term effects, that is going to require a big, new public spending. So how do we reconcile this intuition that public spending will drive inflation with this counterintuition that the energy transition will suppress inflation?Kristina KarlssonWell, I think you picked up on one of the main goals of this paper. This is one of the issues that we're really trying to confront, which is that climate scientists, climate activists, so many people have been calling for a big, public investment in this transition and are being sort of bombarded with inflation hawkery, saying that "We can't afford it right now, it'll drive us over the edge." I mean, I think conventional wisdom is misapplied in this current moment for a few reasons. I think we've already mentioned that the inflation that we're dealing with is coming from several supply chains.And as we said, our tools for dealing with that type of inflation, instead of overall overheating inflation, are different. But two, it's not just government spending, all inflationary. I think you have to really understand what you're spending your money on. And that's the big argument of this paper is that if you spend your money on building infrastructure that will stabilize energy prices, which as we can see, are a huge driver of the inflation we're seeing right now, then you are actually eliminating a major source of inflation. And the amount of spending that we do in the time period that it would require will be much shorter than the amount of time that we've actually been dealing with fossil fuel-driven inflation and fossil fuel-driven volatility.So I think our argument is, "Of course it's worth it, and the stabilizing effects of switching to renewables will be able to, I don't even want to say offset, because I don't want to cosign the idea that this will lead to additional inflation.David RobertsSo a. we have the stabilizing effect of moving off fossil fuels onto renewables, but you don't even think that government spending equals more inflation is true to begin with?Kristina KarlssonI'm saying in this current context. I don't know that the conventional wisdom is properly applied to the context we're in right now. There's a lot of debate over whether or not we are truly overheating, or if we're really just dealing with some supply chain blockages that come from recovering from the Pandemic.David RobertsRight.Lauren MelodiaYeah, I think that if you're studying kind of what's driving inflation, a lot of economists are in agreement: that right now the inflation we're experiencing is much more on the supply side, and therefore, we don't see signs of overheating in the economy.David RobertsRight. And so it makes sense that spending on the supply side would ease that, right? I mean, that spending on the supply side would ease rather than exacerbate them.Kristina KarlssonYeah, I think you could think of a clean-energy spending bill as a supply smoothing policy in our energy supply chain.David RobertsThis all makes intuitive sense, but do we have ... it's one thing to have an intuition, and it's another thing to have some numbers in your back pocket. I'm just wondering how well we're able to model these kind of things. And I wonder to what extent is sort of some of the conventional wisdom, that you guys are disputing, kind of embedded in the models. Do you know what I mean? So, like, modeling itself is misleading us. Do you feel confident enough to be throwing numbers around to policymakers if they ask, like, "How much would this ease inflation?" Do you know?Lauren MelodiaWell, one of the studies that we highlight in this paper, this is not our own modeling, but looked at what a rapid transition to renewable energy production would look like on overall costs to consumers, not a change in the rate of inflation. And they found that a rapid transition to wind and solar today, along with the technological advancements in subsequent years and the economies of scale of really bringing that online, would save consumers about $2 trillion a year on the price of energy.David RobertsThat seems like a large number.Lauren MelodiaSo that's not really about inflation per se. It's really just "what are people paying?" But I think it drives home the point that you make this investment now, we have to make this investment now. It is a government-led investment. It is totally different than the idea of just like throwing dollar bills out into the world to get spent in different ways. This is a very coordinated, planned utility grade investment. Switching to solar, switching to wind, building out the EV charging infrastructure, public transportation, relying on electricity. All of that kind of coordinated investment could save consumers $2 trillion a year.David RobertsWhich they would probably enjoy whether or not there was inflation.Lauren MelodiaYes.Kristina KarlssonI mean, I would argue also that predicting inflation ten years from now in a renewable universe is probably not the right way to prove this quantifiably. In my opinion. I think we're talking about energy inflation. The inflation that we're likely to see over that year, over the next ten years could come from many different sources. I think, if we wanted to say, "Inflation stemming from energy prices will be reduced," the best way to get at that answer is by displaying stable prices, because inflation shows you the change in prices. So I think by talking about the stability of renewables and the stability of energy prices, we're also really getting at the fact that energy inflation, which tracks price volatility from energy, will be reduced.I think guaranteeing policymakers that we are going to be in a 2% inflation universe, if we switch to renewables, is probably not the best way to get there.David RobertsBut I mean, insofar as energy volatility has played a big role in inflation in the past, I mean, like, something close to half of current inflation. If you could promise to take that chunk off the table ...Kristina KarlssonWe can do that.David RobertsThat's not a small thing. To wrap up, this makes total sense to me. Looking out, in terms of long-term economic strategy. It's interesting. It's sort of one example of a thing you see a lot in energy discussions around fossil fuels, which is it's only now that alternatives are available, that we're able to sort of turn and clearly see what the choice of fossil fuels is doing to us, right. Because if there's no alternative to fossil fuels, then fossil fuel price volatility is just a feature of the universe, right. It's just a background condition, which is sort of how we've been treating it. As you note, we leave it out of these inflation measures because we've just sort of ...Kristina KarlssonMade our peace.David RobertsMade our peace with it, right. Like accepted. Like, "This is how it is, we're stuck on this freaking roller coaster, and we have no control over it. Oh well, let's bracket that and look at everything else." But now that fossil fuels are increasingly a choice, we can see, "Oh, like wow, that has really sucked to be stuck on that roller coaster for decades."Kristina KarlssonWith no seatbelt.David Roberts"That's been unpleasant. Let's, let's get off that." So, so anyway, long term, like strategically long term, this makes all the sense in the world to me. But of course, there's strategic long term, and then there's, like, the midterms. So I wonder whether you think that some bold move ... I guess, what I'm asking you is, do you think that a big public spending program on renewable energy would have effects fast enough to materially affect current politics? Or is this kind of a mid- and long-term thing we're talking about?Lauren MelodiaWell, I think there's a couple of ways to think about that. I mean, on some level, nothing that happens with managing inflation today is going to, overnight, change price volatility between now and the midterms. But what we do have is a really active climate movement that's been demanding change, because we absolutely need it. And they're not getting action, and they're being told it's because there's inflation in the economy. And it's our job, it's our point with this paper to arm activists with the information they need to push past that argument. Because I think one of the ways that we really can affect the political climate, is to see action on this issue in particular, which is so popular.We want to see change. We have a plan. We're organized. We know what we need. We know how to get there. And inflation is not the excuse to delay it. It is the reason to act now.Kristina KarlssonAbsolutely. And I think, politically, progressives need to show that we're going to do the thing.David RobertsThat's not typically been our strong suit.Kristina KarlssonI'm hopeful that now would be a good time, and I don't think there should be any tabling this for a little bit later or after the midterms for the sake of political wins, because I think that might actually be harmful. I think pushing on climate investment as soon as possible is probably a political good, also.Lauren MelodiaAbsolutely.David RobertsYeah. I just wonder ... the case, as you lay it out, makes sense, but I wonder about the Democrats ability to sell it, or to tell that story in a way that is meaningful to the public, especially with one of their most prominent members out spewing the dumbest of conventional wisdom on this subject.Lauren MelodiaYeah, they might have a hard time doing what they need to do, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't stop fighting for it.David RobertsRight. And so it goes. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And like I said, this is, like, on some level, I feel like I knew this, on some vague level, but it's so nice to just have it put out. And to me, this is, I just think, one of the great underutilized arguments in favor of the energy transition, which is just that being tied to fossil fuels sucks. It's unpleasant.Kristina KarlssonWe made your hunch citable.David RobertsYes, a citable hunch. This is why I'm in the business, is to have my priors reinforced by experts. Alright, so thanks for doing the report, and thanks for coming on today.Lauren MelodiaThank you so much.Kristina KarlssonThanks so much. Bye.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value you 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. 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