Volts

Long-time readers know that I am a veteran hater of the US Senate, the graveyard of good ideas and progressive policies. America’s upper chamber is one of the world’s least productive and most ridiculous legislative bodies, its dysfunctions matched only by its boundless self-regard. Don’t get me started.Instead, get Adam Jentleson started! Now there’s a guy who has earned his ire at the Senate. As a senior aide to Democratic leader Harry Reid from 2011 to 2016, Jentleson saw up close and personal how the institution’s antiquated rules (especially the filibuster) can be weaponized against reformers. He shared what he learned in a book that came out earlier this year: Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. I didn’t want to have Jentleson rehash the book — it has been favorably reviewed and he has been on every podcast under the sun to discuss it — but I was quite interested in his thoughts on the current Senate standoff. Are Democrats going to let the filibuster prevent them from keeping their promises, improving people’s lives, and getting reelected … again? Are they going to allow a small handful of conservative Democratic senators to squelch a once-in-a-decade chance at legislating … again? Can that still be prevented, and if so, how?Basically, I asked him to explain Joe Manchin to me. Enjoy.(Anthony Cheng)David RobertsHey there, welcome to Volts. I'm your host, David Roberts. Lots of people these days feel a deep scorn and antipathy toward the US Senate, one of the most dysfunctional and ridiculous legislative bodies in the world. I very much include myself in that number. But few people have done as much to earn their antipathy as Adam Jentleson, who worked in the bowels of the Senate as a Deputy Chief of Staff for Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid from 2011 to 2016 – the fateful final years of Obama's two terms. Jentleson got an up close and personal look at all the ways that the rules of the Senate are stacked against reformers, especially the filibuster. He shared what he learned in a new book that came out earlier this year: Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. I know that this newsletter is supposed to be about clean energy; I have not forgotten that, I promise. But US democracy is falling apart around us, and it's got me rather preoccupied. So I thought it would be nice to talk to Jentleson, not so much about this in its ugly past, although we will touch on that a little bit, as much as its current politics. What's going on there today, and what can we expect? Basically, I want him to explain Joe Manchin to me. So with that, welcome to Volts, Adam.Adam JentlesonThank you so much. It's great to be here.David RobertsSo as we speak, just a few minutes ago, we found out that the Senate Republicans are in fact expected to filibuster the creation of a commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection. This seems like a straightforwardly reactionary move. You know, as I look back on the last few uses of the filibuster, they seem straightforwardly reactionary. You go back a little further to the 60s and 70s, and it was used in pretty straightforwardly reactionary purposes then. Has the filibuster always been a straightforwardly reactionary tool? Or is there anything that a Democrat could point to and say, “Look, it works for us too!” or “Look, there are reasons for us to support it going forwards.” Has it ever worked for Democrats?Adam JentlesonWell, I’m going to give you a yes and no answer there. I think the filibuster was reactionary from the very beginning. It was conceived of as a reactionary tool. It was not supposed to exist – it didn't exist for the first half century or so of the Senate's existence. It came into existence largely to empower, not vulnerable minorities to protect them from being trampled by the mob, but rather to increase the power of already powerful minorities, who wanted to have even more power, and in most cases, to stop the marching progress of the majority.The number one powerful minority that the filibuster was invented to protect was slaveholders in the antebellum period. We could talk about this more, but it was first just this talking filibuster, and there was no super majority threshold. I think something that's really important to understand, that is easy to get lost because of our bias towards the new, is that the Senate was a majority rule body for most of its existence for 200 plus years. It was really only recently that the super majority threshold, this idea that things need 60 votes to pass, started to become frequently used at all. So all that is to say, that it was reactionary in its invention.David RobertsSo is it fair to say that all this stuff about protecting the rights of the minority and ensuring the small states have a voice and all that is sort of reverse engineered? The original Senate preceded those rationales?Adam JentlesonThat's right. I mean, a lot of it is just straight up b******t, but some of it is linked to a grain of truth. It is true that the framers wanted the Senate to be one of the checks that they put in place to protect from untrammeled majority rule. But it was the existence of the Senate that was supposed to be a protection against untrammeled majorities.David RobertsIt’s already minoritarian in its very structure.Adam Jentleson Exactly. First of all, the decision to have a bicameral legislature instead of a unicameral legislature was one of these checks. Having three branches of government that act as checks on each other was another one of the checks. And then the Senate itself in its entire democratic structure, having every state get the same number of senators was another check. And then other ones, like having senators be elected to longer terms – six years instead of two, having a higher age requirement, and having to be responsive to a broader statewide constituency, instead of just a district. These were all the ways in which the Senate was supposed to play this role as what people talk about as a cooling saucer. So when people talk about protecting the minority, you know, they're linking back to this, this grain of truth. But, you know, as you say, it was never supposed to be as anti democratic as it is now. And what people are talking about today is an entirely different vision of this Senate. And it is a vision where the minority has a veto over the majority, which is not what the framers intended at all. So I just wanted to say, this is the way in which it's reactionary. It hass been used for these purposes, it has primarily been a weapon to preserve white supremacy. It has occasionally come into use for progressives and for Democrats – one of the most famous filibusters was an anti war filibuster in 1917. That actually led to the creation of the rule that is now the rule that imposes a supermajority threshold. But if you look at it on balance, there's just no comparison. It has always been a tool that is far more powerful, and has had far more effect, for the right than for the left. That’s just the nature of the thing.David Roberts I sometimes hear Democrats say, “Well, there was that one time George W. Bush wanted to drill in Anwar,” and the Democratic Senate filibustered that. So really, it helps everyone?Adam Jentleson You can pick out a few examples over several dozen years. Sometimes, an article pops up by someone defending the filibuster, and they all go the same way, which is, you know, the Democrats should remember that the filibuster helped them. Here's one example. And there are many others. Are there?David Roberts Yeah, name three more!Adam JentlesonYeah, exactly. You know, they usually can't even get to three to make a pattern. I mean, it's just there's no question that it’s the case. The other thing is, if you pull that thread, and you start talking looking at it from a structural perspective, some of these things don't even pan out. For instance, in 1969 and 1970, there was an actual real effort to get rid of the electoral college that was very nearly successful. David RobertsFor the same reasons that we hate it today or for different reasons?Adam JentlesonI mean, it was slightly different. Between 1888 and 2000, no president ever got elected by winning the Electoral College without winning the popular vote. And then in 1968, they sort of had a brush with the dangerous potential of the Electoral College. So all through the 20th century, the Electoral College was basically an afterthought, because whoever won the popular vote always won the Electoral College. And it was like, “Oh, you know, what's the margin? It's interesting,” but it didn't really factor into people's calculations as much as it does today. Landslide elections were a lot more common back then, because partisanship was looser, all these things. So in 1968, George Wallace ran as an Independent, and he got a surprisingly large share of the vote. He came very close to denying either Nixon or Humphrey an electoral college majority. So, after the 1960 election, both Republicans and Democrats were like, “Well, s**t, we shouldn't do that, again. We need to make sure that Wallace can't get momentum.” And so there was a bipartisan effort to get rid of the electoral college. I mean, people forget, but you know, Nixon beat Humphrey by I think it was 0.7 percentage points. It was a very close election and Wallace almost spoiled it. So Birch Bayh led an effort to pass a constitutional amendment to get rid of the electoral college, and this was at a time when constitutional amendments actually used to pass. They just passed the 25th amendment a few years earlier, and Birch Bayh had led that effort. So this was actually a thing that happened. He had about 30 states that were ready to ratify it if it had passed. It passed the house, overwhelmingly. It came to the Senate, and he appeared to have the votes to pass the amendment on a two thirds basis, but it was filibustered. It's a little complicated because you already needed two thirds to pass this because it was a constitutional amendment. So the filibuster didn't necessarily raise the threshold for the number of votes that it required to pass this constitution amendment to get rid of the electoral college, but it did complicate the situation and sort of threw a monkey wrench into it. That eventually managed to be the thing that denied Bayh the number of votes he needed. So all that is to say, if the filibuster hadn't existed, you talk about George Bush and Anwar in the early aughts, we probably would have gotten rid of the Electoral College in 1970, and George Bush would never have been president. So I know that was a long lead up, but there's your punch line. This is the point, right, is that structurally, it is a tool that advantages conservatives over liberals and progressives: it is a tool that makes it easier to stop things. And we are the side that by and large is the side that is more invested in passing big changes. And so that's why it benefits them more than us.David RobertsI'd love to talk more about the history sometime, especially some of the stories you tell about, blocking civil rights bills. One of the things you say in the book that I think is not popularly appreciated, is that the US people – Americans – were ready for Civil Rights way before any laws got passed, because they kept getting filibustered. Like, there was majority support in America to move ahead on civil rights. Long before politically, we were capable of actually doing it. I think people look to things that happen in history, more than they look at things that didn't happen. But if you put on the lens of things that didn't happen and look through American history, it is a tragedy after tragedy, and many of them have the filibuster at the root of it.Adam JentlesonThat's exactly right. We like to tell ourselves this narrative that, perhaps there was a reason we didn't pass civil rights until 1964 – maybe the country wasn't ready for it. Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader at the time, gave this famous speech paraphrasing Victor Hugo, saying “stronger than any army is an idea whose time has come”. But the thing was, America was ready to pass Civil Rights decades before they did. Gallup had anti poll tax bills and anti lynching laws polling in the 60 and 70% range as early as the 1930s and 1940s. There were actual bills that were passing the House that came over to the Senate that had majority support in the Senate; they had presidents of both parties ready to sign them in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. And the only reason the Civil Rights bills didn't pass in the 1920s, and 30s and 40s was because of the filibuster. So if you step back and contemplate the amount of human suffering that was caused by this 30 year delay, it's staggering to think about it. And it makes you a little bit less sanguine about the delay that the filibuster has imposed.David RobertsNo kidding. Well, let's talk about the current mess. So, you know, those of us who lived through the Obama years, have it seared on our memory, that, that he sort of legendarily had a couple of years, not even really two full years, of majorities in both houses of Congress, and then lost the Senate. And then, Mitch McConnell decided before he ever took office, as a matter of course, just to filibuster everything. Obama came into office on this wave of hope, and it's a new world and we're turning the page, we're going to do big things, and he wanted to be a historic Reagan-esque President and etc, etc, etc. Instead, he was pretty effectively bottled up, pretty effectively contained to a pretty modest presidency. And Democrats got punished, got their asses kicked at the ballot box, because as Mitch McConnell cannily perceived, if they can't get anything done, the public doesn't know it's the filibuster. They don't know what's going on. They barely know anything. All they see is a bunch of fighting, and finger pointing and nothing happening, and they blame whoever is in charge, and so they blame Dems. So basically, McConnell pulled off what is, if you can overlook the evil of it, a really incredibly savvy and effective strategy against Obama. When, last year, Biden came in with majorities in both houses, every Democrat who took to a microphone assured us “We remember what happened to Obama. We are not going to let that happen again, we cannot waste time. We know that the only reason people will vote for us in 2022, or 2024, is if we do things for them, and they're not going to care about the process.” So we're not going to let this happen again. Then they sort of passed the COVID relief bill through reconciliation, and Manchin voted for it. And it kind of seemed like, “Oh my god, maybe they did learn the lesson, maybe they are just gonna start doing stuff.” Then we drove into the mud pit. And here we are in the mud pit, doing exactly to a first approximation what happened last time, which is Republicans wasting time on bad faith negotiations, just running out the clock, and then in the end, blocking everything anyway. So did Democrats learn that lesson? Are we replaying this whole thing all over again? I mean, I've heard Schumer say so many times now, “We won't let that happen,” but it seems to be happening. So how do we square that circle? Is it happening all over again, or am I being too pessimistic?Adam JentlesonI think the jury's out. It's hard to unlearn lessons, and there's reasons that the time ran out on Democrats in 2009 and that they got played the way that they did. It's hard to change some of the fundamental things about the way business is done in Washington. It's hard to reorient senators away from the desire to try to work with Republicans. It's partially for noble reasons, and partially because they're scared, and they like having bipartisan cover. It makes it easier for them to do stuff, and they're often willing to trade away a lot of good policy for that political cover. So I think you're right. And look, if you look at the metrics, you could argue that we're behind the pace of 2009 right now. Sorry – it's true. I mean, Biden's approval rating is a lot lower than Obama's was at this time in 2009: Obama was in the 60s, and Biden is somewhere in the low 50s. That's not Biden's fault, necessarily, we're in a more polarized time. He's certainly higher than Trump was. But that's not super great territory to be in, and you can easily see how that would slip into the 40s by the time the midterms rolled around. They passed the American rescue plan. But by this time in 2009, they had already passed the Stimulus bill, and the Lilly Ledbetter Act and a bunch of other bills, they passed more bills by this time in 2009, then Democrats have now. So I think there's reason to be concerned. You could see a very rapid ramp up in the next month. It looks like Senate Democrats are setting up June to be a decisive month, or at least a very eventful month when it comes to democracy reform and the filibuster.David Roberts Yeah, Schumer just put SB1 [Senate Bill 1] on the schedule, didn't he, just right after this happened?Adam Jentleson Yeah. He said that he's gonna bring it to the floor in the last week in June, and then set up what looks like votes on the Equality Act and background checks, and maybe some other things that might get blocked before then. So it looks like after spending April and May sort of pursuing bipartisanship on some of these smaller-bore bills, that June is going to be the month where things come to a head. The reason I say the jury's out is that by the end of June, we could have passed SB1 and reformed the filibuster to do so. And in that case, I would say Democrats would definitely be ahead of the pace of 2009 and do seem to be learning the lessons. Then they would still have the reconciliation process and infrastructure to go in the fall. The other big thing that's coming in the fall is that there's going to be a debt ceiling showdown. There's going to be a government funding fight, which could be a disaster, or could be an opportunity to do big things as well. So there's a lot of variables out there. But it is harder to learn the lessons than people think. It's like you're playing baseball, and you see a curveball, and you're like, “Okay, I know what that curveball looks like, I've totally learned my lesson, I'm going to hit it next time.” And then it comes again, and even though you know what it looks like, and you know what you should do, you still can't quite do it. It's harder than it seems to learn the lessons, even if you know you should be learning them. And so I think the jury is still out there for Democrats. David RobertsYou have said before publicly several times now that you're sort of a determined optimist. You have said the quest to reform or get rid of the filibuster is happening in phases. And everybody's got this idea basically that Joe Manchin loves bipartisanship, or says he does. So we have to basically go through this bit of theater where Democrats put things forward, and Republicans demonstrate that they're not going to cooperate. They demonstrate it publicly and clearly enough that Joe Manchin sees it, and recognizes it, and realizes that there's no progress possible with the filibuster. So he decides he wants progress more than he wants the filibuster and budges on this. That's kind of the theory of the case. But it's this weird situation where everybody's talking about that being the theory of the case. Manchin himself has surely read in a dozen articles that that's the theory of the case, and that he's going to learn that lesson, and that's what's gonna happen. So it just all seems so surreal from the outside. Does Manchin genuinely doubt that Republicans are gonna bottle everything up? And now, they're filibustering the January 6 Commission, which Manchin specifically said is inexcusable. So, insofar as that is the theory of the case, and that the fate of the filibuster is this phased approach to reform or remove it, it seems like this is the phase where Republicans demonstrate that they're not going to cooperate. We demonstrated that. So do we see signs of the next phase?Adam JentlesonWell, yes, and no. I'm sorry I keep giving these equivocal answers, but it's part of the nature of the beast when you're dealing with the Senate. I think that we've started that phase of seeing obstruction happen. Manchin has said that this filibuster alone against the January 6 commission bill wasn't enough for him to decide to reform the filibuster. I think that what you're gonna see in June is additional filibusters. Manchin came out in support of the PRO Act, the big pro-union bill, and maybe that will be one of the things that gets blocked. So I think we are now firmly in this phase. And the reason it's necessary is that filibuster reform is a momentous change. I obviously think it needs to happen, you think it needs to happen, a lot of your listeners do. But it is a big, big change–it would be the biggest change to the Senate rules, arguably ever, but definitely since 1917. And so you know, to get to a level where members are comfortable making a change of that magnitude, they do need to feel like they have exhausted all other options. Now, obviously, that runs up against the fact that we don't have much time; we need to pass these things very quickly. And so that's the delicate balancing act that someone like Senator Schumer has to pull off. And that is, how do you do enough? It's an educational process, so how  do you help Democratic senators go through these life experiences of having Republicans block legislation – it’s like an after school special for senators. David RobertsI've been watching that after school special for a f*****g decade now like. This is what's baffling – this month is going to teach them what the past decade didn't? It just seems so arbitrary.Adam JentlesonHere's the additional ingredient you have to throw into the mix, which is that you have to you have to throw in a healthy dose of vanity here, which means that like senators actually think that they can be the ones to overcome this polarized era that we find ourselves in and break through the polarization and be the ones to craft these big bipartisan deals. I don't think very many senators still think that, but I think to a certain extent, Joe Manchin still does. He gave this one interview to CNN about the lesson that he took away from January 6, and he seemed very sincerely to believe that the lesson for him to take away was that he needed to do bipartisanship to show the country that it was still possible for Republicans and Democrats to come together. My takeaway was that the Republicans are an irretrievably Radical Party and that it is incumbent on Democrats to do everything we can to save our democracy before they take back the majority in 2022, but Manchin had a different conclusion. I think he sincerely believes that.David RobertsThis is one of the big ongoing debates – “What's in Manchin’s head?” You think he is sincere about these things he's saying about bipartisanship, that it's possible that he thinks he can pull it off, that he thinks it's still a possibility. You think like at night, when he's looking at himself in the mirror, brushing his teeth, he really sincerely believes those things.Adam JentlesonI think he's the hero of his own narrative, and I think he genuinely believes that he can pull this off. When Harry Reid was in the Senate and I was working for him, Manchin was very critical of Reid and thought he was too hard on Republicans – if Reid hadn't been such a mean guy to Mitch McConnell a bunch of times, there were opportunities for bipartisanship that Manchin could have helped forge. I think this is something he has long believed. But here's the thing: nobody likes to look like a fool. David RobertsHe's setting himself up! Every time he says, I can do bipartisanship, and then Republicans kick sand in his face, and he looks like a fool. He seems like he's purposefully setting himself up to look like a fool.Adam JentlesonAbsolutely, and then the question is, “What does he do at that point?”David Roberts“How do you back out?” Adam JentlesonAnd that's what we don't quite know yet. Exactly. And so, he's made some pretty definitive statements.David RobertsIf this is the game, and he's, in some sense, aware of it, why does he seem to be going out of his way to make these categorical statements? He seems to be making it very, very difficult for himself to back out of this ever. Why is he doing that?Adam JentlesonWell, they're not quite categorical. Even in his Op-Ed, he sort of said to Republicans, you have a responsibility to come forward and engage here. So if they don't, he can put the blame on them. I think the reason you do it is that you want to demonstrate that you really, really, really didn't want to make the change. I don't think this is going to go down as a flip flop. I think this is going to go down as an evolution that will be applauded, not just by the left, but by a broad range of centrist and never Trump commentators who have come to embrace the need for filibuster reform. I mean, you have David Frum, in the Atlantic writing about the need for it. You've got David Brooks talking about it, you’ve got Jennifer Rubin. So it's not who's gonna be mad when he flip flops, I guess, is the question. It's Republicans who yell and scream about it. But you know, he will be hailed, as being in the category of a thoughtful evolution of somebody who really was committed to the Senate and the filibuster, and did everything he could to resist it. But, you know, simply Republicans made it impossible for him. And so I think that's the path there.David RobertsWhile we're peering into people's minds, again, this strategy, and all these dynamics, are being discussed very publicly. So it's not like Manchin’s not aware of them, it’s not like McConnell is unaware of them. So why, if Mitch McConnell knows that Manchin really wants bipartisanship, and it would hardly take anything to keep him on the hook, why is McConnell just demonstrating as clearly as possible to Manchin that he's not going to help? You know what I mean? It just seems like it wouldn't take much for McConnell to keep Manchin, sort of baited on the hook, and he's not even making the mildest effort to do so.Adam JentlesonThere's a lot of thinking about McConnell that tends to be a little bit too theoretical, because McConnell could do a lot of things that theoretically would be smart for him in the long game. He prides himself on playing the long game – his memoir was titled The Long Game. But the thing is that actually, when you look at it, and look at the record, McConnell really hasn't done anything that has gone against what the Republican base wanted since 2010. In 2010, he endorsed a centrist Republican candidate in Kentucky's republican senate primary, a guy named Trey Grayson, and went all in for Grayson and then got humiliated when Rand Paul beat McConnell's favorite candidate in the 2010 Kentucky senate primary. And since that point, McConnell has hewed to whatever the base wants to do at every major juncture. This is clouded by the fact that there's always a wave of coverage and speculation that talks about maybe this is when McConnell is going to, you know, break from Trump or this or that.David RobertsHe made a sort of gesture that way, right after the insurrection.Adam JentlesonHe did, yeah, that's right. There was a New York Times story that said McConnell is talking about getting rid of Trump, but then what did he do? He voted to protect Trump in the impeachment. So it's sort of a parlor game. But if you want to know where I put my money, it's always on McConnell doing what the base wants. In this case, the base wants there to be no commission. Trump wants there to be no commission. You know, from a cold, political perspective, you could even argue that it's better for McConnell's chance of taking back the majority in 2022 for there to be no commission. I think it's not super smart strategically. It certainly does seem to have just set Manchin off since the vote. But I think that McConnell first of all just really doesn't like to get any distance between himself in the base. And maybe he really just thinks that this is better for them in 2022, to not have a commission.David RobertsIt just seems like the only thing that ever saves Democrats, is Republicans overreaching and stepping on themselves. That's it – that's the one that you can rely on. So Manchin, in some world, I guess I kind of get. He's from a red state. He sort of prides himself on being a negotiator and all this kind of stuff. He's got his own kind of Manchin mythology in his head, and I guess I kind of get all that, as much as it frustrates me, but what is going on with Kyrsten Sinema?Explain Kyrsten Sinema to our listeners. I guess I've never heard or read an even remotely plausible explanation for what her whole deal is. Do you have a sense of it?Adam JentlesonI actually think that hers may just simply be a case of having miscalculated a little bit. Look, I think that prior to this year, a pretty reliable way to get the Garlands and plaudits of the centrist beltway crowd and the love of the Sunday show circuit, was to oppose filibuster reform. And so I think that, if her overriding strategic goal was to try to position herself in the John McCain maverick legacy, being from Arizona and all that, she is a person who used to be a member of the Green Party. So it is always a little bit of a stretch to accept that this is sincere, but let's, for the sake of argument, assume that somewhere in recent years, she had an ideological conversion that makes her now want to be a centrist.David RobertsConverted to centrism – highly implausible. But yeah, sure.Adam JentlesonBut for the sake of argument, let's say it's sincere. Let’s say she wants to do that, and she wants to be hailed as an institutionalist by the Chuck Todds of the world. But I think it was a miscalculation, because the centrist brain just isn't there anymore.David RobertsYeah, who are you playing to anymore?Adam JentlesonExactly - there’s no constituency for filibuster defense anymore. I think that's largely a function of how radical the Republican party has become – I think McConnell has lost a lot of his shine. He used to do a really good job of sort of dressing up as obstruction in these institutional myths, and I think that's come off a lot since the Trump era. But there's no constituency for what she's selling right now. You've seen her approval rating drop in Arizona. A lot of that may be due to her vote against the minimum wage that got a lot of attention. But I can tell you one thing, which is that it is not a senator's goal to spend the first year of a new administration having their approval rating tank in their home state. So whatever she's doing is not good.David RobertsI guess you could just say she misread the room badly, but she seems, having done so now, to just be kind of doubling down on it, curtseying while she kills things. She seems to be going out of her way to be antagonistic.Adam JentlesonShe could lose a primary in Arizona – there are credible primary challenge challenges in Arizona who could both be in a primary and then when the state – someone like Ruben Gayego, in Congress. No one could beat Manchin in a primary in West Virginia, or if they did, they would absolutely lose the seat. So that's a different story. But you know, Sinema can't claim to be the only Democrat who can hold that seat. There are viable Democrats; there's a relatively deep bench in Arizona. So she's putting herself at risk of actually alienating her allies and inviting a primary challenge. She's not up until 2024, so it's not a super imminent prospect, but that's just another way in which I think she really did just kind of miscalculate here and is going to have to find a way to climb down off this limb.David RobertsYeah, I mean, that's pretty historic, a pretty historic misreading of the room. You get elected for one term as a Democrat and your legacy is “Oh, I ensured that democracy would fall apart and then got booted. That was me in the Senate.” One thing that I feel like you'll have some unique insight–and it's an ongoing fight, and it's a fight on Twitter every day–is on people who say, Schumer needs to get Manchin on board, Schumer needs to bust some heads, or make some speeches or threaten some pork or threaten committee assignments or be LBJ–how many times have you heard this–be LBJ toward toward these recalcitrant senators and get them on board. And the fact that he's not doing that is evidence that Democrats actually don't want anything to happen and they're all bought and sold by corporations, whatever, whatever. So what leverage does Schumer have over Manchin? I know we talked about this on Twitter and we're like “It's not our job,” but I feel like this is something people want to know. Is it true that Schumer could be twisting his arm if he could? My sense is that Manchin’s ego is so huge, his vanity is so all consuming, that if you go up directly against him and try to sort of punish him or smack him into behaving, that is precisely what will trigger that guy's vanity, and he will take great pride in defying it. And that would just trigger all the wrong dynamics. But I don't know, I'm not up there; I don't see into either of their heads. So what's your take on this? Could Schumer be going harder on Manchin than he is? Adam JentlesonWe were having this discussion on Twitter the other day, this is like the Green Lantern theory of politics. As Matt Yglesias introduced to Brendan Nyhan, who I think turned it into the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency, it’s the idea that individuals can rise up against and defy the structural or forces of the universe to make great things happen. And as you pointed out, there's something that people said with Obama all the time, “Why can't he, you know, deliver all these big things that he's promised?” David RobertsWhy can’t he make Joe Lieberman be a less horrible person?Adam JentlesonRight. So here's the thing, as you pointed out, it is unfalsifiable as an argument. You could always just say, “Well, if they'd only tried harder, and they pushed harder, they did this, done this or that.” And so it's a difficult thing to deal with. But I think that, given the stakes of this issue, it is really important to sort of surround it with as many facts as you can to try to get an answer there. I would say a real example of Green Lantern-ism was Joe Biden on the campaign trail, saying he was going to cause Republicans to have an epiphany, and deliver all these Republican votes and usher in a new era of bipartisan dealmaking. That was really interesting because that was going up against structural forces that are causing Republicans to be polarized and not want to deal; they're larger than any individual can deal with. I would argue, on the flip side, that expecting leaders and a president to be able to deliver a small handful of votes from their own party, for bills that are broadly popular with the American people, is not Green Lantern-ism and as a more reasonable expectation of leaders. And so then, you say, so what's the leverage? This is where I don't want to be evasive, but the thing is, that's just sort of what a leader figures out. I worked for Harry Reid, but I wasn't Harry Reid, you know what I mean? Reid's unique skill as a leader was to figure out what it was that could get a person to Yes, and sometimes that is twisting arms and sometimes it’s just persuasion.David RobertsThey don't have earmarks anymore, right? That was a huge tool for that purpose.Adam JentlesonRight. But one of the things they have is the massive public pressure, of the fact that you have commentators across the political spectrum begging senators to save our democracy here, and advocating for filibuster reform. So what I would stipulate is that under these conditions, it is possible for a very skilled leader to find a way to get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to Yes. And we may not be able to say, well, you should call this donor in West Virginia or this interest group and they'll be the ones to twist his arm and get him to Yes, or, this friend of his from childhood, who will be the one to persuade him, you know what I mean? We don't know what these things are, but what is the marginal value of a leader if they don't have more insight into what can move Manchin than you and me talking here on this podcast, or people on Twitter?David RobertsWell he's not running again also, right? He's not running for the Senate again, do we know that?Adam JentlesonWell, I think a lot of people speculate that he won't. The reason is, you know, he barely won in 2018 by something like barely 3 pointsDavid RobertsHe doesn’t particularly seem to like the Senate either.Adam JentlesonYeah, exactly. But that was sort of cut, I think, in favor of being willing to do reform because why not? You know, why sort of be the guy to kill Biden's agenda on your way out the door, and then just peace out? You know what I mean? Like why not to say YOLO. David Roberts“He might run for governor” is one thing I hear, and if you're gonna run for governor of West Virginia, you need that Maverick-y whatever.Adam Jentleson Yeah, sure. But, you know, I think that the same reason he might not win as governor is the same as why he might not win in the Senate because it's a statewide election. His state is Trump-y by 30 points, and he barely squeaked by in 2018. So all that is to say, I don't think that I'm arguing that this is an easy thing to do. But you know, Lyndon Johnson, when they brought the 1964 Civil Rights Act to the floor, they didn't have the votes for it. It was filibustered for three months. Through a consistent process of working with members, listening to what they wanted, and applying pressures to strategic points, they got the votes for it. I mean, Reid got the 60 votes for the Health Care bill. The last vote was Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Reid didn't have his vote until after he brought the bill to the floor; the famous “Cornhusker Kickback” was a deal that was cut while the bill was on the floor. So you find a way. And I think that right now, Schumer is doing a good job. I think this filibuster on the 1/6 commission, setting a clear deadline for S1 in June: he's sort of setting boundaries, and sort of creating a cauldron of pressure around Manchin. So I would argue that I think he's doing a good job, but we're gonna have to see how this comes out. But between a president in Biden who ran on being a dealmaker and bragging about all the deals you could cut, and Schumer who wants to be LBJ, the two of them working together, really should be able to find a way to get Manchin to Yes.David RobertsWell, the weird thing is, if you're a vain person–I mean, Manchin is the pivot point now–he could single handedly save US democracy. What better way to flatter one's own vanity than to literally be a hero?Adam JentlesonThat’s right. And it's not just the left that will congratulate him. Yeah. I mean, it will be David Brooks writing in his column. I mean, this is a very big opportunity to be a hero who will go down in history as having done a good thing. This is going to stand up well, to history, if he shifts in favor of reform to help these democracy reforms to pass.David RobertsOne of the more cynical takes on all this is that one of the reasons Democrats–some Democratic senators–like the filibuster, is that they probably don't have 50 votes for a lot of these things, and they don't want the awkwardness; they don't want that to be known. They don't want that to be recorded. How much of this sort of big bold agenda that we're talking about would happen? Like people say, you get rid of the filibuster and then it's the PRO Act, and SB 1, and this and that. How much of that bold agenda do you think really, when the rubber hits the road, has all 50 Democratic votes?Adam JentlesonI think a fair amount of it will. There's a lot of talk that's like, “Oh, what has 50 votes,” but I think that's the wrong metric. I think you should look at what has like 46-ish votes, because bills too often don't have the votes until they get to the floor. I would also look at what bills have like 46, but no hard No-s against them. And so I would throw the PRO Act into that category. I think it actually has 46 votes, and of the outstanding Democrats, nobody's come out and said, “Absolutely, I'm not for it.” So that to me says, that is a situation that’s ripe for when you get that bill to the floor and you make whatever deals you need to make to get those last four Democrats. That's a bill that's gonna pass. I would put S1 in that category, you've got 49 co sponsors out of 50; Manchin has said he has problems with it, but he also co-sponsored that exact same bill the previous Congress, so I don't think there's any showstopper there that prevents him from getting to Yes. So I would look at the range of things that are maybe 45 plus, with nobody like campaigning against them. I would say all of those things are possible: the DREAM Act, which probably already has 40 or 50; I'd say some version of background checks. Obviously, the voting rights preclearance, and those things, a lot of big important stuff. I think on energy and climate, the question is what's going to fall out of reconciliation, what will be deemed that it can't comply with the rules by the parliamentarian. I think you'll have a fair amount of droppings––they call them Byrd droppings because it's the Byrd rule that causes them to fall out of the package. So you'll probably have a fair amount of Byrd droppings to sweep up on climate change that you'll want to get through. It's a lot of stuff and I think voting rights alone: that to me is enough reason to do it. But I think that there's a lot of other stuff–paid family leave, which got ruled out of last reconciliation bill, maybe a compromise on the minimum wage–there's a lot of stuff that you can get through if if they go nuclear relatively soon and in a way that allows them to have time to pass all those things. DC statehood, by the way, is another critically important bill that has an uphill climb to be sure, but also is in the mid to high 40s already and given the stakes, I think it would have a decent chance of passage as well.David RobertsHere's one of the overarching questions that I and I think a bunch of people have. It's probably unanswerable on some level, but, it really seems like US senators, particularly Democratic senators, are in a bubble that is nigh impenetrable. Like, there are things that among sort of your generally politically engaged lefty, have now become sort of bog obvious conventional wisdom, like that the Republicans are all about obstruction, and that the filibuster is reactionary, just on and on, that just don't seem to penetrate the US Senate. I guess I'm just sort of curious about the life world of a Democratic senator. Who are they talking to, and where are they getting the reinforcement for the sort of antiquated views that they cling to? If they turn tune into  progressive websites, or cable channels or anything, they're gonna see arguments against themselves; they're gonna be pelted by arguments against themselves. So somehow they're remaining immune? And I guess I'm just wondering, like, what is the kind of epistemic bubble that they've created, and how are they maintaining it in the face of such a torrent of criticism?Adam JentlesonThe answer is the Senate. You know, it's its own self protecting entity. And it actually sort of takes a very active role in self protection. As soon as Senators start orientation, they're sort of told a lot of these myths about the institution, and a lot of them come over from the House. It's sort of defined to them in contrast to the House and it’s said, “This is a place where we're supposed to be slow, we're supposed to be frustrating. This is the whole purpose of the institution. And in fact, this is what makes it great,” is what they're told. So it creates this perverse dynamic, where arguments from outside only reinforce their sort of defensiveness about the Senate, because they immediately become almost brainwashed into believing that the outside world doesn't understand this complex and beautiful institution. And if the President is arguing against them, well, that's the executive branch and the whole point of the Senate is to be a check on the executive. So we shouldn't let them determine what we do as senators. There's a grain of truth to that, like we were talking about before, but it's become vastly exaggerated. The Senate is supposed to be thoughtful, and craft thoughtful solutions, but it's not supposed to just not pass any solutions.David RobertsIt’s not supposed to not do anything. There's no exactly theory of government that results in that being the conclusionAdam Jentleson What you do see, though, is that a lot of the younger senators, I think, are less susceptible to that.David RobertsBrian Schatz, came into the Senate and heard the myths like everybody else, but he just looked around, and he's like, oh, we're not doing anything. We're not getting anything done. It's possible for them to realize.Adam JentlesonThat's right, because the big difference with the younger crowd is that they haven't experienced any success in the Senate. All they've seen is an institution that's failed. And so it's the older folks who can recall an era where they did actually get things done on a bipartisan basis. There aren't that many of them left. And that's why the caucus quickly got to like 45, 46, 47, in support of filibuster reform, because it is much younger and much more composed of folks who are ready for change. But it is still folks, who can sort of recall an era where they did cut this deal, and they did overcome a filibuster and yada yada, that still are sometimes susceptible to thismythmaking. David RobertsThere's a certain view out there, which I hold onto every other day or so, which says that the GOP has become so homogenous illogically, racially, etc., and so radicalized against the Democratic Party and democracy. There's just a notion that there is no rule based system that can continue working if one of two parties has decided it doesn't favor democracy anymore and feels it's just not restrained at all by the rules, especially by unspoken, sort of unwritten norms. If you just break free of those entirely, and become sort of the purely nihilistic party that's purely about power, is there any set of rules that can make that work? Is it possible to sort of reform our way past this? Or, do you think that we're sort of headed for some sort of reckoning regardless?Adam JentlesonYeah, look, not to end on a depressing note, but the answer is, I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know, and I'm not gonna sit here and tell your listeners that I think filibuster reform is going to solve all of our problems, and especially these larger structural problems that you're talking about. However, I will say that I think it is sort of the necessary, if not sufficient condition, to solve our problems. I think that you can't solve any of them, if you don't reform the filibuster, because you're not going to be able to pass things like S1, and Voting Rights, and all these other bills that I think could pass if we got rid of the filibuster. It is a step in the right direction. And it's, and we're certainly not going to solve them if we don't do it. I come back to DC statehood; I think DC status is a critically important reform that if we are able to get rid of the filibuster, we should put all our effort into passing, because that will address some of the deeper structural inequities of the Senate, especially when it comes to how underrepresented non white Americans are in the Senate. So I think it opens the door to the possibility that we can pass the reforms we need to fix these deeper structural issues. And I don't think we have a lot of hope of solving them if we don't do it. But it's gonna be a long, uphill fight, and I think that it's going to be a struggle. But like you look at the vote today on the January 6 Commission, it was a bipartisan vote. You know, you had seven Republicans join with Democrats to support the commission, but it failed, because you didn't get to 60. So if you're gonna sort of start to draw this party back into the norm of legislating, and actually start to have at least a little bit of bipartisanship, the only way you're going to do it is if you get rid of the filibuster, because you're just not going to get to 60 in today's Senate at any time in the foreseeable future. But you could get to 52, 53, 54 on a lot of different things. And so if we're going to draw this party back into the arena, and get them to not be completely off in crazy land, you have to make it easier to pass things and make it easier, you know, for the gears of legislating to actually turn again. David RobertsIt's ironic that the filibuster, which Manchin says is preserving bipartisanship, is arguably preventing it, preventing the Republican Party from stepping down off this ledge. Thank you so much for coming on, and helping me plumb the mysteries of this very worst of the world's legislative institutions.Adam JentlesonAbsolutely man, it was really fun to talk.  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

(If you’d rather listen than read, just click Play above.)Energy nerds love arguing over the value of distributed energy resources (DERs), the rooftop solar panels and customer-owned batteries that are growing more popular by the day. There’s a fight in California right now over the value of energy from rooftop solar, just the latest skirmish in a long war that has ranged over numerous states. The conventional wisdom in wonk circles is that the value provided by DERs is not sufficient to overcome the fact that the energy they produce is, on a per-kWh basis, much more expensive than that produced by utility-scale solar, wind, and batteries (residential solar is roughly 2.5 times as expensive as utility-scale solar, according to NREL).For that reason, many wonks view DERs as a kind of boutique energy and argue that public funds are better spent on utility-scale energy. Turns out: no, that’s wrong. Some groundbreaking new modeling demonstrates that the value of DERs to the overall electricity system is far greater than has typically been appreciated. The work didn’t get the attention it deserved when it came out in late December, so I want to spend some time with it. First, though, let’s get clear on what we’re talking about.The misguided battle between centralized and distributed energyTo understand the difference between centralized and distributed energy, it’s important to understand the distinction between transmission grids, the high-voltage power lines that carry electricity over longer distances, and distribution grids, the nests of low-voltage power lines (strung from the familiar brown poles) that carry electricity to local consumers. If the transmission grid is the interstate highway system of electricity, distribution grids are the local road systems that branch off those main trunks. Centralized energy generally refers to utility-scale power generators (or energy storage) hooked up directly to the transmission grid: coal or natural gas plants, wind farms, solar fields, grid-scale battery stacks, what have you. The big stuff.Distributed energy consists of anything that generates, stores, or manages electricity on distribution grids: rooftop solar panels, ground-mounted “community solar” arrays, consumer batteries, electric vehicles, building energy management software, and the like. (And then there’s truly distributed energy, in the form of off-grid installations that don’t connect to any larger grid. We won’t be getting into that today.)To paint in broad and somewhat crude strokes, advocates for centralized renewable energy tend to view advocates for distributed energy as crunchy pastoral proto-hippies who can’t handle modernity. They note that utility-scale energy is cheaper and capable of powering highly energy-dense modern economies, whereas distributed energy is expensive and diffuse. Advocates for distributed energy tend to view advocates for centralized energy as corporate capitalists in thrall to perpetual growth. They note that distributed energy brings a range of benefits, from resilience and independence to savings on avoided infrastructure, whereas utility-scale energy tends to do greater damage to landscapes and concentrate economic power.Like many disputes in the energy world, this one has hardened into an identity battle, which is annoying and unproductive, since the answer, like with so many other disputes, is both-and.Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that advocates for distributed energy have been at something of a disadvantage to date. It can be devilishly difficult to quantify the benefits of DERs, so a lot of the discussion gets into hand-wavey intangibles.It can be especially difficult to quantify the benefits of DERs to larger grid systems, because energy modeling to date has effectively ignored distribution grids (which represent about a third of US spending on electricity). It has treated them purely as load, as demand to be satisfied, rather than as active, flexible participants in grid management. Until now! Or, until a few months ago anyway. In December, energy modeler Christopher Clack (a familiar name to Volts readers) and his team at Vibrant Clean Energy (VCE) debuted a new way to model the energy system that takes into account DERs and the services they provide. They used it to study the effect of DERs on the electricity system and the results are summarized in “A New Roadmap for the Lowest Cost Grid.” (Full technical report here; slideshow presentation here.)Spoiler: the cheapest possible carbon-free US grid involves vastly more centralized renewable energy, but it also involves vastly more distributed energy. What’s more, far from being alternatives, they are complements: the more DERs you put in place, the more centralized renewables you can put on the system. DERs are a utility-scale renewable accelerant. The practical implication is that going all out on DERs is to everyone’s benefit, up and down the electricity supply chain, from utilities to consumers. It is difficult to exaggerate just what a revolutionary change this represents in energy modeling and how much it turns conventional wisdom on its head. By making distribution grids visible to their model and co-optimizing those grids with the transmission system, the team at VCE uncovered a source of grid flexibility that could save a decarbonizing electricity system some half a trillion dollars through 2050. That’s real money. (If you want to take a deep dive into the material, check out this interview with Clack on Chris Nelder’s Energy Transition Show. It is gleefully nerdy; I cannot recommend it highly enough.)The cheapest energy scenario is clean and distributedAt the heart of VCE’s work is Clack’s state-of-the-art modeling tool: Weather-Informed energy Systems: for design, operations and markets planning (WIS:dom). It allows resolution down to two-mile square areas and makes dispatch decisions every five minutes. It takes into account granular weather data stretching over decades, climate impacts, policy, all forms of generation, storage, transmission, and on and on. VCE boasts that it “leverages 10,000 times more data points than traditional models.”For this study, WIS:dom was augmented to better understand and represent distribution grids, so that it could bring transmission and distribution systems together in one system and co-optimize them. It was given better information about the costs and capabilities of DERs and more options; for example, instead of spinning up a new generator to meet peak demand, it could draw on distributed solar and batteries. No one to Clack’s knowledge has done this before, so there was a lot of experimenting to get it right. “I had to spend a lot of money and time and resources upgrading the model to include this, with a lot of failures along the way,” says Clack. “That's why I'm confident that we did it first, because I spent a lot of time trying to find someone else that had done it, so I didn’t have to do the hard work.”The modeling question was: if a high-resolution optimization tool is given DERs as an option, will it choose to deploy them? If so, how much?The broader social question was: can DERs help lower the overall costs of a clean electricity system? If so, by how much?The paper presents four core scenarios (which were run across a range of geographies):* BAU (business as usual), which includes existing policies and mandates but otherwise lets economics drive dispatch decisions; it deploys WIS:dom in a way that mimics traditional models;* BAU-DER, which does the same but uses the augmented form of WIS:dom, with greater visibility into distribution systems;* CE (clean energy), which models a system that reduces power sector carbon emissions 95 percent from 1990 levels by 2050; WIS:dom mimics traditional models;* CE-DER, which models a 95 percent reduction but uses the augmented form of WIS:dom.To skip straight to the results: if you make DERs an option for the model, it deploys an absolute boatload of them (spending about $10 billion extra over the first 10 years), and by doing so substantially reduces overall system costs. BAU-DER is $301 billion cheaper than BAU (the blue line above), which means we would save money from day one by deploying more DERs even if we didn’t care about climate change. CE-DER is $473 billion cheaper than CE (the green line), which means DERs will make the decarbonization of electricity much less expensive than doing it all with centralized renewables and storage. And here’s the kicker: CE-DER is $88 billion cheaper than BAU (the red line), which means, economically speaking, we’d be better off reducing electricity emissions by 95 percent using DERs than continuing with the status quo. (And this is all just the pure economics — it leaves out the enormous health savings and environmental justice benefits of reduced point-source pollution.)Whether you’re concerned about climate change or not, whether you want to reduce emissions or not, whether you care about the health and resilience of local communities or not, deploying DERs brings down system costs. It’s the fiscally responsible thing to do.Now, note the shape of the red line above (and to a lesser extent, the green line). Scenarios that decarbonize using DERs are a smidgen more expensive for the first 10 years or so because they use those early years to deploy an enormous quantity of DERs. The US currently has about 98 gigawatts of rooftop solar and less than a gigawatt of distributed energy storage installed. Through 2025, CE-DER deploys an additional 75 gigawatts of distributed solar and 27 gigawatts of distributed storage; by 2035, it is 200 and 90, respectively. (By 2050, it is 247 and 160.) That is an absolute DER building binge, starting now.After that early period of heightened investment, though, savings begin to skyrocket as DERs pay off in system benefits. DERs make everything else on the grid work betterFor the entire history of electricity up until about five minutes ago, grid operators viewed electricity demand as an exogenous variable, a set figure they had to meet with supply, not something they had much control over.The key to the value of DERs is that they make electricity demand more controllable. With energy generation and storage scattered throughout distribution grids, grid operators have a way to move energy around, both geographically and temporally, without firing up more power plants. They can absorb extra energy if there’s a dip in demand or produce extra energy if there’s a spike. The overall effect is to smooth out the “demand curve.” Look at the thick black line on the top right graph below — that’s the distribution demand curve throughout a representative year:Now note the same black line on the bottom right graph. By satisfying the little demand peaks with distributed solar and storage, the demand for utility-scale energy is leveled off. Here’s a graph that shows a “load duration curve,” which reveals how high demand is, for how often in the year, and how DERs affect it:As you can see by the sharp spike on the left, there are relatively rare periods of extremely high demand (peaks). The problem is that the current electricity system has to be sized to meet those peaks, even if that means many power plants end up idle most of the time. Clack says that today, roughly 20 to 25 percent of generation capacity on the grid — some 300-350 gigawatts — covers around 3 percent of the energy load each year. (This, in a nutshell, is why electricity systems everywhere are so overbuilt.) The light blue-shaded area on the curve shows the reduction in demand that DERs can provide (the dark blue on the right is the increase in demand). Not only can DERs “shave the peak” by an average of 17 percent nationwide, they can reduce the demand for utility-scale energy for 80 percent of the hours of the year. They make the load duration curve more level as well. These demand-leveling effects bring four big benefits:* First, if you don’t have those big peaks in demand for utility-scale energy, then you don’t need that 20 to 25 percent of capacity that only runs during peaks. Not building those plants, or shutting them down early, saves lots of money.* Second, a more level demand curve means that all generators on the system will run more consistently, with fewer ramps up and down, at closer to their full capacity, helping to maximize their value. * Third, a more level demand curve means that transmission congestion will be reduced and transmission assets will be more efficiently utilized. (In one of my Transmission Month posts, I discussed “energy storage as a transmission asset.” This is the same idea, on a broader scale.)* Fourth, DERs offer the system the option to shift demand to meet variable supply, rather than always forcing it to shift supply to meet demand. Shifting demand is often much cheaper. These benefits explain why CE-DER is so much cheaper than CE, and even than BAU. They explain why, even though rooftop solar may cost more than centralized solar on a per-kWh basis, its value is greater.Infusing distribution systems with DERs allows grid operators more stability and more options — including more renewables. DERs enable more utility-scale renewablesWind and solar are cheap, but they are variable. They come and go on their own schedule, outside of our control. There will be times — seconds, minutes, hours, sometimes weeks and months — when wind and solar dip and something else is needed to fill the gaps. Conventionally, this role is played by dispatchable generators that can be turned up and down at will — these days, mostly natural gas plants. Given that most natural gas plants, at least those without carbon capture, will have to be phased out in a decarbonized system, there’s a hunt on for “firm” zero-carbon alternatives — think nuclear, hydro, natural gas or biomass with carbon capture, or geothermal. But VCE’s modeling shows that a big chunk of that role can be played by DERs, which Clack calls a “firming agent on the load.” By bringing demand more under grid operators’ control, DERs virtually eliminate curtailment, or discarding of renewable energy due to temporary oversupply, through 2045. Just as they allow transmission to be used more effectively, they allow us to consume more of the energy generated by existing utility-scale renewables.They also prevent the familiar problem of “value deflation” — more wind and solar energy at particular times and places competes with existing wind and solar energy from the same times and places — by giving grid operators a whole series of time- and location-specific demand knobs that they can turn up or down at will to better accommodate renewables. By preventing value deflation, DERs will allow for more new renewables on the system (and the retirement of more thermal and fossil generation). That’s why the CE-DER scenario builds more utility-scale wind and solar than the CE scenario. CE-DER builds 800 gigawatts of utility wind, 800 of utility solar, and 200 of utility storage, whereas CE builds 60 gigawatts less wind and 50 less solar (though slightly more batteries). By enabling renewable energy to be moved around, DERs unlock more of it — with, again, enormous public health benefits that are not captured in the model. Put technically, as Clack told Nelder, “the model says that distributed [solar] and storage in some combination ends up being higher value than the differential in the [levelized] cost of utility-scale solar and distributed solar.”Put more colloquially, though it will require enormous upfront investment in the coming decade, laying a quilt of DERs over the nation’s distribution systems is the best thing we can possibly do to enable the rapid emission reductions we will need in the decade after. DERs are not a boutique version of, or a distraction from, utility-scale renewables; they are a necessary complement, an enabler and accelerator. DERs will mean more jobsVCE did some analysis estimating that the DER-enhanced scenarios would add an additional million jobs per year relative to conventional scenarios. It stands to reason that a huge deployment of DERs would create lots of jobs. These are very hands-on, labor-intensive projects. And since distribution systems are ubiquitous in the US, it would create jobs in every part of the country (though not uniformly). I’m generally suspicious of employment projections, so I don’t know how much stake to put in the particular figure, but we can be confident that more DERs = more jobs. DERs could hasten the collapse of existing power marketsVCE’s modeling shows that current electricity markets, if they are not reformed, basically collapse in the next 10 to 20 years. DERs will hasten that collapse in two ways. First, they will reduce demand peaks, which produce a great deal of value in current markets. Lots of peaker plants will get cancelled or shut down and peaker money will dry up. Second, DERs will enable more utility-scale wind and solar, which have zero marginal costs. They are all upfront capital costs; once a solar panel is in place, it doesn’t cost it anything more to produce the next kW. It can bid into markets at $0. Pretty soon, so much of the market’s power will come from zero-marginal-cost sources that prices will be $0 most of the year, and $0 means zero profit for participating generators. Electricity markets were built for fossil fuel generators. They need reform — but that’s a topic for a different post. (This is a good start.)Clean electrification boosts the value of DERsAn intriguing note: Clack says that if WIS:dom is told not just to decarbonize electricity but to decarbonize the whole economy (i.e., electrify everything), the value of DERs to the grid effectively doubles. An economy-wide decarbonization scenario that makes use of DERs saves a trillion dollars relative to one that doesn’t. VCE will have a new report on economy-wide decarbonization coming out soon.DERs also provide a range of co-benefitsVCE’s modeling only captures DERs’ contribution to overall grid performance and cost. It does not capture many of the benefits that have long attracted customers to them: resilience against brownouts and blackouts, the capacity to go off-grid temporarily (or permanently), independence from the whims of utilities and state regulators, reduced personal greenhouse gas emissions, and most of all, lower electricity bills. All of those benefits will help drive early adoption of DERs as their value to the grid ramps up (though they should be boosted by utility, state, and federal incentives). The value of DERs should be visible in all models and statesClack says that it’s just four paragraphs of code that open WIS:dom up to distribution grids — other models, including the models that utilities use in planning, could easily replicate this. “One of the reasons I was so keen on having it be relatively simplistic is, it should be able to be adopted by other models,” he says. “Maybe they wouldn't show as much savings as we do, because of different model logic, but I'm pretty confident they will show similar trajectories.”This is just one more area where outdated utility models and practices are keeping costs too high and the clean-energy transition too slow. Utilities have traditionally been hostile to DERs, viewing them as competitors or net costs, but VCE’s modeling demonstrates what should have been obvious: having flexible generation and storage infused throughout distribution grids offers a fantastic tool to help stabilize a grid with growing renewables and increasing electric loads and bring costs down for all ratepayers. VCE’s work is obviously germane to the many fights going on across the country over net metering. (See California in particular.) Utilities want to pay solar homeowners less for the energy they produce, but VCE’s modeling shows that, if anything, they should be paid more. They can help reduce rates for all ratepayers. It makes fiscal sense for utilities and states to incentivize as much DER growth as humanly possible. Utilities need to stop viewing DERs as an intrusion, a disruption, or a distraction. They are not simply smaller, more expensive versions of utility-scale energy. They are a firming foundation that will help utilities build stable, reliable decarbonized electricity systems.DERs are good for everyoneIt’s not often you come across an energy solution that’s truly win-win, but DERs, if they are properly understood and deployed, are good for just about everyone.They save building owners money, increase individual and community resilience, create local jobs, reduce peak demand, level the demand curve, get more out of existing power generators and transmission lines, unlock more utility-scale wind and solar, boost reliability, and reduce system costs. We should build lots of them, everywhere, starting now. 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

I have been reading Will Wilkinson’s writing since I was a baby blogger, way back in the early 2000s. By then, I had already left behind the libertarianism that gripped me in college, but Will was still a professional libertarian at the Cato Institute. I disagreed with him about many things, but I always found him rigorous and engaging.Over the years, I’ve followed as he’s moved from Cato to the center-right Niskanen Center (where he got canceled) to, now, the Progressive Policy Institute, where he is a senior fellow. In the process he left behind libertarianism for “liberaltarianism” and now some some kind of synthesis that doesn’t quite have a name but lands in the vicinity of social democrat, with an emphasis on small-d democracy.And of course, like everyone who’s anyone, he has his own newsletter: Model Citizen.There’s something nice about following a mind you admire as it tries to work its way toward higher and better understanding — it is so rare these days to witness anyone change their minds about anything — and there’s something especially nice when it ends up converging with your own thinking. I feel much more confident about things I believe when Will articulates them.Both Will and I have come to spend less time thinking about what might be the correct or optimal political philosophy and more time thinking about the workaday challenges of pluralism and democracy: how people of different cultures, ethnicities, genders, beliefs, and personalities, whose disagreements and conflicts are unlikely ever to be entirely resolved, can live together in relative peace.All of which is to say, I’ve wanted to talk politics with Will forever. We got around to it a few weeks ago and now I’ve finally got the thing produced. If you're in the mood for almost two hours of nerdy talk about Ayn Rand, rationalism, freedom, social insurance, the relationship between markets and government, and the perils of pluralism, strap on those headphones and travel along. (Note: several times in the pod I say “non-zero” when I mean “non–zero sum,” which bugs me now, but what can you do.)VOLTSD: Hello, welcome to volts. I am your host, David Roberts. Today I'm excited, as I have as a guest Will Wilkinson who is currently a senior scholar at the Progressive Policy Institute, which is sure to be of some amusement to those who have followed Will's career which began at the extremely different Cato Institute. So rather than try to explain Will’s whole history, which we're going to get into, I'll just say that I've been reading Will’s work for years now, and have been following his intellectual and political journey that he's been on, which has paralleled my own in a lot of ways. And so I thought I would talk with him about that journey, and about where he's ended up, and how we move forward in American politics from now. So we're taking on all the big questions today. So thanks for coming, Will, we appreciate you being on. WW: Thanks, Dave. I'm ready. DR: So before getting into the meat of things, just start by telling us a little bit about where you're from and how the story of Will Wilkinson that ended with you being a young, teenage Ayn Rand enthusiast, what's the what's the origin story?WW: Well, I was born the child of a poor sharecropper. Just kidding. That's, yeah, that's The Jerk. which describes me pretty well.I grew up in a little town in the middle of Iowa - Marshall town - it’s a small city of about 27,000 people. It's the county seat. So that makes it locally important. And it's exactly the same size as it was when I grew up there, which is interesting, because the composition of the population is very different today, but I moved there when I was five, because my dad had taken a job as the chief of police. So my entire childhood my dad was the chief of police in my hometown. My mother was a nurse for a large part of my childhood, she stayed at home, but she also worked as an obstetrics nurse and a home health nurse when I was a little bit older. I’ve got two older sisters. You know, go Bobcats. I don't know, what do you want to know about?DR: It's so American. Well, it's a small town, the chief police dad, the nurse Mom, it's, you know,WW: It's like, I really liked encyclopedia brown books because his dad was a police chief and his mom was a nurse. I grew up in a John Cougar Mellencamp song, I even would suck down chili dogs outside the Tasty Freeze, for real. So, one of the things that I find interesting, and I've been working for a long time on a book proposal of a version of this density divide paper that I wrote a couple of years ago. And I've been using my hometown as a model of things that have changed in the economy and how that's affected where people settle. And I didn't know when I was a kid that I was enjoying peak Marshalltown, Iowa; it was as good as it ever was in its existence. And it was as good as it was ever going to be. You know, it was a really healthy, vital little town with small manufacturers. The schools were great, you know, just like an incredibly active civic life - great little league, flag football, all of that stuff. And, you know, most of it's gone now.DR: All things that seem to be sort of dying out.WW: Not the Little League Baseball, that's not gone. But I mean most of the manufacturing is gone, and the average level of education in the town has gone down. One of the main employers was a place called Fisher Controls, which makes governors and valves. They employed a lot of engineers and a lot of lawyers, people like that. And they really downscaled their presence in Marshalltown. We also used to have a big Maytag air conditioning plant, a bunch of different stuff, which employed executives and hired lawyers and employed accountants and people with college degrees. Most of that stuff has gone, along with the good manufacturing jobs for, for people without college degrees. And so we've got mostly shitty manufacturing jobs in food processing.drvolts   5:11  It's gone from a 90s John Cougar Mellencamp song to like a 2010s John Cougar Mellencamp song.Will Wilkinson  5:18  Yeah, it's gotten a little, it's getting a little darker. But it was, it was a lovely place to grow up. Really. And, it was a conservative place. You know, my dad is a cop, which is a conservative-ish profession. My mother was actually a more political person and she was very conservative. For some time, she subscribed to the Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum newsletter, and that was just kind of background in my childhood. It's not like our family was very political. My dad was one of those old fashioned public servants who thought it was extremely untoward to ever express a political opinion. Because his job was to look after the safety and security of the whole town, and everybody needs to believe that you're working for them. And you can't take sides, right, so he wouldn't even tell us what his political opinions were at the kitchen table.DR: Funny. WW: Yeah, yeah. And I think that kind of ethos really has changed in law enforcement.drvolts   6:23  To say the least. Well, let's start with both of us. You have told this story of before you were sort of an enthusiastic libertarian as a teen and ended up entering the professional, libertarian world. I also had a brief period of enthusiastic Ayn Rand enthusiasm, and libertarianism. And we're going to talk about how you move past that, but I want to just take a moment to take seriously what it is about libertarianism that attracts a certain type of young man, like we were. Mostly men, mostly white - not exclusively. Let's take a moment to take the attraction seriously; what was it about it that clicked so hard for you and made such sense for you at that moment?Will Wilkinson  7:29  You know, it's really hard to say exactly what it is. And I'm very wary about the fidelity of memory. But what I remember, it's actually kind of weird, how I ended up being a libertarian. I grew up a member of the reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is a sect of Mormonism. I won't explain that unless you want it explained. And I went to church camp every summer for several weeks. And I've always been a weird person. I mean, I've always been a bit of a free thinker. And one day, at a campfire,  you know you'd sing all the campfire songs, these silly songs at first, and then you get into the more serious songs, Kumbaya and all that s**t. And then campers are invited to get up and give testimonies, and mostly you get up and talk about how God is awesome and how your life has been touched and blessed and so on and so forth. You know, the RLDS, they're now known as the Community Christ, they're not they're not Community of Christ. They're not evangelical. You know, praise Jesus, speaking in tongues sort of things, it's actually pretty sedate. People would give their testimonies and I love singing with a bunch of people. I feel like that's what I miss most about church,drvolts   9:02  It's the best part of church.Will Wilkinson  9:04  I love it, I find it so nourishing to the soul. That is probably one of the reasons why I'm desiccated and bitter. We'd sung all the sweet campfire songs and I was filled with the spirit of love and community and I got up and I really wanted to tell people how much I loved them and I got up and said, you know, I don't really know about this God stuff. But I love all you guys. I think this is great.drvolts   9:40  The secular humanist credo!Will Wilkinson  9:44  Yeah, my mother was my Sunday school teacher and I don't know what it is in my personality. I've got a weird combination of just rigorous logic, this kind of relentless rationality about “does this make sense”? And also this drive to please and to be a good trooper for the cause. And so I legitimately wanted to be like the best, you know, quasi-Mormon that I could possibly be. And my mother would be teaching me the Bible or the Book of Mormon. And I would just relentlessly cross examine her about, “okay, so if this happened…” and then things don't make sense. And I would end up cornering her by accident, because I was just inquiring, like, well, how does this make sense? And she'd end up crying, because we're good. And then I would feel so terrible, because that wasn't my intention. But that kind of instinct came out in that campfire. And the funny thing that came to that was like, after, you know, the next day, one of the counselors, some middle aged dude wearing sandals with socks, came up to me and said, “Hey, you know, Bill”, I went by Bill. And he says “I think there's this book you'd really like”, and I said “yeah?”, and he's like, “yeah, it's called Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand”.drvolts   11:19  Mike, your quasi Mormon camp counselors turned you on to Ayn Rand.Will Wilkinson  11:23  Yeah, and he was kind of conspiratorial and I didn't really know why. But I was like, “okay”! So that summer I was maybe 15 or 16. I picked up Atlas Shrugged. And, you know, it's the fattest book, it’s 1200 pages or something like that. Anyway I dipped into it. And I was like, “this is a slog”, and just set it aside. Fast forward a couple years, after my freshman year in college at the University of Northern Iowa, I ended up being a tour guide at the Joseph Smith historic center in Nauvoo, Illinois, giving tours of Joseph Smith's house. And, I thought “Oh, this is gonna be a long summer”. There's nothing in Nauvoo, Illinois. It's not really a town. It's this abandoned kind of ghost town. All the Mormons lived there, and they left. There's this big historic site. And I was like, this is gonna be boring, so I need to bring the biggest book I've got. So I brought Atlas Shrugged, and it while giving tours of Joseph Smith's house. And I spent all summer reading it. You know, when you're a tour guide, you'd get the first shift and you'd open up the visitor center, and you'd kick back at the desk, and might be an hour, two hours before anybody comes in. So you'd sit back and read your novel. And I was riveted by it, I totally got into it. I decided I didn't believe in God, by the end of the book, and the thing is, I was clearly never going to really believe in God - I just don't have the god gene. I went back to college, for my sophomore year, and ended up reading The Fountainhead, and it really resonated with me. The thing that was really captivating to me was the critique of altruism, believe it or not. My church is this sweet-hearted, cosmopolitan, internationalist, “all humans are one”, vaguely social justice-y, even when I was a kid. It’s a really liberal form of Mormonism (comparatively). But everything is about service. Everything is about doing things for other people. And in my Midwestern milieu, and that overall service Christianity you're not supposed to stick your head up, you don't want to look like you've got a big head or you're better than other people. My dad would always say, “don't don't get too big for your britches”, that kind of thing. What I found in Ayn Rand was permission to be awesome. That's really what excited me down to the core of my being. This argument, this justification for just f*****g going for it. Be the best version of yourself that you can be and you don't have to f*****g apologize to anybody. You don't have to justify it to anybody. You just be awesome.drvolts   14:56  Right? It was the Uberman aspect you saw in yourself. Nobody who reads these things is like, “Oh, I suddenly realized my cousin is extraordinary” it's always “Oh wait, I'm extraordinary, at last I can tell the world”. WW: Yeah, it's never, “I'm Eddie Willers” - that kind of pathetic viewpoint character, who's supposed to typify the average guy. We're all John Galt. Everybody who reads The Fountainhead is Howard Roark. But it was really transformative for me and I don't think in a bad way, because it's not really the Ubermensch stuff because I was never interested in lording power over others or crushing people under foot on my ascent to the peaks of Promethean glory or whatever. I just thought it was amazing that it was okay. That if I wanted to just do it for myself - if I had aspirations, if I wanted to be a great artist, I should try to be a great artist, right?drvolts   16:11  Well, that's a much more noble set of motivations and residences than I can claim. I was about the same age and it was one of the few times I was in my college library, literally just browsing the philosophy section, because I had sort of like a young man's interest in philosophy. Where did you stumble upon this? It's called Marable College in some small town, Tennessee. It had 800 students when I went there, so there's no reason anyone ever would have heard of it. But I stumbled across this book called The Virtue of Selfishness. And I was like, oh, tell me more. Tell me more. So I ended up reading all of Ayn’s non-fiction, and even in my peak Rand enthusiasm I could never abide her fiction. I still can't read a paragraph of it. It's so bad, but, but for me, it was less “I can be extraordinary, I can do what I want. I don't have to apologize to him.” For me, it's just like, “I can be left alone and don’t have to mess with anybody else.” Nobody messes with me, nobody owes me anything. I don't owe anybody else anything. I think a certain kind of young man, especially with that rationalist streak that you're talking about is often coupled with a certain degree of emotional illiteracy. Or let's say the way young men are socialized in the US, particularly young men who are good at school, work, rationalist stuff are often raised a certain way - not necessarily trained in emotional literacy. So the idea that there's these two languages, there's the language of propositions and reason and deduction, which is very clean and makes sense and is all transparent and right there. And then there's this other language of human emotion and interaction that is conducted in body language and implication and glances and girl stuff, right? And I just didn't speak that language. I wasn't good at it. I felt insecure when it was around like I never quite knew what was going on. And what Ayn Rand will tell you is just that that stuff literally doesn't matter. There is only the clear, rational meaning of the word on the page, the deduction. It's all very clean, and there's nothing hiding behind you. There's nothing you're not getting, right? All right there in the open. It's right angles and clean lines. And that's what drew me in is this perfect clarity. And it's a perfect clarity that tells me “Yes, you can relax, you're not missing a bunch of stuff. You're not failing to discharge a bunch of obligations that you're only vaguely aware of, right, you're not failing on an emotional level all the time. That stuff is a distraction for weaker people.” You need to become of clear, sharp diamond-like mind. And of course, you know, the young libertarian applies this diamond-like rationalism, generally to other people's words and actions. And maybe not quite so rigorously to their own. It's comfortable but yeah, I had no ambitions. My only ambition was to be left alone. And this is permission to be left alone. I still remember like, reading all these non-fiction books getting totally zealous like only an 18 year old college student can get zealous, and then going and writing this Religion final term paper, going into talk to my Professor, just explaining to him with this super intense earnestness, like why Ayn Rand was right and everything he had devoted his life to studying in practice, was not only wrong, but wrong and obvious, in trivially obvious ways. It's just ridiculous, right? It was all just ridiculous man. I feel it's so embarrassing in retrospect.Will Wilkinson  20:56  Yeah. And you know, when I think back on it, one of the things that I think is b******t that people do, when they ask “what's your intellectual journey?” is that they'll tell you about arguments, but if you know anything about how people come to have beliefs, that doesn't have anything to do with arguments, it's all identity. It's all what resonates with you, emotionally, and so there's a special irony in getting attracted to kind of rationalist stuff for purely emotional identity based reasons that you are completely blind to yourself.drvolts   21:34  Yes, of course, and the promises that you don't have to ever become aware of them, because A equals A at the root of it all. You don't have to examine your own motivations. It's all very clear.Will Wilkinson  21:49  You do have to examine your own motivations, David, because your emotions are the output of sort of premises that you've accepted, right? So you're responsible for your emotional reactions to things, you have to make sure that you only believe rational things so that you have the right emotions. If you are having a wrong emotion, that means you believe something wrong. And so you have to figure out what it is.drvolts   22:11  Imagine just Ayn Rand having these unwelcome emotions and just thinking like I've got to extirpate these by reasoning harder, I've got to reason harder!Will Wilkinson  22:25  She's a fascinating kind of tragic person. I will stand up for Ayn Rand's literary quality. I don't think anybody knows how to judge her because she is a genre unto herself. Like, clearly, there's something going on there that people find incredibly riveting and persuasive. She nails exactly what she says she's trying to do. She's trying to write didactic moral fiction that makes you believe something different. And she just crushes it, by her own standards. But aesthetically, I think they're great. They're great in a way that nobody can recognize because one, she's Russian, you know, raised in Russia, educated in Russia, she grew up in the same block as Vladimir Nabokov. Right? It's sort of an upper middle class Jewish milieu in Leningrad, or St. Petersburg. And really well educated, comes to the US, wants to be a writer, writes for Cecil Mill, writes a bunch of movie scripts, and they completely internalize a bunch of Hollywood standards, including a certain kind of melodrama and kitsch.drvolts   23:52  Yes, capital R romanticism. I think that's what never really resonated with me, that sort of romantic melodrama, I can't.Will Wilkinson  24:04 So it's a weird combination of Russian philosophical fiction. There's a lot of Dostoevsky in her DNA but it's filtered through Hollywood and the 1920s and 30s old right politics, like anti New Deal politics. You throw all that stuff together and it's just going to be a stew that's going to be repugnant to people with fine literary standards of the time or even now. I think they're amazing, weird books. They're a kind of experimental fiction,  and I think they're just incredibly successful. And I think people just don't give you know Ayn Rand enough credit as an artist. Because they just don't want to judge her on the criteria that she ought to be judged on, but I think she's amazing.drvolts   25:08  Well, that's sweet. I'm such a Philistine. I read stuff like that and I'm just like, “just tell me what you want to tell me.” Get rid of the trains and the melodrama, I don't need a love story, just tell me what you want to tell me. So that's why I went for nonfiction. Of course, I have the same reaction anytime I read almost any poetry or fiction.Will Wilkinson  25:30  I'm a huge dummy, right? Because all I really wanted was the trains in the end, and the rape scenes. That's all. That's all. Well, that's all I was really into. And somehow I got seduced into a comprehensive philosophy, which is what she was trying to do. Clearly I needed something else to believe in. I didn't want to be a certain kind of really lame Mormon, who doesn't even believe in the cool Mormon stuff, right? Like we didn't have the “you get your own planet” and we didn't have the special underwear, any of that stuff like that.drvolts   26:11  So I was raised Presbyterian, which is like, if you can name a thing about Presbyterianism ahead of 99% of most people, WW: Just by faith, I guess.DR: I guess it's not the dictionary definition, like generic Methodist. So we could talk about Ayn Rand all day. But we're falling behind. So let's move along. You were like a full on Ayn Rand enthusiast, went into the kind of libertarian world, started working at Cato, which is, you know, certainly at the time was sort of like the commanding heights of libertarianism, and then over time, I don't know exactly how long it took, but you have described the process as basically, you arguing against all these critiques of libertarianism over and over again, and eventually just started thinking, you know what, these are pretty good critiques. Describe for us the intellectual process by which you were rationally persuaded against a view, which seems like a vanishingly rare thing these days. It's like an exotic animal. I want to hear all about it.Will Wilkinson  27:34  I guess it doesn't happen a lot like me. The backstory is, I got super into Ayn Rand. I decided that being a philosopher was the most important thing you could be because making sure that people have correct premises is the only thing that's gonna save our society - A equals A dammit. I wouldn't mind if people would get around to being like “A equals A” I mean, that would be nice. Because there's such a weird thing right now we're going through, over the pandemic. It made some of my Randian instincts came back in this weird way, where I'm just like, reality is what it f*****g is, dude. You can't decide whether or not a virus is contagious. It drove me crazy. I think there is something healthy about that orientation toward them, you know, the existence of a reality that's external to you that can't be changed by what you think or say about it. Science needs that, we have to think that we're looking at something that's not us. It is helpful. But I wanted to be a philosopher. So I was an art major, I went to the University of Northern Iowa on a full tuition art scholarship. And I mean, I was the president of the thespian club, and I was an arts kid. I was the you know, artsiest kid in my school and won all those awards and Ayn Rand drew me away from it. Which is tragic. I think it ruined my life. I should be a painter. I would be a happier person if I lived in  rural Vermont and painted giant paintings in a barn. I would be living my best life. Instead, I just argue with a******s all day long on Twitter. And I'm like, this is terrible. How did I get myself into it? And Ayn Rand is how I got it. So I decided I am going to have to go to grad school. So I applied, but I was a terrible student. I had like a 2.9 GPA at the university, the third best public university in Iowa. I couldn't get it, I couldn't get into the University of Iowa. And I heard at the time, there was this dude. Brian Leiter was writing these rankings of philosophy programs. And I learned that one of the best terminal MA programs was in DeKalb, Illinois at Northern Illinois University. So I applied there .DR: Ah funny, I got a terminal MA too. WW: I also didn't get into there. But I just decided, like, f**k it, man, I'm just doing this, and so I just moved to DeKalb, Illinois, enrolled at NIU as a, they'll take your money if you just want to be like, as a graduate student at large or whatever. And, I just took philosophy classes as if I was a grad student. And, that worked, like, the next year, I got accepted to the program, with full funding and everything like that. And it was a great program, I did well, and then ended up going to the University of Maryland for my Ph. D. program. And over all this time, you know, I was like, you know, just a really zealous, libertarian objectivist. You know, I had developed this big social network of objectivist friends, early days of the internet, I was on a bunch of, you know, email lists from Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia fame, the guys who started Wikipedia, you know, Jimbo Wales, and then Larry Sanger, were just part of this milieu, I would meet them at the Summer seminars for the Institute for Objective Studies. And me, and all my friends were like, friends from the internet, and they were like, objective friends, and a lot of them are still my friends. Like, some of my best friends are those people who are also not objectivist anymore, but so that's where my heart was socially. But like, you know, I'm all of a sudden in real philosophy grad school. And I'm, you know, getting hit with stuff left. And right. Now, the thing is, like, philosophy, moral philosophy, and political philosophy wasn't what I was interested in, you know, I was doing like philosophy of mind and language and metaphysics and epistemology, the hard stuff that smart people do, not like this, like sissy, you know, moral stuff. But like, you know, I had to encounter all these arguments. And when I got to Maryland, you know, kind of leveled up a level, at how difficult and sophisticated things were. And at a certain point, I dropped out to go work at a startup because I wanted to make it big, you know, people giving stock options out. And this was like, right before the internet bubble burst. So that lasted like, eight months. But then I got a job at the Institute for Humane Studies, which is like, you know, Libertarian Educational Foundation, and got really deeply into the DC libertarian politics, scene, public policy scene. And when I went back to Maryland, and I decided to do political philosophy, and, you know, we had to read John Rawls, and all this, narrow the standard stuff, and you had to grapple with a lot of arguments against what I was doing. And I was kind of dogmatically ideological, but because my self conception was as a superbly rational person who could give you a satisfying justification for my beliefs, I felt it was incumbent upon me to be able to defend my views. And when somebody had an argument that kind of made me come up short, you know, I took that really seriously. Like, I was sure that I was right. And then if I thought about it hard enough, I would figure out what was wrong with what they're saying. And I always did that. I'm very clever at shoring up my own flanks, right? Like, I always did come up with an argument that would push it off, that would find a way to, to just steal their argument of its intended force. But after you do that, with 20, 30, 40 different arguments, right, like, you have to make some tiny concessions. Right, you have to be like, okay, I can give away this premise that normally I would defend, but if I don't give this away, I'm gonna have to give something much bigger away. But after you start giving away a lot of these little premises, right, like it adds up to something bigger, which is why like dogmatists are really dogmatic, right, like, they're not going to give up any of the little premises because, you know, they see where it's going slippery slope. Yeah. And so over time, you know, like I dropped out of grad school, got a job at Cato. And then at Cato, my job was to be a professional libertarian apologist. That's what I did. And so then I encountered a whole other level of people, the public intellectual cohort. And I think this is really significant because I think people's views change. This is something people will say to you as a criticism, which is that you wanted some other group of people to like you. You wanted to go to cocktail parties. Right? You know, you hear the cocktail party one?drvolts   35:36  Of course, yes. But this is, I mean, it's not as you say, It's not wrong. And there's a reason that I actually think, especially in that era, the libertarians were quite, you know, sort of the money-ed libertarians were quite savvy about, creating not just an intellectual superstructure, but a social superstructure that people could be involved in and find friendships and find a life find those cocktail parties, like they were very savvy about, about playing that aspect of it.Will Wilkinson  36:11  So I was really deeply embedded in, you know, first I was deeply embedded in this sort of objectivist community that I’d become a part of online. But that is kind of a fringe of the broader libertarian community. You know, they're considered kind of, a little bit crazy. They're always around. When I got to Cato, you know, I kind of mainstreamed a little bit. And in part, and that was because of grad school, I, you know, started shifting my views to kind of a more respectable form of classical liberalism, but also to the more acceptable forms of libertarianism. And I was, you know, embedded in these big libertarian institutions and social networks. But I wasn't just embedded in those right, and this, I think, makes a huge difference. Like at the same time, this was the early days of blogging and the early aughts. So how I got my job at Cato is how I came to know Brink Lindsay, we both had blogs at the same time. But there would always be these meetups with people just like what you had in common is that you all had a blog. And so we'd meet up and you'd meet DR: That’s a decently reliable indicator of an interesting personality. Yeah, at the time I would go to a party of bloggers, especially at the time.WW: Yeah, the early adopters were a certain kind of person. And, and I really enjoyed those but like, but you just became socially interested in other people who were doing similar things as you'd like. So when, I had moved into DC and you know, I got to know Matt Iglesias and Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes and all those people really well, they were part of my social milieu too, you know, there was a weekly poker game that would go back and forth between Julian Sanchez house and the group house that I had with a bunch of friends. That was a very mixed liberal and libertarian affair, you know, and we just, like, shoot the s**t, right? I really think that, Julian Sanchez, and me and, you know, a couple of other people really had, you know, had a big influence on say, like, Matt's views on on housing, or occupational licensing,drvolts   38:32  Occupational licensing.Will Wilkinson  38:34  I think that just the fact that he was socially connected with libertarians where he was like, these are actually good persuasive arguments. He wasn't convinced by libertarianism. But there were some things that libertarians thought that he became aware of, at a deeper level, and, you know, some similar things with with Ezra, and they influenced me in turn, right, like, you know, we’d argue cogently about things, and if you actually like somebody, if you're part of their social circle, part of their social network. It just makes you take what they say seriously.drvolts   39:15  Yeah, it's such a fundamentally different relationship than encountering some schmo online who you then proceed to argue with on Twitter, right? I mean, emotionally, it's such a hugely different relationship.Will Wilkinson  39:28  Totally, totally. And so it really mattered to me that I, I didn't know at the time, right, because, like, in a way I saw Matt and Ezra as frenemies. Because they were kind of rivals. And, I'm not a very comparative person, right, in the Oh, you know, “they’ve got something that I want”, but I am very comparative in that this person is my benchmark. I think I'm a smart guy. I’m as talented as this person, and so if they're doing better than me, that means I'm f*****g something up. Which is like why Ezra always makes me feel like I'm f*****g up my life.drvolts   40:11  Try writing at early Vox just surrounded by wonder kins plodding along.Will Wilkinson  40:18  Yeah. And with stuff like that my view started to suddenly change. And when I was at Cato I had been working on my dissertation proposal, I'd gotten really deeply into Rawls, because I was like, this is what the core of analytic political philosophy is, you have to be conversant in Rawls, or else you just can't be part of the conversation. You know, even if you're talking about something else, you have to talk about it. There's a certain jargon, you know, that because all of Rawls’ Harvard students controlled all of the journals, and so they only wanted to talk about stuff in their language. It's like any field. So I said okay, I gotta become fluent in Rawlsian. And I got really deep into Rawls actually, was super persuaded by a lot of stuff. And, you know, and so I came on this project like, you know, what, he's right about how to think about a lot of these issues, you know, about what it means for society to be good. But it just misses a ton, right? And I, over this time, I'd become like a huge, FA Hayek fan, who I think is just an absolutely brilliant person. And that had a huge influence me, he's a much deeper thinker than people sometimes give him credit for, because he gets used as a kind of cartoon figure as the bad right, but he's, legitimately one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century - got a lot wrong, but there's a lot that's really deep in his stuff about cultural evolution, why it is that ideas persist and stuff like that. That is really profound. But so I was like, Okay, I'm gonna marry you know, I'm gonna make John Rawls and Friedrich Hayek have babies.drvolts   42:07  Synthesis, right, this is the first, like, insofar as there's a retreat from ideology, right, it begins there. Right. Okay. Other people have some good points, I'll synthesize them and make them better.Will Wilkinson  42:20  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And around the same time I was into this, you know, we're kind of mutually influencing each other. Brink Lindsay, you know, wrote this essay about left leaning libertarianism for the New Republic that got titled Liberal-tarianism. Because, like, you know, working at Cato, or being libertarian, libertarians always say, you know, we're not really left or right, you know, like, they want to claim this kind of neutral ground sort of thing. And I was like, really into that. And, and I took it seriously, which made me dumb.drvolts   42:56  Right? Well, if you just look at the words on the page, right, if you just look at the ideas and the deductions and the implications of the words themselves, it makes sense right? If you're just ignoring all the social undercurrents and, you know, psychological and emotional and political undercurrents beneath it, you can continue believing them.Will Wilkinson  43:15  I came to see, pretty clearly - when you work at the Cato Institute, you can't miss it. Then there's a broader social world, as part of this organization called America's Future Foundation, which is a youth club, young adults club for libertarians and fusion-ist conservatives. And you know, it's libertarian and fused with conservatives and I'm socially constantly around Republicans, just constantly and so I was like, okay, it's pretty clear to me that, I would go to other libertarian things to the, you know, the Marijuana Policy Project or whatever it was called, the weed legalization people who probably did a better job than just anybody that was ever around. They've had tremendous success, right? They were kind of hippie-ish left wing libertarians, but that's just not what most of it was right? And even a lot of those people were right wing. And so I was like, I understand why this is the case sociologically that, you know, republicans and conservatives and libertarians were part of this cold war anti-communist coalition. But man, as you know, the mid aughts. The Cold War has been over for 15 years. Can we get past these contingent alignments, right? So Brink and I are like we need to make good on this thing we like if there can be libertarian conservative fusion-ism there can be a libertarian-liberal fusion, and we pursued that. drvolts   45:05  Did you have dreams at that point? Or did Brink have dreams? Or maybe both of you have dreamed of making that into a bonafide thing that was going to end up, you know, having its own whatever, think tanks and yeah, in political presence, like, did you think it could become that?Will Wilkinson  45:24  I'm not a very strategic person. So, so, yeah, I think that was the fantasy that it would catch on and have influence. I think at some point, maybe we could, you know, take over Cato, which was short sighted. But, yeah, we had these monthly dinners that Brink organized with Steve Tellus, a political theorist at Johns Hopkins, that we just called them the liberal-tarianism dinners. And it would be a bunch of, you know, people from Cato and other libertarian ish people from around DC. For some reason people, you know, Megan McArdle, visit some people who worked at The Economist, and then just like liberal, you know, wonks people from Brookings, people from cap, people from just, you know, wherever, from the nation, from the New Republic. And so we, through that process, Brink, and I got ourselves embedded in the left of center, DC journalist, in a wonk, in public policy circles, and a lot of those people became our friends. And that changes you too, a lot of these people are just like smart people who are really impressive. And I even feel like we were really successful in pulling them in our direction. But the way it works is that they pull you in their direction, as well. And the Tea Party happened.drvolts   47:08  And yeah, I was gonna say part of this, part of this seems to me - and this is what puzzles me about all the other libertarians - is that among these other things going on, around them around the kind of (well, I mean, you could see the undercurrents for decades but it's we're busted out in the open is Tea Party) it's just the Republican Party evolving in a way that is diametrically opposed to whatever libertarian instincts remain in the party. You know what I mean? Like exactly heading in the direction of sort of irrational identitarianism and cultural resentment and all that stuff like that, this is what I don't get is how you can still be a professional libertarian and still be attached to that party. I mean, it was plausible, I guess, you know, the early aughts, certainly in like the 90s, or something like that. But at this point, like, what is left of libertarianism in the actual Republican party? Will Wilkinson  48:01  I mean we've been having this completely hilarious discourse about vaccine passports. And people opposing them on libertarian grounds. And it's just incoherent. It's just completely incoherent. Right? Like, we have to get the state to ban private organizations from requiring proof of vaccinations. They've completely lost their moorings, and to the extent that the right doesn't have libertarian impulses, it has impulses that it sees as libertarian, because they're things that they inherited from the conservative fusionists like Ron Paul, who emphasized all of the liberal aspects of libertarianism, right? Like Rand Paul was still against the Civil Rights Act and things like that. Freedom of association is so important, that it's just completely legitimate for the law to do anything to rectify 400 years of the enslavement and apartheid and brutal oppression, like, “no freedom, no, freedom of association is too important”. But everybody understands, and this is one of the things that took me a while, but I did start to understand and this was because of reading so much political philosophy and countering these arguments over and over again, that we don't get to start from Day Zero and the allocation of goods and resources that people get, isn't a function of their individual initiative. Everything has a history, and the history is broken, and actually one of the people who convinced me of this the most was Robert Nozick. Who says very radical things in Anarchy, State and Utopia. He's very clear that his argument doesn't apply to the actual world, his theory. He's, I mean, he's very frank about it. Right? Like, if we had a just initial acquisition, you know, there's an initially just distribution of goods, if we started from a point of perfect equality, and then people made these voluntary exchanges that led to inequalities emerging, then there would be no justification for redistributing it, right? That's what he's saying. But he's definitely not saying that he explicitly says that the distribution that we have doesn't reflect a bunch of just exchanges, it reflects a bunch of people stealing stuff from other people, and taking that sort of thing really seriously after a while, and seeing how irrelevant that is to actual libertarians, DR: I was gonna say, so what? Like, what would happen if we all started from square one and had you know, an initial just exchange of resources and went from there like, so what, like, who cares? What applies in that situation? It's not a human situation that's ever happened or ever will happen? I would summarize the arguments that led me away from libertarianism in two ways, and you're sort of referencing the second one here a little bit. One is on a personal level, this notion that I'm responsible for what I do, you're responsible for it, I should be able to do whatever I want to do unless it harms you. Right? That's kind of the libertarian. And so you look a little closer at, well, what are they? What do I mean to harm you? It's clear enough? If I punch you, right, but what if I smoke a cigarette and your kid is in the same room? Or what if I drive to work? I emit some greenhouse gases, which in some incremental, very distant, attenuated way, harms everybody on Earth. So then the question then becomes, well, where do you draw the line of harm, what counts as harm? And then the more you think about that, the more you realize, all the philosophical work is being done, by your definition of what counts as harm, which does not follow from any of the libertarian  premises, it's just a moral decision. It's, you know, it's a moral decision, what am I going to count as negative harm and then what's too attenuated to count, and where do you draw that line? Everything falls out of that, and what you sort of realize that, this is what I realized, is the basic sort of like John Muir, you know - you pull on one thing, and you find it attached to everything - sentiment, like everything I do, literally everything I do, affects other people in some way or another. So what ought to apply were I an atomic unit is irrelevant, because I'm not and no one ever is, or can be in politics. You know, you want to maximize freedom, which, in a clean world, where we're starting fresh, might be purely negative freedom, right? You just don't impede people, don't mess with people, don't prevent them from doing things. But in the world we live in to truly secure freedom, if freedom means anything, if freedom has any substantive content, it requires intervention by the government, it requires active intervention by government. And then again, you're just drawing a line of like, well, what increment of last freedom in the past, justifies government intervention today. And again, it's more or less an arbitrary line where you draw like everything falls out of where you draw that line. And it turns out the clean slate is totally mythological. We're all always already meshed in all these historical obligations and responsibilities and histories. And so just the cleanness and clarity, which is what attracted me, as a teen, I realized as I got older is like, in so far as that's attractive and clean, it's because it's wrong and has no application to the actual world and is not going to make me happy and it's not going to make a good society. And you're sort of like you referenced that in, you know, the clean slate stuff. And so this brings you, I think, to libertarianism, which is, as I understand it, this notion that yes, we want to maximize freedom, right like the libertarians, but we acknowledge that merely refraining right from mistreating people will not have the intended outcome. Right? Right. You have to, you have to purposefully create the conditions of freedom. So then you were there for a while and liberaltarianism in it kind of never really seemed to catch on. And you also say that you've kind of moved past it, or would no longer use that term or sort of like, I don't know, moved beyond it. So where was the fault in this synthesis? Like, why did you end up sort of becoming dissatisfied with it in the end?Will Wilkinson  55:39  Well, you know, that's hard, because I stopped calling myself a libertarian when I still saw myself as libertarian, right, like, it was a deeply embedded, deeply internalized aspect of my identity. But at a certain point, I saw that the things that I thought were so heterodox, I was kind of abusing the term if I was applying it to myself, because, because a lot of people would think that I wasn't if they knew what I thought, even though I still felt that I was just interpreting liberty correctly. And similarly with with liberal-tarianism, one of the main components of that is something that I've called the free market welfare state, which you want, markets that are innovative, not onerously regulated, so that markets can be dynamic, prices can move freely, you want the right regulations, you need to take care of externalities and public goods and things like that. But we ought to be aiming for a dynamic, innovative high growth economy, because the humanitarian upshot of economic growth is immense. And so that's something we ought to be going for and markets that are competitive, and innovative and dynamic are a huge part of that. But it seems clear to me from the political science literature, that people will only tolerate that kind of dynamism, that disruptive innovation that drives growth, if they are insulated from the downside risks of all of this dislocation and creative destruction. People aren't gonna tolerate having their jobs offshored, you know, like having a new technology just completely put your business out of business. Like if they don't know what they're gonna do. Right? How am I going to feed my kids? People want social insurance, it's the most freakin popular thing in the world. You can't get around it, the richer people get, the more government they demand. You know, it's almost a law. And I forget what the name of it is, Wagner's law? It's not really a law, but like, it's Wagner's consistent regularity. That, as you know, GDP per capita goes up, demand for government goes up. And a lot of that is that people want social insurance. That's the most expensive.drvolts   58:42  This is part of something you've been writing about a lot lately. This is part of what explains the deep strain of anti-democratic sentiment within libertarianism is that if you give people the choice, they do not choose libertarianism.Will Wilkinson  58:59  Yep. I mean, it really does come down to that. But it's interesting, that's the view of basically anybody with a dogmatic ideological theory exactly like you said, because people don't choose it, you won't choose it right? So we need to have the revolution, and, you know, install the party, because democracy is gonna end up being counter revolutionary, right? Everybody has the same problem, unless you're just going to be a consistent, small d Democrat, where you just get to be like, “Hey, you know what, I'm going to just freakin live with people disagreeing and I think that people ought to get what they vote for”.DR:Well, we'll, we'll return to that later, too. WW: Yeah. So if you stop fighting that, I mean, it's not just that right. It's not just that people overwhelmingly demand unemployment insurance and some kind of health insurance. That has some like public backstop all of that old age insurance, Social Security, Medicare, they want it bad, and they get it (except for health care in the United States). But we're not communists and it's not just that that stuff actually does enable the economy to be dynamic, it's just really, really clear that people are much more tolerant of market liberalisation, when they're insulated from the shocks, So if you leave people comfortable, you know, if I lose my job, I'm going to get unemployment for however long, my kids are going to have public education, even if I lose my job, my kids are going to have health care, even if I lose my job, right, people stop worrying so much about having dynamic markets is going to make them lose their job, right? It's kind of obvious why it would.drvolts   1:01:02  This seems so common sense to me, I guess, looking back, now, it's just any system, any living system, really any sort of, self-maintaining system, you know, like in biology, look at computer programs, it needs some degree of openness, and some degree of structure and stability, right, and you want to balance too much openness and you get dissolution, too much structure, and you get decay, and rot. So you want a balance of structure and dynamism and that seems trivially obvious when you think about living systems in biology or even social systems. It's only an ideologue who could ever sort of imagine like, going all the way in one of those directions, is some sort of skeleton key.Will Wilkinson  1:01:57  But why it is that ideas of spontaneous order and emergent order are so important to libertarians in a certain kind of conservative because you have to believe that a certain structure is going to emerge out of all these individual acts of exchange, trade, and blah, blah, blah, you know, and to a large extent it does, but the thing is, politics is just endogenous to all of it all the time anyway, and the big fallacy is, you know, thinking that there's some, that there's the market on the one hand and the state on the other hand, and that they're antagonistic. And this is another thing that just had a big effect on me, like I started getting some economic history when I worked at the Mercatus Center and other Kochtopus, libertarian organizations, I ran a series of seminars that were led by Douglas North, who is a wonderful - he died a few years back, he was in his 90s - but a Nobel Prize winning economic historian, and I don't know why exactly Mercatus was financing junkets on his behalf because he wasn't really remotely libertarian, but, it was a prestige thing for us. And, these seminars were amazing. It had some of the world's best economic historians, a bunch of economic theorists, amazing political scientists, you know, and I had to organize these things and take notes. And it was a huge education, and I learned a lot of economic history, and you start to see that, oh, markets exist, because governments create them, right? Like, yeah, they form a lot, you know, trade is always gonna happen, right? Like, you can't stop human beings from being like “you got a KitKat, you know, I'll give you a Reese's”. Right? Like, people are gonna trade. And people are going to trade in complicated ways. But a lot of forms of trade just aren't possible without somebody creating a kind of infrastructure that makes sure that, you know, contracts get enforced. drvolts   1:04:06  Yeah, this is so fundamental to me, I wanted to stop and focus on this point for a minute, because I've been thinking about this a lot lately. You will have trade, you always have trade, trade is just part of what humans do. If you want to scale it beyond tribal trades with other tribes, if you want to do it on any scale, you're gonna end up trading with people you don't know, and don't have any social or historical connection to. You don't have any of these sort of emotional or social bonds that might help enforce rules or honesty or whatever. So if you want to scale it up at all, you need rules that are separate from either tribe, and that both tribes agree to subsume their immediate interests to, right I mean, that's just like the basic structure of non-zero cooperation. We're going to, together, submit to this third party, this independent third party authority that consists of a set of rules and some mechanism to enforce those rules. And then you've got government. And to me this is the process by which humanity is improving itself and building up and becoming more complex and building up and outward, through these mechanisms of non-zero cooperation, all of which involve the same basic structure. And, to me, what's interesting about the US is it’s the closest thing a country came to being founded explicitly on that notion, right, we are not a tribe, or even a set of tribes, we are just a set of rules and procedures through which tribes can cooperate in a non-zero way. And to me, this is sort of the key. The central tension in politics is that I think if you look back over history, you'll see almost every advance in human welfare came out of that, came out of that system of non-zero cooperation and agreement to third party rules. You can see it in science, you know, where I'm not right because I'm more influential, or have this or that degree, we all submit to the same rules of third party examination and peer review, and whatever else. These rule-based systems have produced everything that we love and is good, but they are always in tension with tribal imperatives and tribal instincts and the sort of instinct that if the rules tell me that I must sacrifice my tribes best interests, then f**k the rules, my tribe’s best interests are my are my thing, are my primary thing and any rules are secondary. And that's sort of all of human history, the buildup of non-zero cooperation, and then the periodic collapse of non-zero cooperation, because of these tribal instincts. And that to me, among other things, sort of renders this libertarian idea ridiculous in that it is only these rules and these structures and needs-enforcement mechanisms, which we call government, in some cases, that enable what we call markets, sophisticated, modern markets at all, or exchange of ideas or art or name it, it's all everything good comes out of that.Will Wilkinson  1:07:43  On my podcast I recently had Virginia Postrel who is the former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine. She’s just written this absolutely riveting book on the history of textiles. It kind of gets into the Political Economy of how we come to have the fabrics that we wear, it's called The Fabric of Civilization, it's a really good book. And, you know, you just look at textiles, and just, you know, it's one of the most fundamental things, every single culture in the world weaves, you know, in some way. So, how does that scale up into trade and Nike, if you follow that story, there's a certain point at which it's just face to face exchange, and then extending trade routes, and then there's a certain point at which you just can't do the non-zero sum exchanges, they get too complicated, the assurance problems get too hard How do you know that the other side is going to hold up their end of the deal? How do you retrieve lost resources when the other people screw you over? And immediately people come up with institutions to solve those problems. And those institutions are the law. States didn't exist to do this, right? States exist, because, you know, people are tyrants and want to lord over other people, and you know, princes fought over land and s**t like that, but they ended up having to play this role, or somebody else would, and they'd get richer and drive them out of business. So all these, you know, principalities sooner or later had to start providing these state services, and they all do because you can't get out of it. And the funny thing is people, libertarians and conservatives like to think of the United States as a specially libertarian place, but in a way, it's especially not because, I mean, the American state provides the the backstop currency for the entire world like we provide the light, clear shipping lanes is a global public good, that is mainly enforced by the incredible threat of American naval hegemony. Right? The American state is incredibly powerful. And the modern economy, the modern global economy, not just the modern American economy, depends critically on the American state, doing things, you know, the Federal Reserve doing things, the Treasury doing things, the US military doing things. The status quo is just, you know, not even remotely libertarian, and a lot of this stuff that libertarians, conservatives for some reason, a lot of like, the military, or whatever are in the business of providing these global public goods, but they tend to see market structure as being something that's emergent and evolved rather than politically chosen and implemented and sustained. I do find that incredibly naive, and it's important to see just how political all of our markets are, because one of the things that drives me crazy is intellectual property law, you know, copyrights, patents, they're just outright theft, right? They're state enforced monopolies, they probably put a damper on innovation. And they make us poorer. And they're obviously just fake, you know, it's just the state is there, right? It’s just made up out of thin air. And it makes a lot of sense. You want to incentivize people to discover stuff, and you want them to be able to internalize that portion of the overall gains as a certain kind of compensation for their intrepid productivity and discovery. But they don't have to be long, they don't have to be restrictive. But the American economy is structured soup-to-nuts by intellectual property law. Just absolutely. I can get arrested for fixing my computer, it's just crazy.And so once you understand that markets are political, just in that very simple way that markets are structured by the legal definition of property rights. And that we can be actively involved in structuring them in different ways. Once you realize that you can actually be more constructive about trying to build the dynamic markets, you have to build them. Markets don't stay competitive by themselves, for instance, they just don't,drvolts   1:12:47  Yes, there's no final structure that gets things right. That's like, set it and forget it, right, which is another thing that is an attraction, I think of libertarianism, especially to sort of young left brain males is like, “get this system in place, and then we're good”. At least to me this is pretty fundamental to my philosophical development, there is no end to that, right. This is what you mean by politics never goes away, there is no end to the process of negotiation and amendment and updating and fighting and contestation. And this is what pluralism means. It is like that process of haggling things out with one another, is not an interim state on the way to something else. It just is. It just is human affairs. What’s the quote, “One must imagine Sisyphus Happy”. Right. The longer I've sat with that the more profound I think it is, and I think it has to do with this getting comfortable with the ambiguity, and frustrations and half measures that come with pluralism. And this I sort of like, I'll skip a few steps since I definitely want to get to this. And this gets to my central question about America these days. But, you know, as I've thought about it and gone through philosophies of everything, I'm very attracted to philosophies of everything. I've just started thinking more and more lately, like, here's the kind of thought experiment I run in my head, like, what if God came down and said, “Hey, I'm real. I am in fact omniscient. And like, your, your philosophy is correct. You got it, right. Like all the other ones are wrong, objectively, metaphysically. You are correct.” And I just think, well, what would change in the world if that happened? If it turned out I not just thought I was right, but I actually was right. And I actually did know the right system. And the more I think about it, just nothing would change. Like fake news, see that was changing the world. It would be indistinguishable from me just thinking I'm right. And so I would still end up having to negotiate with people who believe differently than me, and find some way for us all to live together, peacefully. So that process of politics, of pluralism, of figuring out a way for people who believe different things to live together peacefully, is the meat of the real thing. And it's not some frustrating shadow on the wall of a true political philosophy that we could someday reach. Right? It's like that is the meat and potatoes of politics, the final state of politics is haggling and fighting, just never quite knowing and never quite getting the perfect measure. This philosophical pragmatism led me to write in, in a similar way, sort of like Rorty’s whole point, that he kind of thought himself out of analytic philosophy. I sort of feel the same way. Like, at the end of the day, whatever these truths are, you're still stuck in a world full of people who believe different truths. So we've got to figure out how to live together. And so figuring out how to live together as the whole thing, it's not a frustrating distraction from the real thing.Will Wilkinson  1:16:44  I agree with that completely like, and then that has been a big shift in my overall outlook once that sunk in. You know, I've written a lot about why libertarians are skeptical of democracy. And it comes down to what you said before, the problem with it is that people won't vote for libertarianism. But I, for a long, long time, have had this kind of general skepticism about democracy. You know people aren't really that smart. You know, people are poorly informed. It's amazing what people don't know, about politics. I love the factoid that, that this huge realignment of working class whites came about just because Barack Obama was black. And it's not just like that they were racist. It's just they didn't know which party was the party for like white people.drvolts   1:17:43  It's amazing how much poor analysis happens in political circles by people who just cannot really conceive or internalize the depth of public ignorance. So they have to create these other explanations for things that happen.Will Wilkinson  1:17:57  I mean, I just find it amazing that just having a black guy as president made a lot of union members be like, “Oh, that's the party of civil rights, and the party for white people's interest is the other party” like, people didn’t know. But if that's the way it is, if there is such endemic public ignorance, you know it's reasonable to be a bit wary of what democratic publics are going to do. But in the end there's just no way to get around people disagreeing. If you want to say that “oh, people have these rights, or people have those rights” they're politically effective, they're real, if enough people agree that you're right, yes. Right. Like you're saying, it doesn't matter who's right. Because you're not going to convince everybody that so and so is right. So the whole thing, and that's the kind of the Rortian point is that if people all just kind of agree that this is a right and the courts agree, and the legislators agree and people don't relentlessly campaign against the recognition of this right and try to install judges who won't, then it's a right, that's what it is for something to be a right, it has a social reality, it's exactly the same as why our money's worth anything. It's because everybody thinks it's worth something and that's good.drvolts   1:19:30  Yes, but much like people don't understand money for partially psychological reasons, like something about that terrifies people, or just unsettles people on a deep, deep level. You see this, you know, with traditionalists or religious people or even sort of philosophical realists or whatever, just this idea that like, wait a minute, if it's only real to the extent we agree it's real, we're just marshmallows, we're in mush. There's nothing to push off. There's no foundation, there's no sort of hard thing to put your back up against to get the friction. It's this ambiguous mush forever, that I think terrifies people. This is why people want God or whatever, there's a ground somewhere that we can find and get our bearings.Will Wilkinson  1:20:29  I mean, there's some fundamental psychological differences between people who are tolerant of ambiguity and people who find it very, very uncomfortable. I seriously think that the main foundational, ultimate reason why I have been able to change my mind a lot over time is that I'm extremely comfortable with ambiguity in the end. I’m okay in a suspended state and I feel that discomfort right now. I recently lost my last job, where I was supposed to be a kind of proponent for a certain kind of liberal-tarian-ism. And I was relieved to get out of it because I don't like having to be the champion or a representative. I just want to try to figure out what's right. I don't want to be constrained.drvolts   1:21:28  Ergo [???]Will Wilkinson  1:21:29  Yeah, [???]. In one of my favorite essays, by the novelist, Donald Barthelemy, who is the kind of patron saint of the MFA program I went to at the University of Houston, it's a beautiful essay called Not Knowing and this is about writing fiction but it applies to just about everything; that art comes out of a certain comfort with not knowing with being in this uncomfortable suspended state of ambiguity. There's a similar thing as this term from Keats, like negative capacity [sic]. It's one of my favorite ideas.drvolts   1:22:18  Can we acknowledge that this is an unusual psychological feature?Will Wilkinson  1:22:28  I don't think it's unusual for a certain kind of person, like Ayn Rand, fucked up my life. I'm supposed to be an artist, right? Like this is how artists are.drvolts   1:22:39  For a certain kind of person, it’s more usual in like, art, or poetry or writing or acting or something like that, right, which is about humans and therefore must wrestle with ambiguity. I think it's more unusual for that kind of person to go into politics, right? Because people tend to be attracted to politics through some theory that they think is correct and right.Will Wilkinson  1:23:04  Politics will just absolutely repel people with a great deal of negative capacity [sic].drvolts   1:23:10  And fear, you know, I think we both acknowledge that these personality traits are not fixed quantities, right? They're variable based on circumstance, social circumstance, and things like that. And of course, as we know, fear sends people in the other direction, fear pulls people away from ambiguity and makes them more desirous of clarity, more desirous of clear in and out rules. I think this tolerance of ambiguity is sort of crucial for humanity's healthy future but it's just so defeasible, it's so easy. You have to engage your frontal cortex to do that, which means your amygdala has to be a little bit quiet, you have to calm these fight or flight systems in order to be able to exercise the kind of frontal cortex thinking that can allow you to see sort of the virtues of ambiguity and non-zero cooperation, all these things, but it's just so easy to get people scared. I don't know how good things ever happened in politics. I've talked myself into a position where I think everything good is miraculous. Will Wilkinson  1:24:25  I mean, we've done the very common thing of seeing why our own personality type is awesome. The height of the very high openness, very low conscientiousness is the negative capacity [sic]. That's the art style, that's the free associative, like “try it out, you don't really care”, right?drvolts   1:24:52  I have that. But I also have that rationalist. The person who craves clarity, the person who is attracted to libertarianism in the first place, I also have that person inside me. And those two people do not necessarily cohere.Will Wilkinson  1:25:09  They do, I mean this is something I've thought a lot about like why are some of my best friends people that I met at the objectivist camp when I was an undergraduate? And the thing is because it turns out, they were like me, like, everything depends on where you start. Right? In people, it's not people's fault. If you started out reading Marx or you started out reading Ayn Rand you'll get on a different track, but where you end up is going to depend on what kind of person you are. And a lot of the people who I’m still friends with from objectivist camp are people who are really high openness. They're incredibly intellectual and curious and they were really curious about Ayn Rand and objectivism at the same time that I was, but that wasn't going to be the end of their curiosity, it was the beginning. And then they move on. But there's nothing inconsistent with having a logical rationalist disposition and this all consuming curiosity about different views and different cultures and things like that. And if you've got that kind of personality you're going to have a hard time sticking with a dogmatic tribe. But once you figured out that they're doing something that doesn't make sense. It's going to bug you.drvolts   1:26:31  So let me skip to what I think is the key, the central question about America before we're done, because I really wanted to grapple with this, and we sort of laid some groundwork. WW: Cancel culture?DR:Exactly, exactly. I'm talking about Dr. Seuss. No, you know, as we said earlier, the US in its founding documents, and theorizing, is a nation founded not on any tribe or class of people, but on ideas - all people have dignity, all people have rights, rule of law, not of man - which as I grow older think is more and more important, more and more central to everything, this idea that we're all governed by these procedures, these objective third party arbiters. And that's how we make pluralism work, right, we all submit to this shared set of principles and values and rules. And within that, we can have our own whatever culture, our own cultural ideas, our own religion, religious freedom, our own freedom of philosophy and association, right? So pluralism is going to live by virtue of these rules. And then there's this other America, you might call it, the actual America, which is very much founded by a particular tribe and class of people, and in practice, has always violated its principles and rules to elevate and maintain the dominance of those people. You know, there's white money, property owning, whatever, on and on. So there's this core tension in America. And I have just started wondering, is that resolvable? So if you come to America, with what they call thick cultural commitments, right, you believe in Christianity, say, if you really believe in Christianity, then it sort of follows that you should want everybody else to be Christian. Right? It's sort of like it is inherently totalizing, as most sort of like hardcore fundamentalist philosophies or religions tend to be. And so can you genuinely hold on to those thick commitments and also submit to this thinner commitment to procedural-ism? Right? I mean, that's kind of what America is, that's what pluralism is. You can keep your thick commitments as long as you abide by these procedures, these rules, these institutions, right. And that's an inherent tension. And it's been resolved in the past, by hypocrisy, right. It's basically through white men, running things while saying words about procedural neutrality, and waving their hands at procedural neutrality, but now demographics are changing and people are starting to notice that and demand their own piece of the pie. And so that test of those procedural commitments is happening now. And I guess what I'm trying to ask is, is it really possible for those thin commitments to procedural neutrality, to a common set of laws and rules and institutions, is it possible for that to be enough to sustain human beings, psychologically and socially? Or do they need thick commitments to particular tribes, particular Gods what have you, particular histories. If they do need thick commitments, can they then live together under these thin commitments? In other words, I guess what I'm asking is, is true pluralism actually possible, psychologically? Is it something that humans can genuinely do?Will Wilkinson  1:30:57  I think so. I think it's hard. This thick/thin tension isn't ever going to go away, people do need thick identities. Very few people are, you know, deracinated, cosmopolitan liberals with, you know, a high tolerance for ambiguity who just think negative capacities [sic] are the greatest thing in the world, right…drvolts   1:31:18  People like us could live within that world but I think we established we’re freaks.Will Wilkinson  1:31:21  …ideologically relish contestatory democracy and pluralism. But I think that is always going to be a minority view. What we're going through right now, I don't really think it's a battle between thick, white Christian identity and thin American proceduralism. It's just the most normal thing in politics, that politics is always distributively hot, right? It's distributively high stakes, and the composition of our population has changed a great deal and the relative power of a certain kind of white person, white Christians, has precipitously declined. And they're terrified about loss of control over the culture, and the economy and their sense of status. And I don't think it's about maintaining a thick Christian lifestyle, because religious participation has fallen off a cliff and there are tons of Trumpist conservatives who don't go to church, who will say that they're Christian, but actually have no religious practice in their life. So they'd probably be better off if they were animated by a thick conception of the good and religion. I think there's something nihilistic about this kind of person, just, you know, getting on board.drvolts   1:32:54  It's a culture, though. I mean, it's a specific culture, right? Pickup trucks, Arby's, owning the libs, yeah, yeah. You know.Will Wilkinson  1:33:01  Yeah cultural politics has replaced a lot of religion stuff, but I think we're just going through a lot of turmoil because we're at this inflection point where white Christians are already in the minority, you know, population is going to be majority non-white by 2042 or so, or just barely more than 20 years. And the current coalition that is the Republican Party isn't going to survive in a pluralistic democratic society that is as diverse and multicultural as the one we are coming to have. And these are death throes and they're dangerous places. This happens over and over and over and over again, in history, where the dominant men are the dominant group, where a majority falls into the minority, and then they get nasty. Right, it happens again and again.drvolts   1:34:06  Yes, that is politics. WW:Yeah, basically. And so I think it's gonna stay nasty for a while. DR:But the question I'm trying to get at is, I think there are people who would argue, America worked, because there was a dominant identity and culture. And it was defined at least in part by openness to other cultures and by allowing other cultures and colors and ethnicities and languages to come and sort of hang out as long as they didn't get too uppity. But I think there are people who would argue democracy really only works if there is a primary culture, and if a primary culture falls and loses its hegemony, it's going to be replaced by another one. There's no such thing as a stable state with multiple, equally non-dominant cultures. That's what I mean by true pluralism. I think there are people who would argue that true pluralism just can't survive and the throes are gonna end up in the replacement of one culture by another.Will Wilkinson  1:35:21  I think you’re making a point that we went through in a different guise, that a lot depends on social agreement. Facts with social ontologies depend on the agreement and one of those facts is the authority of the state, the legitimacy of a democratic system. And people have to agree about it to have it. Agree enough about it, for us to have it. And right now, we've got a lot of disagreement, basically that the Republican Party is against democracy, its theory is that the other party isn't fully American, that they're citizens only in a technical sense, but not in a moral sense.drvolts   1:36:08  The US is their culture, not the procedural, not the laws and procedures, it's their culture, that is the essence of the United States. And if their culture is dethroned, even if you have the laws and procedures still in place, you don't have America.Will Wilkinson  1:36:24  Right? And so they're contesting the legitimacy of the laws and procedures for this other reason, right? It's not like they have some philosophical problem with majoritarian institutions. They have a tribal problem with majoritarian institutions. And I think it's true that in the long run, if you're going to sustain liberal democratic institutions, there does need to be a common narrative about what the country is and what it means. But I don't think…drvolts   1:37:01  How thick that needs to be, I guess, is what I'm trying…Will Wilkinson  1:37:03  Yeah, but I'm skeptical of the thick/thin dichotomy. Because I know what you mean by thickness in some daily practice sort of way. If I'm really religious, and I've got to pray five times a day and face Mecca, I think most people need that kind of thickness in their life, but I don't think it's necessarily political. Because the reasons those identities are political, it's either people are threatened because they're in the minority, and the majority is trying to stomp on their identity, or what's happening now is you've got a majority that's dwindling into a minority, and they're panicked and trying to hold on. But I don't think there's a problem for most American-Muslims or most American-Buddhists or most American-Jews in living a thick religious life, for example. That's consistent with their allegiance to a certain conception of America, like what you said before, that there being this inherent tension between America's ideals and America's history, I think is the story, right? That is the story that everybody can accept, that thing that we can all agree on, and that we can be proud of is that we have these ideals that are beautiful. And that who we are, are people who have struggled over time to make good on our ideals, so that they apply to everyone. And everybody can buy into that in theory.drvolts   1:38:48  I just don't know. I mean, I guess everybody. I guess my cynical suspicion is that if you're a minority culture or minority ethnicity or whatever, obviously, that conception of procedural fairness and pluralism is to your advantage. So in a system like ours, it's natural that all kind of subaltern populations and factions are going to proclaim allegiance to that set of values, right, but then if they gain some power and dominance, if one of them say, were to gain some special privileges or whatever it just seems like those commitments would go overboard and they would become committed to their continued power, you know. I mean, it's only like a tool for subaltern populations trying to get a piece of the pie. And I just wonder if it's enough, if it's a stable thing.Will Wilkinson  1:39:54  It's not stable but this is just what we were talking about, that of Sisyphus being happy. Right. That's just it, people are going to disagree, they're going to get mad about it, they're going to try to undermine the system when it's against their faction’s interests. And you have to try to do whatever you can to have systems where the coalition of the rest of everybody who has an interest in maintaining the rules that some faction is trying to undermine is sufficient to hold them up. The system will never fall into a steady state equilibrium where we don't have to worry about it spinning out of control, every system is sooner or later going to spin out of control. The American system is weird in the sense that it has persisted for so long, despite so many internal tensions.drvolts   1:40:51  Yeah baffling, the more you learn about history, the more baffling that fact becomesWill Wilkinson  1:40:56  …this government's collapse. Something I just wrote was that constitutions don't survive because the framers were brilliant, they survive, because they're always fucked up, they're always inadequate, we can never anticipate how people are going to bend the rules, how they're going to exploit them. But Hayek is right about spontaneous orders, we don't know what order will emerge on top of a set of fundamental rules when you first put them in place. You don't know what factions are going to realign around those rules and what their dynamics are going to be. So the system is always going to tend toward some kind of destabilization. And it is always about being creative and flexible, about figuring out how to shore up the system. And that's one thing Americans have been good at, we're good at kludges. That's one of the things that annoys me about conservatives these days is there's so much worship of the framers and this originalist conception of the Constitution, when seriously the fact that our country survives at all is because we're pragmatic, we're we're arbitrary, we would just change the rules. By definition, every constitution is living, they survive by being changed so that they're not incompatible with the order that is emerging. And so we've got this crazy kludgy patched system, that somehow it's this jalopy that is flying and who knows how it stays up?drvolts   1:42:43  Doesn't that terrify you though, doesn’t that terrify the mechanic. Like, I don't know how this thing's running, but I'm gonna get in there and f**k with the engine anyway?Will Wilkinson  1:42:52  I've become Zen about it, right. Of course, I'm terrified of the plane crashing. And especially since right now, about 40% of the country is just straightforwardly trying to crash it. So that is alarming. But I just think that this is it. This is what life is, this is politics and life is political. There's not a way out of it, there's not a better place to go that's gonna be better permanently. It's just what it is. And my parents, my grandparents were alive with the worst war in the history of the world. Everything f*****g fell apart, right? And there's nothing that's gonna stop that from happening again, it will happen again and you just have to try to be a finger in the dam and hope that enough other people get their fingers in there. And sometimes it's just gonna fail. You're just not going to get enough fingers in the f*****g dam and it's gonna break and you're all gonna die. And there's nothing we can do about it. Except try to put your finger in the dam and try to convince other people to do it.drvolts   1:44:05  Right, right. Another thing that makes me uncomfortable about that, but I guess I just have to get used to it, is for me that vision of kludgy jalopy being held together by our patches as we go forward, that's never done. This never fixed that. We're all constantly fighting over that contested pluralism that never resolves into any clean one system or another. I can get behind that as that's life, as good as it gets. It's better than the many tyrannical alternatives. Right? But I just don't envision that idea or that vision, inspiring that many people. I mean, it's terrifying. It's just inherently terrifying. Will Wilkinson  1:45:07  Well I don’t think people have to think that's what it is. It's not important that people see the system for what it is. Because that's internal to this view, that people are going to disagree about what the system is, and people aren't going to see it the same way. And people are going to have fanatical absolutist ideologies that they're going to try to ram through. And that's just, we just have to live with it. People don't need to believe that that's the way things are. I'm not making some Straussian point that…drvolts   1:45:39  Yeah, I was gonna say we're tiptoeing up to Strauss.Will Wilkinson  1:45:41  No, because I'm not saying that there's something that people need to believe to survive, and that we need to tell people to mobilize. I'm going to just tell people what's true, this is how the system is, this is how democracy is, don't worry about the fact that our disagreements aren't ever going to resolve, that's not a bad thing. It's a great way to live in a society where we can hash it out, keep it within the rails of the political system, rather than having it spill over into violence. If we're yelling at each other and screaming at each other and we're not actually forming mobs and attacking the Capitol during the validation of election results, then we're doing okay. If we start f*****g attacking the Capitol while the elections being certified, then that's bad. And the system will f*****g crash if people keep doing it. And I think you can just tell people that.drvolts   1:46:41  Can you though because one of the things that polls are always finding (well, this is interesting, it's not actually true across parties) but you know, legendarily one of the things that Democrats or Democratic voters in particular on surveys and polls will tell you “Oh, I hate all the fighting” and I hear this from normie friends too, non-political friends, just all the fighting and squabbling, something about it bugs people and they wish people could just be more cooperative and get along better. So telling people that fighting and squabbling is like fingernails on a chalkboard. That's just it forever. That's our life. Can you really tell people that it makes them happy? I don't know that people like that state of affairs.Will Wilkinson  1:47:28  I don't think people like it. But here's the thing. We're talking about political ignorance before like most people aren't going to listen. They're going to watch ESPN. They're going to watch Ohio State like, you know, and get really depressed when they lose or something. But like they're so they're not going to hear us. And that's fine. That's part of it too.drvolts   1:47:47  All right. Well, thanks for coming on. Thanks for this discussion WW:It was a delight. Thank you. Yeah, let's do it again. Awesome. 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

It is now widely agreed among energy wonks that the fastest, cheapest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to, as I like to put it, electrify everything. That means cleaning up the electricity system while shifting other energy uses — especially transportation and buildings — off of fossil fuels, onto electricity.When it comes to electrification, one technology in particular sits at the nexus, helping to decarbonize the electricity system, vehicles, and buildings all at once. I'm speaking, of course, of the humble solar photovoltaic panel, a technology that has defied predictions for decades, getting cheaper and cheaper, spreading faster and faster.But the spread of solar panels is just the leading edge of a much larger, more important shift to electrified homes and communities. As I've followed electrification and all its implications, one of the people I've learned the most from, in conversation and through her writing, is Lynn Jurich. In addition to being an insightful observer of the US energy system, Jurich also happens to be the co-founder and CEO of America's largest residential solar company. Sunrun has been around since 2007 and seen some ups and downs, but lately it has been all ups. The company adapted relatively quickly to the pandemic shutdown, invested heavily, and had a banner year in 2020. Then, to top it off, it bought Vivint, its leading competitor, for $3.2 billion. It is now sitting at the top of a burgeoning residential solar market, with a valuation of some $22 billion.I talked with Jurich about her new deal with Ford, the reason US residential solar costs twice what it costs in Germany, the ways distributed energy can help the grid, and the next steps for electrification. Thanks to her for coming on and to you for listening. If you value this kind of work, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber. 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

Chloe Holzinger, a battery analyst at IHS Markit, dives into the electrifying world of lithium-ion batteries. She discusses their pivotal role in sustainable energy and the booming electric vehicle market. Chloe explores advancements in battery technology, including new chemistries like silicon anodes and solid-state options. The conversation highlights challenges like supply chain issues and ethical sourcing of materials like cobalt, while also teasing innovative alternatives that could reshape energy storage. Buckle up for a journey through the future of battery innovation!

Welcome back, my Volts friends, to the Battery Week that never ends. (Just kidding — this is the last of it.) For several weeks now, I have had my head buried in batteries, specifically, lithium-ion batteries: how they work, why they have taken over so fast, what different varieties are competing for which markets, and where innovation will take them in the future.Even with as many PDFs as I’ve read, I'm still learning every day just how much I don't know. I'm not going to lie: I still have the Wikipedia page for lithium-ion batteries open in a tab.So I thought it would be nice to round out battery week with someone who actually knows what they're talking about. To that end, I was happy to chat with Chloe Holzinger, a battery analyst at IHS Markit. (At least, that’s what she was when I spoke with her, and how I introduce her on the pod; since then, she’s become an Investment Associate with The Engine, a venture capital firm spun out of MIT.)Chloe keeps up with lithium ion batteries for a living, so I was eager to talk with her about the growing market, the raw materials that make up batteries and their possible supply problems, the coolest new innovations in batteries, from solid state to liquid metal, and much more. She was generous with her time and I learned a ton. Enjoy.David Roberts   Hello, everyone, this is Volts and I am your host, David Roberts. For several weeks now, I have had my head buried in batteries, specifically, lithium ion batteries: how they work, why they have taken over so fast, what different varieties are competing for which markets, and where innovation will take them in the future. Even with as many PDFs as I have under my belt now, I'm still learning every day just how much I don't know. I'm not going to lie, listeners, I still have the Wikipedia page for lithium ion batteries open in a tab. So I thought it would be nice to round out battery week with someone who actually does know what they're talking about. To that end, I am joined today by Chloe Holzinger, a battery analyst with the clean energy technology and renewables team at IHS Market, a research and analysis firm. Chloe keeps up with lithium ion batteries for a living. So I was eager to talk with her about the growing market, the raw materials that make up batteries and their possible supply problems, the coolest new innovations in batteries, from solid state to liquid metal and much more. She was generous with our time and I learned a ton. So without further ado, let's get to the conversation.Welcome, Chloe. Thanks for coming on Volts.Chloe HolzingerThanks, David. Thanks for having me.David Roberts   All right, let's start maybe just a little bit by telling us how you ended up in the battery area studying batteries, analyzing batteries in the battery market. It's a strange niche field; how'd you end up there?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, I sort of fell into it by accident, as so many people do. I got my undergraduate degree in Marine Chemistry and my master's degree in Mechanical Engineering, and happened to find the one startup in the Boston area that was developing batteries for underwater applications. So I joined them as employee number six, got a patent, and worked for them until they got acquired by a defense contractor. I then hopped over to the market intelligence field, where I've been covering the broader next generation battery technology area, and the various end applications for batteries. And I've been here ever since.David Roberts   How long has that been? How long have you been immersed in batteries? Chloe Holzinger  Total, including the startup experience, is probably about five years.David Roberts   It's been an active time in that field! Let's just briefly talk about what lithium ion batteries are and where they came from. I think everybody's heard of them. At this point, they've kind of gotten a lot of hype, but maybe tell us when they entered the market, their market development and why they're kind of reaching this crescendo of hype right now. Chloe Holzinger  Sure. So I can provide a very brief history here. Lithium ion batteries were kind of invented separately at different stages by different companies. If I remember correctly, Kodak did some innovation on actual tape casting, which is the process that's used to actually make lithium ion batteries. Some of the core lithium ion battery technology itself was actually developed at Exxon way back when; they just kind of sat on that. Then some other different key breakthroughs were also developed at different corporations; I think Sony was one of them as well. I may apologize if I got any of that wrong. But they really were initially commercialized for the consumer electronics industry. Then smartphones and computing power got much better, laptops became more commonplace, they were able to eventually make the jump from consumer electronics and these small applications, to electric vehicles, whether you're talking about a Tesla or Toyota hybrid, lithium ion batteries have been pretty crucial. And now we're seeing them used in all these different kinds of electric mobility applications, as well as the grid storage space.David Roberts   What was the first time they showed up in an electric vehicle? Because, just intuitively, the leap from a laptop to electric vehicle seems like a pretty far leap. Who had that idea and made that happen the first time? Chloe Holzinger  You know, I don't actually know the exact history, but various people have been trying to make electric vehicles for a really long time. It's just before they were trying with lead acid batteries. So there were a few electric vehicle prototypes in Jimmy Carter's time, and they obviously didn't really go anywhere. As much as people have lots of lots of opinions – and I certainly do as well – about Elon Musk, you got to credit Tesla for really making the electric vehicle really sexy and popular again. David Roberts   Is it fair to say that Tesla, back in the Roadster era, which I guess was like 2008 or 2009, that that's kind of what kicked off the current frenzy of development? Or do you think it was inevitable?Chloe Holzinger  I think both. I think Tesla was really there. Right place, right time, right idea, which is a pretty tough combination to come up with. I think regardless, you're seeing electric vehicles really rise in all different parts of the world and different companies really leading the charge. And it's such an integral part of decarbonizing transportation and industry. You know, if it wasn't for Tesla, I'm sure it would have been some other company. But it happens to be this particular American company that really got it started here in the States at least.David Roberts   So, what's so great about lithium ion batteries? Let's just, just briefly kind of look at the chemistry in the materials. We had lead acid batteries, we had nickel metal hydride, nickel cadmium batteries; batteries have been around. So, at the sort of the chemistry level, what is it about lithium ion batteries, that's so great, that has allowed them to colonize these markets?Chloe Holzinger  I could wax poetic about lithium ion batteries. A lot of what I do in my various market roles is talk about all these other non lithium chemistries that people are trying to develop. And there really isn't a better alternative to lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles. Lithium ion batteries are exactly the right combination of energy density, it has good enough cycle life, which means that it has a fairly good battery life, it has great power density, it's able to charge in a reasonable amount of time, you know, all of these different factors. There are certainly some safety issues, but they're pretty safe. All of the other different kinds of battery chemistries out there, they have various strengths and weaknesses, but they're really unable to compete on all of those fronts for a vehicle application. You have these various different grid alternatives like flow batteries, some of which use vanadium or zinc. Those are really big and heavy; they are not light enough, simply, for a vehicle application. Lead acid batteries –  you replace your lead acid battery every few years or so in your car. It doesn't have a great cycle life; it certainly doesn't have a strong enough energy density in order to fully electrify a car with a reasonable all electric range. There's really just no competition with lithium ion batteries for mobility applications.David Roberts  Does that have something to do with lithium itself, just as a material? I mean, is lithium itself the secret sauce?Chloe Holzinger  In some ways, yeah. If you'd whip out your handy dandy periodic table that I know everybody carries around with them, lithium is towards the top [left] of the periodic table, which means that it's one of the lightest elements.David Roberts   So it's top left, I'm checking here. It looks like it's the [third] lightest material. Chloe Holzinger  It is, and right below lithium should be sodium. I haven't completely disappointed my chemistry teachers. Even if you go to that one row below lithium, that's a much bigger atom, and that bigger atom means that the energy density of that battery system is going to be smaller: you're going to have less ion exchange per kilogram of material. So the lightness of the lithium atom or element or ion is definitely a part of what makes lithium ion batteries superior to so many other different battery technologies. There are a few other different arguments here–there are some batteries that are multi-valence, in that they exchange a couple electrons instead of one electron, but those are still extremely early on in their development.David Roberts   Well, let's talk about the lithium ion battery market then. So you said, they sort of grew and completely ate consumer electronics, and then have jumped up and basically now dominate  EV's, I think. So what's the sort of lay of the land on lithium ion – where they're being used, what's driving all of this development and innovation?Chloe Holzinger  It's really the electric mobility space. Lithium ion batteries today are definitely good enough for an all electric vehicle, as we're clearly seeing. There are a few different factors that are driving further innovation in this area. So first is that automakers really want to be able to rely on this lithium ion battery value chain for the long term. There are a variety of different questions; whether or not they're valid is another point, but there are a lot of doubts about whether or not various key metals are able to scale up their production to meet some of these astronomical projections that automakers have around electric vehicles. Some of the crucial ones are nickel, cobalt, and lithium. There's a lot of innovation right now around developing technologies that are more robust against some of those fluctuations in key metals’ supply, demand, and pricing.David Roberts   I know they're expected to grow; every chart you see has the line shooting up into the right. But in terms of scale, compared to current nickel or cobalt demand for batteries, are we looking down the road at 2x, 10x, or 100x? When people are daunted about the scale of these metals, what do we mean by scale exactly? What are these projections?Chloe Holzinger  I think right now, for scale, all electric vehicles are 2 to 3% of annual new car sales. Automakers are saying that they're going to go all electric by 2035 or something, and California wants to ban ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles by 2050.David Roberts   Washington actually just said no new ICE vehicles sold after 2030.Chloe Holzinger Yeah, I mean, that's even more aggressive. And so to even meet that kind of target, you're talking some pretty dramatic scale ups of these upstream industries. In the lithium industry, lithium ion batteries were something about 30% of the total lithium market before electric vehicles took off, when it was really just consumer electronics. Today, 65%-67% of all lithium products go into lithium ion batteries, with the remainder being like glass and pharmaceuticals and all of these other kinds of niche applications. The lithium industry is really being driven by the lithium ion battery market. The nickel and cobalt industries are a bit different. But that's just [?????]David Roberts   Is this driving prices up? I mean, with all this new demand for lithium, has price become a problem yet, just for the raw material?Chloe Holzinger  No, not for any of the raw materials really. But right now, cobalt is really both the most expensive battery raw material, and the most well known to be sustainably problematic, whether you're talking about the human rights issues or the mines themselves. There's been a lot of coverage on the issues with cobalt mining.So there's been this effort over the past several years to move away from cobalt, because of these primarily price and sustainability reasons, but also because there are simply better technologies out there than some of these high cobalt chemistries. There are a ton of different battery chemistries and a ton of different lithium ion battery chemistries. And there are strong advantages to battery chemistries that don't use cobalt on the energy density front, on the cycle life front for some chemistries; there's just a wide diversity of chemistries out there that really make it possible for automakers to pick and choose what types of lithium ion batteries they really want to use for which models.David Roberts   Let's get into some of those variations and I'm curious about the sort of variations in chemistry and also sort of like what performance sort of advantages and disadvantages come with us with these different chemistries. So, the two sort of dominant chemistries, right now, or what have been for a while are NMC and NCA. NMC has nickel, manganese, and cobalt with its lithium, and NCA has got cobalt and aluminum. Both those notably involve cobalt. I know there's been some effort just within those categories to sort of change the proportions and shrink cobalt. Who's doing that, and what does that involve? What do you lose by losing cobalt, and what do you need to compensate?Chloe Holzinger  Pretty much everybody's working to reduce the amount of cobalt in these batteries. The NCA technology is really almost exclusive to Panasonic and Tesla, and they're currently really the only NCA mass producers. So NCA batteries are therefore used predominantly by Tesla for its electric vehicles, and they're not used at all in grid energy storage systems.David Roberts   And that's because they're extremely high energy density right? Is it something to do with the aluminum?Chloe Holzinger  Yes, they are very high energy density, and the Tesla Giga factories have been struggling to keep up with Tesla demand for a few years now. So even if there was demand for NCA batteries and energy storage systems, there just isn't supply for that. For Tesla in the NCA chemistry, they've been able to reduce the amount of cobalt in their batteries from 20% to 10% now. So they've been able to significantly reduce the amount of cobalt in those systems. For NMC, you know, this is the most commonly used cathode formulation in lithium ion batteries today. And as you noted, there are many, many different NMC formulations with varying ratios of those key nickel, manganese and cobalt components. This is where, to your question, it gets very interesting, in terms of varying the amount of cobalt. The early versions of NMC had equal amounts of nickel to manganese, cobalt, or NMC111. And the technology has since progressed to now, where there's a lot of talk and support for high nickel cathodes, which would be eight parts nickel to one part manganese to one part cobalt. So that's, again, if you're thinking about the ratios, dramatically reducing the amount of cobalt there, and the benefit is that these high nickel cathodes enable much greater energy densities. But the converse, the trade off here, as you noted, is that these high nickel cathodes are a bit less thermally stable than the lower cobalt cathodes, and that can impact cycle life and safety. So some of the reason why it's been a bit more difficult to commercialize these high nickel cathodes for mass produced electric vehicles, outside of China, is that some of these batteries need extra safety features at the pack level in order to counteract some of that increased thermal instability.David Roberts   Right. And when you add cooling systems and whatnot, you add weight and thus, lose a little bit of your energy density advantage.Chloe HolzingerRight, exactly. David RobertsBut the NMC 811 chemistry, that's the thing now, right? It was a GM that just sort of debuted that fairly recently. I thought it's all it's all the rage. Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, it's definitely a thing. It's been used in various electric vehicles in China for a year or two now, maybe a bit longer. And as you noted, it's definitely made its way outside of China as well. Even Volkswagen says that they are planning on using high nickel cathodes in their luxury vehicles. But, at the same time, you've also seen the rise of this other chemistry called LFP which is lithium iron phosphate, which has the lowest energy density compared to NMC and NCA, but it doesn't have cobalt and its core feedstocks, Iron and phosphate, are much easier to procure and much less vulnerable to price spikes than nickel, manganese or cobalt.David RobertsRight. And the loss of energy density for these LFP batteries–is that mainly because of the loss of nickel, just because iron and phosphate just won't hold as many ions as nickel? Is it that simple?Chloe Holzinger  It's a little bit more complex than that. It has to do partially with the cathode crystal formulations and really the cathode structure, which I really don't think I could explain at an intelligent level. You know, suffice it to say that LFP is structured entirely differently from NMC and NCA, and that different structure isn't able to hold as many lithium ions in a small enough space as NMC and NCA. And, iron’s heavy. These are not necessarily light batteries. But there have been innovations in pack design. With LFP, one of its advantages is that it does have better cycle life and it does have higher safety performance than NMC and NCA. We saw last June that BYD released a new battery pack architecture that removed a bunch of the safety features that were in there for NMC and NCA, and this pack architecture is specifically for LFP batteries in electric vehicles. At the pack level, these LFP batteries do achieve very competitive energy densities such that Tesla can use an LFP battery pack in its vehicles in China, and have those vehicles really achieve very competitive ranges and energy densities, compared to its NCA batteries back here.David Roberts   Right. I think in the Tesla battery day presentation, I believe the way they put it was that LFP–just the chemistry–has 50% of the energy density of their high nickel chemistry. But at the pack level, you get 75% of the range, because of the lack of safety and cooling, and everything. VW actually said something similar with that–they're going to use LFP in their lower end, sort of workaday cars where you don't need energy density. Let's just pause here and talk about energy density for a minute. Energy density – tell us what energy density is, and why it's so prized in these applications.Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, so energy density is basically, very simply, the amount of energy you can cram into a particular kilogram or volume of space. So there's gravimetric energy density and volumetric energy density. You want more energy in that set unit, because then that extends the vehicle’s range, if you're talking about a vehicle application. So higher energy density batteries are able to go further, drive further between charges. And range anxiety is really one of the key things that particularly Americans cite as one of the reasons why they're not interested in buying an electric vehicle. They're concerned about not being able to easily drive to visit family or friends, or their annual trip to their favorite vacation spots, or go skiing. You know, there are so many different things to do in this country, and some of them are pretty far away. EV charging station networks are continuing to be built out, but people are still citing range anxiety as one of the key inhibitors for them to actually commit to an electric vehicle.David Roberts Right. So when we talk about energy density, we're mostly talking about range. We're just talking about how much energy you can cram into the battery in the same space. I had this in a separate section, but we're into it now. Let's distinguish that quickly from power density, which is a slightly different thing. Can you tell us what power density is?Chloe Holzinger  Yes. Energy and power are like two sides of the same coin. So, energy is basically the total amount of, let's say, electrons in a given volume in a battery, for example. So your battery pack will have a very specific energy capacity. Power is the rate at which those electrons leave that battery to go do other things. So power density really refers to how quickly can you get that energy out of the battery, how fast those electrons leave.David Roberts   Oomph Is the word I use. Chloe Holzinger  Yes, exactly. With lithium ion batteries, they do have their own particular variations in power density. But a lot of that ends up being irrelevant when you put it into a pack. You're seeing a lot of different pack architectures; there's some high voltage pack architectures that are more efficient now. And so, the power density isn't really something that folks are optimizing for at the moment.David Roberts   Isn't that, though, what gives you your zero to 60 in two seconds, or whatever it is they're saying now? Chloe Holzinger  That really doesn't really have to do with the battery chemistry so much. Just like you can fast charge your car, you can definitely discharge your battery pretty quickly if you want to. It's just whether or not that harms your battery system. So there has been some research on better enabling fast charging for electric vehicles.David Roberts   Right. So fast charging, it's just for the flip side of power density, right? It's like how quickly you can release the energy and how quickly you can accept it. Is that sort of together? Those are kind of the same thing?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, yeah. The flip side is that if you discharge your batteries super quickly, you can, A) harm the lifetime of your battery, and B) then that impacts your range, because there's fewer electrons in your battery then. So that's why your hybrid, or I guess my little Honda Insight, has an Eco Mode, where it controls how fast you can accelerate and things like that.David Roberts   Oh, interesting. And how is that Eco? Is it just Eco because it makes the battery last longer?Chloe Holzinger  Sure, I’m pretty sure that's the only thing it does. It does seem to impact my air conditioning, too. But I'm not entirely sure what good Eco Mode does, except I get five stars if I do well.David Roberts   So, obviously, energy density is dominating in the EV space, since most of what people want out of an EV these days is greater range, and that's kind of what people are pushing toward. So I'm sort of curious, EVs are by far the biggest market for these batteries, so my sort of assumption is that whatever the EV market wants, that's what's going to drive innovation. And sort of whatever the EV market ends up choosing is just going to scale up so big and get so cheap that it's going to be cheaper for other applications too. So I guess what I'm asking is, outside the EV space, what are the other applications for lithium ion batteries, maybe where energy density is not the prime consideration? Are there other factors that developers and researchers will be chasing, sort of other performance characteristics other than energy density?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah. So I think what's important to clarify is that, range and energy density, those are what consumers want. But what automakers want is a reduction in costs. And really, that's what every sector wants. They don't want to pay too much for the battery. So some of these high energy density technologies that are really cutting edge and technologically incredible, some of them are really expensive, and it's hard to see how those costs can come down. And so there will likely always be some kind of market for those extremely high energy density technologies, but it's still a huge open question on whether or not those technologies will even be used in electric vehicles beyond the luxury vehicle segment. You even really see those different chemistries in an economy car. And I think from the past couple battery power day announcements by Tesla and Volkswagen, they're not planning on those high energy density batteries being used in most of their vehicles. They're looking at tailoring their vehicle battery strategy to some of these cheaper chemistries that are more robust to price bikes. And, to answer the other half of your question, when you're thinking about the impact of these automotive trends on other end uses for batteries, whether that's consumer electronics or energy storage, you see a couple different things. So for consumer electronics, that's a market that pretty much at this point scales with population growth. Everybody has a laptop, cell phone, some people have multiple, and the battery technologies for those systems are pretty stable. Those are not really where a lot of the cutting edge innovation really is at this point in the battery world. For the energy storage market, the energy storage market has fluctuated in what battery technologies it will use, depending on what's available, and how much they cost. And so this recent increase in LFP demand in the automotive industry, for example, has actually caused a shortage of LFP battery availability in the stationary storage sector. And this is definitely temporary. I don't really want to scare anybody –David Roberts   It's just manufacturing capacity, right?Chloe Holzinger  Right. I mean, if you think about it, electric vehicles are like 90% of the battery market. So if you are a battery manufacturer, and an automaker comes up to you and says I want you know, this huge amount of LFP batteries, are you going to go fulfill that order? Or are you going to go, “No, I'm committed to these other orders that are much smaller for these other particular applications.” Sometimes they'll commit to the energy storage contracts that they have, and sometimes they'll say, “Well, actually, this is really tempting, I'm just going to go with this much, much bigger order.” And there are a lot of efforts to increase manufacturing capacity for LFP batteries at the moment. But for the short term, first half 2021, it's been basically impossible for stationary energy storage companies in the US to order new LFP batteries for systems this year.David RobertsInteresting. Let's talk about storage briefly. In EVs, obviously, energy density is a big thing, because you want to go a long way. What are the sort of performance characteristics that you're selecting for, in say, a home storage battery–a Powerwall or some variant? What do you want out of that battery?Chloe Holzinger  The fascinating thing with the grid storage sector is that, unlike electric vehicles, every application is really different. Comparing an economy car to a luxury car, you might say, one person does city driving, and the other person likes to do long treks or whatever. But comparing a home energy storage system to a utility-scale solar plus storage system that's a gigawatt in scale, those are completely different systems, with completely different demands and needs. That utility scale system is probably going to want to cycle once a day, twice a day, maybe. And that's a lot more often than you would charge your car; that's a pretty heavy use case. And, in the US, we have a lot of land here, so footprint isn't really a huge issue. Whereas, in your home, you really want a small system that’s very safe because it's in your house, and you want to make sure, ideally, it's paired with a solar roof. I think Tesla right now has just said that they aren't selling any home batteries without solar. But that's probably not going to charge and discharge as deeply as a commercial, industrial, or utility scale battery.David Roberts   So for a big grid battery, then, maybe you don't care so much about energy density, because space is not as prized like volume is. It's okay to be a little bigger, and it's okay to be a little heavier as long as you're very resilient, or have a high cycle life, right? So, if I'm going shopping for a battery purely on cycle life, where do I look? Who's the leader there?Chloe HolzingerYeah! Some of it's also just discharge rates. Really the only two battery chemistries right now that are really used in stationary storage applications are LFP chemistries and NMC chemistries, and not necessarily high nickel NMC like 811 formulations – it's like NMC 532 or 111. They're not the ultra high density, lower cycle life chemistries. Among those three chemistries, if you're talking the two different NMC formulations and the LFP, that pretty much covers the vast majority of stationary storage systems. There's much less diversity in chemistries in the stationary energy storage market, in part, because there's different needs than the mobility market, and a lot of the efforts to make new technologies for lithium ion batteries are focused on the needs of the mobility sector and not necessarily the needs of the stationary energy storage sector. And so you see that these non-lithium alternative batteries are almost exclusively targeting the stationary energy storage sector because there are so many discrete niche applications that maybe lithium ion isn’t best suited for. In an ideal world, one of these non lithium alternatives, would be able to find a place in it. So an example is some of this long duration seasonal storage that people are talking a lot about now. California, in particular, has been supporting these through grants, and various Community Choice Aggregators are supporting these through RFPs. Those types of seasonal duration, really, really low discharge systems, enormous systems for meeting those various occasional needs, [lithium batteries] are not appropriate.David Roberts   Enormous systems, that may only charge and discharge like, once a season - once every couple of months.Chloe Holzinger  Yeah. And so for those systems, lithium ion batteries are way too expensive. You could hypothetically, still do it with a lithium ion battery; it's technically feasible. But you would never want to – it would be extraordinarily expensive. And so you are seeing a bunch of different technology developers developing entirely different systems for long duration storage specifically, that are using various different kinds of low cost feedstocks. And they're claiming we'll be able to meet those types of needs at reasonable capital expenditures.David Roberts   Right, let's return to EVs real quick and look at a few of the sort of more hyped, cutting-edge technologies that are coming along, see if we can figure out if any of them are really going to change the game, as they say. Let's talk about one that I think everybody's heard about at this point, which is solid state batteries. Maybe just tell us, what is a solid state battery and why would you want to make one? And is it in fact going to [make a huge difference?] I mean, I've been immersed in batteries for weeks here and I have read an enormous array of very strong opinions about the future of solid state batteries, all of which are mutually contradictory. So maybe you can just give us your sense of sort of, what is solid state, why is it so hyped, and will it revolutionize batteries all over again?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, yeah, definitely, there's definitely a variety of opinions here. And really what solid state refers to really just means that the electrolyte and separator in an all solid state battery are replaced with one solid material that you know, is non flammable, that doesn't use the same materials as today's incumbent electrolytes and separators do.David Roberts   We should just pause and note that most of the incumbent electrolytes are liquid, some form of goop– Chloe HolzingerLiquid or gel.David Roberts–which tend to be flammable, among other things, which is part of the problem.Chloe Holzinger  Yes. That’s really where the safety concerns around lithium ion batteries come from. It's because of these flammable electrolytes.David Roberts   So you replace the electrolyte with a solid material that obviously gets you safety, since the solid material won't catch fire. But what else? What else does it do? Chloe Holzinger  That's really it. That's the definition of a solid state battery. David Roberts   But don't they also improve energy density, though?Chloe Holzinger  So this is where it gets tricky. Because for a long time, people thought that in order to use a lithium metal anode, which is really a much higher energy density than today's incumbent, graphite anodes, you really need a solid electrolyte, because when lithium metal anodes charge and discharge, lithium plates back onto the anode. And so there's a risk of the lithium plating unevenly on that anode.David RobertsDendrites!Chloe HolzingerYep. And these branch-like dendrites can short the system and cause the battery fires; you really don't want dendrites. David Roberts   This was an interesting fact, I just learned in my research, which I'll insert here, is that using solid lithium metal as an anode actually preceded lithium ion batteries. And it was these problems, namely, the formation of dendrites and such, that actually led researchers to say, well, let's put graphite on top of the lithium. And that way the ions can nestle in the graphite or intercalate in the graphite. They won't be able to hold as many, but they'll be stable, and it won't have these problems of dendrites and etc. So it's sort of interesting that the solid metal anodes are coming back. Like, they were around in the 1970s, and they're coming back; it seems like everything comes back eventually in the battery world. Chloe Holzinger  Yes. And lithium metal anodes are really the key to maximizing energy density in lithium ion batteries. And for a long time, a lot of people thought that you could only use them with a solid electrolyte. What we're finding now is that that's not necessarily true. You're starting to see a lot of other startups that are using lithium metal anodes with liquid electrolytes – Scion power has been doing it for a long time. And Cuberg, which was just acquired by Northvolt. These battery developers aren't using a solid electrolyte and are still achieving the same types of cell level energy density that the solid state battery developers using lithium metal anodes are also achieving.David Roberts   Well, why wouldn't you want to use a solid electrolyte though? Are there considerations governing why you choose one electrolyte or the other? Chloe Holzinger  So the solid electrolyte benefit is that added safety, right? You're not going to get that added safety with any kind of liquid electrolyte.David Roberts   Right. I guess I'm just wondering, why isn't everybody sort of herding to solid electrolytes if they're safer? Is there is there a drawback of some kind?Chloe Holzinger Yes, there are a few. The first electrolytes were made of this polymer called polyethylene oxides, I think PEO electrolytes, and these are solid. They're actually in use in vehicles today and have been for a while, in a few ride sharing vehicles, I think in Paris. But they need to be heated up in order to actually achieve the kinds of ionic conductivities, in order to basically allow the battery to charge and discharge efficiently. And that external heater impacts the total battery efficiency. If you have to use part of the battery output to heat itself, you're having less battery to drive the vehicle. That's one main issue with electrolytes is that room temperature ionic conductivity is difficult to achieve. It's difficult to make a solid state battery that can charge and discharge at reasonable rates at room temperature without an external heater.David RobertsInteresting. Is there such a thing in the world yet? I assume some researchers are on that.Chloe Holzinger  Yes. So that's really one of the first things that a lot of these solid state battery developers that you're seeing today have been focused on and working on, since they were founded. That was really their first starting goal. And so companies like Solid Power and Ionic Materials, they both claim to be able to have very competitive charge-discharge rates at room temperature. The other factor is, with any new battery technology, it's going to have a lower cycle life than one of these incumbents. And this is a case for solid state batteries, for lithium metal anodes, for some of these high manganese cathode chemistries that you're hearing about now. These are all new materials that are still in their development stages. And so because of that, they're not 100% optimized for full functionality yet.David Roberts   And that's just a matter of learning by doing right–just making a bunch of them and figuring out incremental improvements.Chloe Holzinger  Exactly. Science is a slow process. And, some of these batteries are only able to achieve 500 cycles, for example, which is much less than, you know, the 1000 cycles plus that you would really need to be qualified for use in an Electric Vehicle. All these companies have been getting much better over time, Bbt that's still a weak area for solid state batteries.David Roberts   So it sounds like a lot of the hype around solid state is less about the solid electrolyte in particular, and more about the combination of a solid electrolyte with lithium metal as an anode. Chloe HolzingerExactly.David RobertsThat's what people think is going to be the next revolution, or whatever.Chloe Holzinger  Right. So if you take a look at QuantumScape, for example, QuantumScape uses this lithium metal anode. And it claims that it has spent these past many years of its development really optimizing and solving the dendrite issue. But QuantumScape uses a solid ceramic separator, yet also uses some liquid electrolyte at the cathode. So it's not what I would call an all-solid state battery. It is a lithium metal anode battery, but not all solid state. And it's because it uses a solid ceramic separator, it can be lumped into some of the semi-solid batteries. These different terms kind of get conflated. David RobertsSemi-solid state.Chloe HolzingerYeah, yeah, I mean, really. So, the lithium metal anode, that is the part that enables this huge energy density increase that QuantumScape has been able to show through its data that it’s shared.David Roberts   It's a little weird to me, then that solid state gets all the hype, since it's really the lithium metal, it's the metal anode that's really giving you the sexy kind of performance boosts that you want in the solid state. The electrolyte is a little bit of a footnote to that. Why did things work out that way? Is it just people not being careful with their terminology?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, it's a little bit of an artifact from when people thought that you needed an all-solid electrolyte for a lithium metal anode. And so “solid state battery” really referred to the combination “lithium metal anode” and “solid electrolyte”. But you're seeing companies now that are developing lithium metal anode batteries without solid electrolytes, and you're seeing solid electrolyte developers developing batteries with a graphite anode. So it's not really the uniform term that people assumed it would be when it started becoming part of the lexicon two to three years ago, David Roberts   I'm just gonna clarify this for readers who are confused. You have a lithium metal anodes, which can be coupled with either solid or liquid electrolytes. And then you have solid electrolytes, which can be coupled with either lithium metal anodes or traditional graphite. And so they're sort of separate in that you got a matrix of possibilities. But the solid state that everybody's excited about, the one that's supposedly setting off this whole new round of innovation and everything, that's mostly about the lithium metal metal anode involved. Chloe HolzingerYes, yes. David RobertsAnd so the lithium metal anode holds more lithium ions. And if you can overcome the dendrite formation problem, you just get a ton more – they're saying double the energy density, which would mean theoretically, double the range for an electric vehicle. And there's a bunch of these that are supposedly, just over the horizon, right, like mid 2020s? Is all the really sexy hype stuff still out a few years? Are any of these in use yet?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah. A lot of these different battery technologies are still pretty far away from commercialization. So, probably the most aggressive companies are saying that they'll be able to use solid state batteries in an electric vehicle by 2025. And that's pretty aggressive when you're thinking about how long it takes to get a battery qualified for use in a vehicle by an automaker. And also, when you're thinking about the scale in production, if you're going from a pilot plant to a mass produced vehicle, that's a huge jump in production capacity. And that's a whole different hard part of this whole equation. You can make the best battery in the world at lab scale, but that doesn't really mean anything if you can't make it in a cell that can integrate into a pack for an electric vehicle, and then produce the same high quality battery over and over and over again for many vehicles. That's a huge stretch.David Roberts   Yeah. One of the sorts of considerations I keep stumbling into is, you've got, at this point, a pretty enormous manufacturing capacity built up for conventional lithium ion batteries, which means just a lot of learning by doing a lot of scale, and just a lot of built infrastructure. And so one of the things I see a lot is, if you're going to get a competitor to conventional lithium ion batteries, it's probably going to have to be able to make use of existing manufacturing capacity. In other words, like, you can't just require a whole new set of factories, whole new kinds of factories. So I'm wondering, of these kinds of solid state batteries, are any of them going to require new factories? Or are they going to be able to make use of existing manufacturing techniques?Chloe Holzinger  The startups are really pursuing mostly one of two different strategies. So the first strategy is really becoming a material supplier for incumbent cell manufacturers and producing their solid state batteries on today's manufacturing lines. And as you said, that really is able to leverage existing infrastructure, which is phenomenal; you can really access that very quickly if you can integrate yourself into or integrate your technology into these manufacturing lines. That's a great way to be able to make a lot of your batteries quickly. Also, some of these manufacturing lines – these costs quite a lot of money to build. So many factories and automakers aren't going to want to pay for new factories that require new facilities. When you have governments really throwing billions of dollars at a single factory, if you consider all the amounts of money that the European Union and various European countries have given to sell manufacturers to build factories within Europe, it's incredible. So that's one strategy. The other strategy is, if the battery company is unable to integrate its technology with today's manufacturing lines, there's really no other option except for that company to become a cell manufacturer themselves, and build the relevant manufacturing lines using whatever specialized equipment that they need. They're going to have to do that themselves.David Roberts   And that, to me, just sounds daunting. I mean, to me, it almost sounds more challenging than the sort of scientific work of developing a new chemistry, just the nuts and bolts work of becoming a large scale manufacturer. This other manufacturing process has been around for decades, and it's been coming down at cost for decades. I mean do you see any of those possibly getting anywhere or succeeding?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, I mean, I don't want to pick favorites, or say that anybody's absolutely not going to succeed, because I could absolutely be wrong, and I don't want to insult anybody. But I think one of the factors that is supporting groups in the second category that want to make batteries themselves – because you're right, this is in a lot of ways even more difficult than the actual battery development in the first place. But there are huge amounts of money out there looking to support solid state battery development, whether you're talking about automakers, or cell manufacturers, or chemicals suppliers, or now, financial institutions. SPACs are here for at least the near term, and the amount of money available to companies looking to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC is just phenomenal. You have a valuation of a billion dollars, which used to be a lot of money for a startup. And suddenly, overnight, go to a $10 billion valuation.David Roberts   Yeah, it's got a bit of a bubble feeling, as I read around solid state. Do you think that's right? Do you think there's gonna be some high profile crash and burns happening at some point?Chloe Holzinger  I mean, I think it really depends on the company. Not all the SPACs, the companies in the electric mobility space that have chosen to go public this way, they're not all equal. There are some companies that are already making revenue, and that haven’t really changed their business plan at all since going public. They're just continuing ahead and saw an opportunity to make a lot of money really quickly, and who am I to blame them for that? I actually support some of that strategy in part because there has been a lot of government support for electric mobility technologies in a lot of countries but not really in the United States over the past four years, since 2016. So a lot of these developers and these companies that are operating in this space, if they're targeting a market that they're expecting will grow with these kinds of exponential rates that automakers are expecting, they want to grow quickly in order to meet that demand. And going public via SPAC is a quick way to make that money to scale your process and go get that market. And you don't want to miss that opportunity.David Roberts   There's a lot of money floating out there. Chloe HolzingerYeah.David RobertsLet's talk about one or two more of the areas of innovation. We hit solid lithium metal anodes, which gets you a bunch more energy density. We talked about solid electrolytes, which gets you safety – no more fires. One of the other ones I see come up a lot that Tesla is leaning heavily on, and that I know some people are very excited about, is using silicon as an anode. Can you tell us a little bit about about who's doing that and why?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah! So Silicon is a little bit different from these other different technologies, in that it is much closer to commercialization than either solid electrolytes or lithium metal anodes.David Roberts   You mean silicon anodes specifically? Chloe Holzinger  Yes. And really when I say silicon anodes, for the most part, I’m meaning silicon graphite composites. These won't really be pure silicon anodes. I’ve really yet to see a pure silicon anode battery that is cost competitive with lithium ion batteries. David Roberts   Why is the graphite still in there? What goes wrong when you add more and more silicon? Like, why is it difficult? Chloe Holzinger  It’s not necessarily that it's more difficult, because all silicon batteries have existed for a while; it's just that graphite’s way cheaper. If you can use some percent silicon to increase the energy capacity of your anode, and, the more silicon you put in your anode the faster you are able to charge your battery, if you're able to use a relatively high percentage of silicon in your anode, but still have some graphite in there, you can get some of the benefits of using a silicon anode without necessarily the extremely high costs.David Roberts   And silicon as an anode – does it work the same way lithium metal as an anode does, in the sense that the ions plate onto it, or is it intercalation?Chloe Holzinger  No, it's intercalation for these silicon anodes. And I kind of skipped over it, but there are some technical difficulties with silicon. With that intercalation, the silicon anodes do tend to swell, and that swelling can crack certain parts of the battery. It can impede and change different coatings that you might have on the silicon anode particles, and swelling isn't good. These silicon developers for batteries, all of them claim to have addressed the swelling in some regard, whether they're doing all silicon, pure silicon anodes, or silicon-graphite composites, they're all looking to address that main issue. But really, all of these developers have their own particular kind of material. There isn't really one dominant silicon-graphite material that's in use out there. There are a wide variety of companies using silicon metal, and some using silicon oxide, and others using silicon nanoparticles. It's just a very diverse field of a lot of different technologies.David Roberts   And didn’t Tesla just announce something kind of new and fancy in its 2020 battery day? It's going to use just unprocessed metallurgical silicon, right? So you cut out the processing step, just use raw silicon and instead of trying to mix all these chemicals in to prevent swelling, it’s just going to design the cell – of course, you know, I have this 101 level understanding of all this so I could be getting all this wrong – but it's basically going to design the cell to accommodate swelling, instead of trying to prevent swelling. It's just going to design around it and allow it, and even in some ways get benefits out of swelling. I don't know if you know any of the details of what they're doing. That could be a horrendous summary.Chloe Holzinger  I mean, I don't think really anybody outside of Tesla knows exactly what Tesla's working on. Tesla has a knack for making these large announcements with very sparse technical details. And so I also am looking forward to seeing what they are talking about. I would assume that the combination of all of the different technologies that Tesla discussed at its battery day – I think Elon Musk said something along the lines of he's expecting this to be a three year plan until these technologies are in use. That seems unnecessarily aggressive. I mean, I wouldn't consider it a failure of Tesla, that Tesla was disappointing me in some way if they took a few extra years to do these things. And I think that we'll probably end up seeing that on a more of a 2025 or 2026 timeframe. David Roberts   Right. So just to summarize, then on the silicon, you get more silicon on your anode, you get higher energy density because you’re housing more ions basically, but silicon’s expensive, and graphite is cheap. So the effort here is to figure out a way to use more silicon, thus increasing energy density, without unduly increasing costs. Is that a fair summary? Chloe HolzingerYeah, yeah I think I can agree with that. David RobertsThese are, to my mind, the big ones within the lithium ion family that we've hit here: the sort of lithium metal anode, solid state electrolytes silicon anode, high nickel cathodes, LFP with iron rather than the manganese and the cobalt. Those are, to my mind, the big sort of competitive or maybe competitive ones within the lithium family, but there are, as you say, these other chemistries that if you talk to people working on them, they say have advantages. One of them is zinc, sort of just using zinc. As I understand it, just substituting zinc for lithium, and using zinc ions rather than lithium ions. Do you have any thoughts about zinc batteries, whether they're going anywhere, zinc ions specifically?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, so zinc batteries. From my understanding, there are a lot of zinc battery companies out there. So it's possible that you know, I might not be speaking exactly to the same type of market that your contact is. But, you know, most zinc batteries are being developed for stationary energy storage applications. And similar to what I said about silicon anodes, every zinc battery company has their own particular technology. There isn't one zinc technology that's outstripping all of the others. Eos – another company that went public via SPAC – they're developing a zinc battery for stationary storage applications. I think they're using some kind of air cathode? I could be getting that wrong. And then there are others in battery companies that are using a flow battery architecture, which is usually more common for vanadium batteries. There are just so many different zinc chemistries out there. I would be interested to see how these different systems perform in the field. A lot of these different technologies are still lab scale, and Eos obviously isn't. But, how these perform in the field – if they're able to increase manufacturing scale, and compete on costs with lithium ion batteries. That’s another area – a lot of these zinc batteries do use much cheaper chemical feedstocks than lithium ion batteries, but because they don't have the same kinds of manufacturing economy of scale as lithium ion batteries, it's still more expensive as a system to deploy right now.David Roberts   One of the zinc guys I talked to, his company’s big scheme is, he says, he can slipstream into a lead acid manufacturing plant and just use the same machinery as a lead acid manufacturing plant. And he wants to go after lead acid batteries, which are still a $45 billion global market; they're not gone by any stretch of the imagination. He wants to scale up that way: first, eat up the rest of the lead acid batteries and then start competing against lithium ion after that. So yeah, there's just a huge variety of ways you could go about that. And also sodium. I don't know if this is even worth saying anything about but I've also read that you can substitute sodium, which is basically salt, substitute those for lithium compounds and make sodium ion batteries. Have any of those poked up onto the actual market yet?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, you know, I think there's really one leading sodium battery startup for electric mobility applications called Faradion, based out of the UK. They're targeting both grid storage applications – a lot of that lead acid replacements – as well as low cost e-mobility applications, like two wheelers, for example. And, again, I think that this is a really interesting and compelling kind of technology. But going back, even to the QuantumScape example, the hard part is really the commercialization in some regards. It's not really the hard part, but it's a different problem and it's a different way of thinking about the same technology. And sometimes, it takes one group of people to develop the technology, and another group of people to commercialize it. There are two very different problems that are both incredibly difficult. David Roberts   Well this brings me to a sort of an overarching question. In some sense, this was sort of the question that ended up motivating my whole dive into batteries in the first place. Which is, you can find a lot of people in this space, who will say, yes, there's all these interesting new technologies out there innovating out there on the cutting edge, finding little tiny niches. And there are plenty of batteries that can outperform lithium ion on a particular metric, this metric or that metric, or that can have some performance advantages. But it's that second part, it's commercializing and scaling up, and conventional lithium ion batteries with conventional lithium ion manufacturing capacity, have just gotten such a head of steam, have gotten so big, scaled up so much and are falling in cost, all the time, as manufacturing capacity, doubles and doubles again, that it's that lead – not sort of the scientific lead – but the commercialization head start, this just unbridgeable.Like, there's no new battery technology that's going to perform so much better, that it can just sort of magically do that scale, especially when you're chasing a receding target, right? Because the lithium ion batteries are forever getting cheaper and cheaper. And as I say in my posts, this is somewhat of a parallel to the PV in solar. There's all these other solar technologies that can outperform conventional solar PV on this or that metric. But just the amount of scale and manufacturing scale that PV has at its back is just giving it an unbridgeable head start. On that big question like, and I guess it just comes down to how much you rate the difficulty of this commercialization, so any of these sort of innovations we've talked about – your solid state, your different kinds of anodes – what's your sense of whether they have a chance? Or do you think that your sort of standard lithium ion batteries would just have that scale advantage that's unbeatable at this point?Chloe HolzingerNo, I definitely think that there is absolutely room for improvement. The technologies that are likely to succeed and be implemented on those commercial scales and compete at those costs will be the technologies that enable cost reductions in other ways. Whether it's because they're using cheaper feedstocks, or able to integrate into incumbent manufacturing lines, whether that's lead acid or lithium ion, leveraging the existing infrastructure is huge. And, reducing the cost of batteries is going to be critical for enabling some of these EV adoption rates that these automakers are expecting. The battery makes up, I think, 50%, roughly, of total costs for an electric vehicle.David RobertsOh wow, that’s crazy.Chloe HolzingerAnd so in order to really make electric vehicles affordable for everybody, and not just people who want to go buy Tesla's, you really need to bring those costs down. You also need to be able to scale the supply chains for lithium too. Lithium batteries have these current great economies of scale, but those are going to need to increase even further. And are our current processes really robust enough to accommodate some of that demand that we're forecasting for 2030, 2040, 2050? There are definitely open questions out here that some of these non-lithium battery alternatives could be able to take advantage of.David Roberts   So there's at least the possibility then, there's at least an open possibility, that some of these supply mccammon materials, supply constraints could inhibit lithium ion growth enough to open a market – a possibility in the market – for these other chemistries.Chloe Holzinger  Sure. I do think that whatever slowdown in the lithium ion supply chain, if there is one, would only be temporary. Lithium ion batteries are just so good at what they do, and there's already so much money in here that it makes sense to simply fix the problem rather than pivot to an entirely different technology. But I mean, for alternative technology developers, it's really critical to make sure that you're competing with the lithium ion battery technology that you plan to compete within 2025 or 2030, or whatever you plan to enter the market, and not today's lithium ion battery technologies or yesterday's lithium ion battery technologies. As these alternatives keep developing, lithium ion batteries are gonna keep getting better. We're seeing new pack architectures, new cell architectures, new battery management systems that are able to increase the usable battery capacity of an incumbent lithium ion battery without really any changes to chemistry, you just make the–David Roberts   Oh, just a software that’s new and better–Interesting. Chloe Holzinger  So there are just all of these other technologies that are surrounding the lithium ion battery industry that, you know, are making lithium ion batteries even more competitive and even more cost effective, and lowering, you know, pack costs and sell costs to levels that are useful for economy cars. We're just seeing improvements really all around.David RobertsI was gonna ask this later, but this is a good segue into this. I read one of these reports, and the first thing I would say is, I've never looked into a market that is so – I don't know what the word is – dynamic, uncertain? Like, if you're trying to compete against the lithium ion batteries of 2025, who in God's name knows what’s that’s going to be? Who knows what you're competing with? It's just such an incredible state, there's so much flailing around in the dark here. There's so little consensus about what's going to happen. It's a little crazy. But, in terms of lithium supply, I wanted to hit on that again before we go. We mentioned that cobalt needs to go. I think everybody agrees that the battery makers agree that over time, cobalt needs to be shrunk and eliminated. But what about the lithium supply itself? My sort of vague sense from what reading around is, there's plenty of lithium in the world. Absolute supply is not the constraint, but digging it up is pretty gross, the way we currently do it, and pretty limited. So what's underway to sort of address those possible supply constraints?Chloe Holzinger  So you're right. There's tons of lithium in the world, we're not really at risk of a lithium shortage by any means. In terms of pure natural resources, it's really about being able to get that lithium out of those natural resources in a cost competitive way, and in a way that you're producing a battery quality lithium product. Lithium ion batteries require an insanely high quality kind of lithium. There have been a lot of junior lithium companies looking to try to tap into the growing lithium ion battery market, who have struggled in one way or another to produce a product that is acceptable to the lithium ion battery industry. Whether or not it's low purity, or it has certain impurities that are really toxic to lithium ion batteries, it's hard to produce a high quality lithium product for lithium ion batteries. There are really only a handful of companies out there that do it. Making sure that those companies are able to scale their production in a manner that they can address some of these lithium ion battery demands of 2025, that's definitely a huge concern, especially since lithium prices were so low for so long, really, for the past year or two. David RobertsAre they rising now? Chloe HolzingerYes, they are coming back now. Which is great because it was really getting impossible to imagine how they could go lower. But they are coming back and that added capital for the lithium companies will be really crucial for funding these capacity expansions. A lot of these expansions take a long time to build, and even once they're built, they can take a really long time to actually have the lithium go through the whole process. These brine ponds in South America – the way that these ponds work, is that you, very simply, slowly evaporate the water off of the brine.David Roberts   Yeah, really slowly! That's a crazy industrial process where there's just weeks of stuff sitting there.Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, yeah, and it's really sensitive, it's really hard to get that right! Those evaporation ponds are extremely, you know, they sound really basic and really simple – you just evaporate the water. But, it's not so simple. It's a very delicate balance. And it's just incredible that you know, your smartphone or your fancy electric vehicle, whatever. The lithium in there, there's a high probability that came from 18 months of evaporating in South America.David RobertsIt's hard to adjust the supply, remotely, on a timely basis if 18 months of evaporation!Chloe Holzinger  Yeah! So then the other side of this is that, in Australia is where a lot of the other lithium comes from, that comes from hard rock mining. That doesn't rely on evaporation at all, but it does have significantly higher carbon dioxide emissions than the brine process. So there is a trade off: you can go faster, but that requires a lot more energy much faster, you can't just use solar power. So it’s a lot of carbon emissions.David Roberts   It just seems like, I mean, this is my liberal arts major’s, untutored, gut response to all this, but this just seems like an area that like surely science can do better than that. At least, it just seems like something that we haven't put a lot of a ton of research into yet. And surely, we're going to come up with something better in the long term. If we need this, like, 10x, 50x of lithium supply, surely we're gonna figure out something better than 18 months of evaporating? Chloe HolzingerAbsolutely. David RobertsIs there anything on the horizon that's more sophisticated?Chloe Holzinger  Totally. And, I think the reason why we haven't seen a lot of those technologies being used commercially yet, is because there wasn't really a need until, like five years ago. So, again, science takes a long time, and it takes a while to develop an entirely new technology. But there are quite a few different options out there right now – these technology developers that are targeting the lithium industry, and looking to really extract lithium from these natural resources at a lower energy capacity and reduced water consumption, and in a shorter timeframe, with low CO2 emissions. Those are all crucial factors for these next generation lithium extraction technologies. But there are quite a few out there.David Roberts   And just quickly on Nickel–what's the story on nickel? Is it roughly the same, like there's enough in the world, it's just capacity could be higher?Chloe Holzinger  Nickel is a bit of a different story, because the nickel industry is much, much larger than the lithium industry, and lithium ion batteries make up a very small part of that nickel demand. Nickel’s used in a lot of alloys. I think it's used in steel manufacturing, for example. Making sure that there's enough nickel also for the lithium ion batteries, it's a tough situation to really think about. David Roberts   Because it sounds like Elon Musk is borderline desperate to find Nickel. He's out there saying on calls, like, please start a nickel company. I will give you a guaranteed 30 year contract; someone please give me nickel.Chloe Holzinger  Yeah. And I honestly don't entirely know what he's talking about there. It may be that he wants somebody to mine nickel specifically for him, and that's really where he's coming from, rather than necessarily for the steel industry, which is much bigger than the lithium ion battery industry.David Roberts   Maybe it will just – with Tesla's march towards vertical integration – maybe it will just open a nickel mine.Chloe Holzinger  Yeah. So I think, with regards to really all of these different technologies, one of the ways that companies like Tesla are looking to address some of these long term needs is through battery recycling, because you can recover a lot of these metals through those processes.David Roberts   What a great segue, this was my next question! This is something I feel guilty about, that I'm not actually writing much about in my series. And this is, environmentally, a huge part of the story. So let's, let's talk about recycling, then. Right now, the sort of amount of lithium ion batteries that need to be recycled right now, is relatively low, because a lot of the ones that were in the first EVs are still going. So the problem we're facing now for lithium ion battery disposal is just a fraction of what's going to happen once EV's are 50% or 100% of cars, rather than 2%. So what is the current state of lithium ion battery recycling? Is it done, and what can and can't be recovered from them? And like how environmentally gross is all of this, I guess I'm asking.Chloe HolzingerYeah. There are some battery recycling facilities that are operational today for lithium ion batteries. But what most of them are doing right now are basically making some of the scrap materials for manufacturing back into a usable feedstock for lithium ion batteries. So that scrap recycling is where a lot of battery recycling is today. And that's great, but it's very different from the processes required for breaking down a fully realized lithium ion battery into its constituent components. Exactly what you said – there really aren't too many lithium ion batteries that have reached their end of life right now. So we haven't really seen any of these major lithium ion battery recycling facilities really be profitable yet because of that very small total volume of end of life batteries. But, if you can extract nickel, manganese, cobalt, lithium from these batteries today, and recycle them into the value chain, that would be an incredible feedstock for lithium ion batteries. And some have argued that that could even be a higher quality feedstock than virgin materials, because you know exactly all of the inputs going into that system, as opposed to a rock you dug up from the ground.David Roberts   But my sense is that one of the difficulties is that these are compounds, right? These are not sort of discrete metals on different parts of the battery, they're compounds. So there's some chemistry involved in pulling that apart. Chloe Holzinger  There is. I think the leading process that I am not technical enough to go into too much detail about is called hydrometallurgical. That's very energy intensive, and does require quite a bit of sulfuric acid to break down those components. But I think the two areas, to my mind, that are most pressing right now about better recycling processes, is that half the cost of battery recycling comes from the logistics of getting the battery out of the car and to the recycling facility and then getting the recycled material to the cathode producer or to whoever the customer is. Those logistics costs are hugely expensive, and definitely going to come down.David Roberts   That's the kind of problem we know how to solve, right? I mean, those are solvable.Chloe Holzinger  They are solvable problems. They require cooperation. *Laughs*David Roberts   *Laughs*. Uh oh, maybe we don't know how to do that. Chloe Holzinger  Say, for example, some European countries qualify used lithium ion batteries as hazardous waste, versus some other kind of category, and that creates paperwork. And I had no idea paperwork could be so expensive, but apparently it is. And, I guess, aside from logistics, the other part is that lithium ion batteries today are not designed for recycling. They're not designed yet to be taken out of a car very easily – it's really difficult to get it out of a car.David Roberts   Right? So yeah, I was gonna ask whether the recycling concerns are sufficiently large or pressing enough to actually be feeding back into the kind of innovation and design of batteries. Is anyone trying to make these batteries more recyclable? Is that a real effort yet?Chloe Holzinger  Not that I have particularly heard of. Although, I think, from a theoretical perspective, I would assume that swappable batteries, like those that NIO is working on, would be easier to recycle simply because you can get it out of the car very easily. But, with regards to – glue is really hard for a recycler to get around. I haven't really heard of any cell maker or automaker talking about using less glue in a battery.David Roberts The zinc guys are quick to say they don't use these compounds. Lead acid batteries are pretty easy to recycle – you just strip them apart – and they say zinc batteries are the same, you can just strip them apart and get almost 100% of your materials back. That's one of the advantages of the zinc people boast. I just don't have a sense of whether the market cares about it yet or whether the market will care about it. This is, I guess, a vague question, but just do you worry about the environmental impact? Every time I bring up batteries on the internet, without fail, there's a person who comes along and says, “Oh, yes, but we're mining horrible things and polluting horrible things. And the whole thing's an environmental disaster that everybody's ignoring and glossing over because everyone loves EVs.” I would love for that to be wrong, but I'm not super confident that it's wrong. What's your general sense of the environmental impact of this? Is that a big top of mind concern for you or for the industry?Chloe Holzinger  So it's definitely a huge growing interest for the industry, especially the upstream mining sector, because that's really where a lot of these concerns really come from. Cathode production can be electrified, which means that if you use solar or wind power, you don't have carbon emissions. The cell production facilities, those also require quite a bit of energy, but you can use clean energy resources for that as well. David Roberts   It’s really less about energy than the materials really, that I'm talking about. Just this mining and disposal of materials.Chloe Holzinger  So the recycling bit, and the upstream mining bit – those are the two parts that when somebody is talking about sustainability in the lithium ion battery value chain, those are the parts that I would think that they're talking about. Recycling, we're seeing a lot of government support for this, as well as automaker support, because if you can get higher quality material through a process that maybe you own –David Roberts   Right, so you're mining your own waste, basically.Chloe Holzinger  – that's super attractive. And, from the upstream part, we were talking about some of these lithium extraction technologies, there are a lot of efforts there to make that a lot more transparent and a lot more sustainable as well. So I wouldn't necessarily throw out some of these concerns offhand, but I don't really think that they're super relevant to the conversation. Since there's the idea of sustainability and lifecycle analysis and carbon emissions in the lithium ion battery value chain, ESG concerns, these are all things that the lithium ion battery industry is taking, actually very seriously.David Roberts   And you think they're solvable on some on some timescale? There's no problem for you?Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to talk your way around Cobalt. So, the solution there is just to get rid of the cobalt, or wait for recycling. But aside from that, there's no part of the lithium ion battery supply chain that is going to lead to the kind of disaster like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the Exxon Valdez, or any one of these major oil spills that have had all these kinds of ecological long term consequences.David RobertsYeah, I guess when you're calculating the environmental impact, you do have to sort of “minus” all the oil and gas impacts that you are avoiding, right, which is huge?Chloe Holzinger  I wouldn't necessarily say minus? I don't want to say that the lithium ion battery industry is perfect, and that they don't really have to do anything in order to satisfy that criteria. I think there are changes that need to be addressed. But I think that the conversation around “lithium ion batteries and electric vehicles are just as bad as ICEs (Internal combustion engine vehicles)”, I think that's kind of a disingenuous argument.David Roberts   Okay, I don't want to keep you all day. So just as a final topic, then, this relates to the supply chain too. Sort of notoriously, even though more or less everyone agrees at this point that we are on the front end of a giant explosion of EVs and the EV industry, the US notoriously has virtually no domestic EV supply chain. We have virtually no EVs manufactured here; the metals are imported, almost all the parts are imported, almost the whole supply chain is imported at this point. And this is something that lots of people are concerned about. They think in terms of the whole competing with China, and jobs and a new growing industry, all that kind of stuff. So part of what Joe Biden's infrastructure proposal is about, is trying to goose the creation of a US EV supply chain, both for kind of materials and parts and for the EVs themselves. What's your take on that? Is that a doable thing? Is that something that we could stand up really quick? Or are there structural reasons why it's particularly difficult or why it hasn't happened?Chloe Holzinger  I don't think there are really any structural reasons. I think it's really about – oh, maybe this is a structural reason, but, I think it's more about making sure that our policies around clean energy technologies and electrification are well aligned at the local, state, and federal levels, and that  those aren't going to change anytime soon. Part of the reason why we haven't seen some of these is that industry players fled the US market. While they do have all of these facilities under construction in Europe, it’s because the US has gone back and forth a few times on its EV policies. President Trump did have a lot of support, actually, for the upstream minerals supply chains, and did sign some executive orders, looking at the battery minerals supply chains, and the possibility of bringing some of those here.David Roberts   Because there is lithium and nickel here, right?Chloe Holzinger  Yep. But some of those efforts were pretty undercut by his administration's attitude against electric vehicles. And so that leads to some confusing signals for the industry. And I think having a well aligned cohesive electric vehicle and clean energy industry policy would definitely increase the confidence of both investors as well as industry players that the US market can be relied upon. So that's one main aspect. The other main aspect is that if you take a look at where these battery industries are, and wherever the minerals operations are, those companies have all received huge amounts of government support. I don't necessarily know if the US is really ready to commit that kind of government funding to battery manufacturing. I guess we'll see what the Loan Programs Office does at the Department of Energy (DOE) now. But, in the latter Obama years and in the Trump times, there was a lot of fear around being guilty of the next Solyndra. David RobertsReally...Chloe HolzingerYou're not gonna ever get anywhere if you're always going to be afraid of that kind of pretty minor failure. And, in some ways expected, you're gonna have some failures, it's not all going to be winners.David Roberts   I know, the point of the program was to take risks as a whole. And that's how it was designed and sold. That was the whole point...Chloe HolzingerYeah, yeah!David RobertsOh, don’t get me started on that... There's definitely going to be a new Solyndra. I mean, there's definitely going to be a bunch of failed EV companies and failed battery companies and the like.Chloe Holzinger  Oh absolutely. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. This is kind of what the US is supposed to be very good at – wildly committing to insane ideas, and some of them panning out. But not all of them. And that's, you know, there's a reason why we have such a healthy startup culture in the US, and why a lot of these US battery startups are being acquired and attracting attention internationally from Europe and Asia. There's a lot of intellectual capital here. It's really just about making sure that there's a reliable steady market.David Roberts   Right. And that requires industrial policy of a size and scale that this country hasn't really has been kind of trending away from ever since Reagan. That's kind of one of the more interesting, broader political stories going on right now: is Biden trying to revive industrial policy, old school industrial policy of the kind that like China and Germany used to dominate solar PV? It will be interesting to see whether we're willing to do that. Well, thank you so much for this. There was one final question I had. And you may not have anything to say to it, but it's on my mind, because I like to speculate about future utopias. Some of the reports I've read about lithium ion batteries, about the innovations possible once you get your solid state, your lithium metal and your various other advances people are talking about, like right now, prices are approaching $100 per kilowatt hour. People are saying we're going to hit that by 2023 or whatever, which used to be, as I understand it, considered basically impossible. And now it's on the way, and I'm seeing reports talking about those numbers, eventually getting down to like $50 per kilowatt hour or 40, or even 30, which is mind boggling to me. And one of the things that makes me think about it is, mostly we think about existing applications and sort of like, how do we make batteries for those, but I'm just wondering if you have a battery that is $30 a kilowatt hour, what could you do with that, that we're not even doing with batteries yet? In other words, like, what are other applications for energy storage that might open up if we end up with super, super cheap storage?Chloe Holzinger  Sure. Yes. First, I'd be very curious to see what kinds of assumptions are made on those $30 per kilowatt hour batteries.David Roberts   I can tell you, it has to do with fluorides, and conversion rather than intercalation, and a bunch of other speculative stuff. That is, I doubt it will hit 40 or 30. But even 50, or even like 70, even 100 is crazy, but like, once you're getting lower than that, I'm just wondering, what other worlds of energy storage maybe just haven't occurred to us yet because we haven't had batteries cheaply? Chloe Holzinger  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think one application that we're seeing quite a lot of momentum for is marine vessels, and electrifying the propulsion systems for marine vessels; particularly, ferries are good. In the same way that electric buses make a lot of sense pretty much everywhere: you can predict where the vessel is going to go, you know exactly what it's going to get there, and you can charge it at reliable times. So that's one area. I think, another area for some of these next generation batteries, maybe solid state lithium metal anode isn't appropriate for an economy car – I don't know – but it would definitely be appropriate for electric aviation and those types of applications where weight and energy density mean even more than the mobility sector, or the automotive sector.David Roberts   Talk about energy density being prized up in the air - that's when you need it most.Chloe Holzinger  Yes, exactly. Some of these electric aircraft could definitely benefit from solid state batteries, both from a safety benefit, because you super do not want that battery to catch fire – you want to make sure triple share that that battery is very safe – David Roberts   Thermal runaway has a whole different valence when you're thousands of feet up.Chloe Holzinger  Safety matters a lot more to the aviation sector than then even to the automotive sector – and energy density as well, as we both talked about. So those are really some of the key markets that I would be most interested in for lithium ion batteries moving forward. There is a lot of talk about medical devices and going the other way and, and looking at smaller and smaller –David RobertsYeah, right, right. Chloe HolzingerThose applications are not really a cohesive group. They all have different requirements. And that could be a way for some of these non-lithium, potentially zinc batteries. There are a lot of different battery options for those different kinds of devices. David Roberts   Well, so interesting. I've kept you, sorry, longer than I said I would! I feel like we've only scratched the surface. Thank you so much for taking all this time and for talking to me. Chloe Holzinger  Yeah no problem! It was a pleasure.  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

(If you don’t want to read, you can listen! Just click play above.)Hello! Welcome back to Battery Week here at Volts … where we use the term “week” somewhat loosely.Up to now, we’ve been focusing on lithium-on batteries (LIBs) — why they are so important, how they work, and the varieties of LIBs that are battling it out for the biggest battery market, electric vehicles (EVs). It’s fairly clear from that discussion that LIBs, in some incarnation, are going to dominate EVs for a long while to come. There is no other commercial battery that can pack as much power into as small a space and lightweight a package. Plus, LIBs have built up a large manufacturing base, driving down prices with scale and learning. Their lock on the EV market is likely unbreakable, at least for the foreseeable future. But there’s another battery market where some competitors hope to get a foothold: grid storage. They think there’s space in that market waiting to be claimed.Currently, there’s a robust and growing short-duration grid storage market, offering storage of anywhere from seconds (to provide grid services like voltage and frequency regulation) to four hours. LIBs have about 99 percent of that market locked up; in some areas, projects with solar power coupled with four hours of storage are bidding in competitively with natural gas. Most energy wonks believe that, to fully shift the grid to zero-carbon energy, we will eventually need long-duration storage as well, to the tune of weeks, months, or even seasons. LIBs are almost certainly not going to cut it for that purpose, so it will be some combination of other technologies. (I’ll write about long-duration storage some other time.)In between short and long, there’s something that might be called mid-duration storage, covering the range between four and 24 hours. What technologies will cover that range? LIBs can do it, of course — theoretically they can cover any duration; you just stack more and more batteries — but the economics get extremely difficult. Mid-duration projects will require lots of capacity but might run comparatively rarely. As duration gets to four hours and above, the cost of LIBs, at least today’s LIBs, starts to get prohibitive.This is where other batteries come in, challengers to LIBs that hope to beat them at longer durations — though they aren’t quite there yet. “There really aren't competitive technologies in the battery electric vehicle space aside from all these different lithium ion batteries,” says Chloe Holzinger, an energy storage analyst at IHS Markit, but “there's a ton of different battery technologies for grid storage. They just tend to be significantly more expensive than lithium ion batteries.”These challengers believe they are better suited to the needs of the mid-duration grid storage market, where energy density matters less than capacity, calendar and cycle life, and safety. They think they can bring costs down to competitive levels at those durations. (Some of them think they can find other niches as well, but it’s grid storage that offers the most realistic shot.)Flow batteriesFlow batteries operate on a fundamentally different principle than the batteries we’ve looked at so far. Rather than storing energy in metals on the electrodes, energy is stored as a dissolved metal in an aqueous electrolyte. The anolyte is stored in one tank; the catholyte is stored in another; pumps circulate the fluids past electrodes (sometimes in a fuel cell), where they don’t quite mix, thanks to a thin separator, but they exchange ions and electrons, generating electricity.The key conceptual difference is that flow batteries separate energy (the amount stored) from power (the rate at which it can be released). If you want more power, you make the electrodes bigger. If you want to store more energy, you make the tanks of electrolytes bigger. And electrolytes are fairly cheap, so it’s cheap to increase capacity. This is in contrast to LIBs, which double in cost with each doubling of energy capacity. In theory, flow batteries can scale up to almost any size, relatively cheaply. So as the demands for storage get bigger — six hours, eight hours, 12 hours — the economics of flow batteries look better and better relative to LIBs. A variety of different metals can be used in the electrolyte. For a long while, vanadium was expected to be the breakout candidate, but materials costs remain stubbornly high. Companies have tried with zinc (like the late ViZn, and also see below) and iron (like ESS, which is still going strong). Recent history is littered with failed flow battery companies.“Flow batteries have been the next big thing for a really long time,” says Purdue University assistant professor and battery expert Rebecca Ciez, “but they've never quite gotten there.”The problem, as ever, is the steady march of LIBs down the cost curve. “For a three-or four-hour system, a lithium ion battery outperforms any flow battery now,” says Dan Steingart, a materials scientist and co-director of Columbia University’s Electrochemical Energy Center. “Fifteen years ago, that was not predicted.”Flow batteries can theoretically expand their energy capacity indefinitely, for little more than the cost of the electrolyte goop to fill the tanks (though pumps and other accoutrement add to the cost a bit). But “when we're below $100 per kilowatt-hour on the cost of [LIBs],” says Steingart, “you're really close to the cost of the goop.”And flow batteries, like all challengers, face the fact that LIBs are well-established and well-understood. “It's easier to finance a lithium-ion battery,” says Steingart, “because of all the existence proofs and their inherent reliability. I can predict the fate and the failure.” That makes the operating and maintenance costs of LIBs incredibly low, on the order of 1 percent of the cost of capital, whereas for flow batteries it is 2.5 percent at best.There are still flow battery challengers in the field, like Largo Clean Energy (which bought VionX), which is commercializing vanadium flow batteries; Primus Power, which has a zinc bromide battery; ESS, which is selling an iron flow battery; and the mysterious Form Energy, which counts an aqueous-sulfur flow battery among its offerings. But there is a growing sense in the field that flow batteries aren’t going to be able to catch up to LIBs, at least not any time soon, without government help.Zinc batteriesSeveral companies are working on batteries that exchange zinc ions instead of lithium ions — it’s the second-most-popular metal for batteries.Zinc has the particular advantage of being light and energy dense like lithium, so with relatively modest adjustments, it can slipstream into the lithium-ion manufacturing process. Zinc is plentiful, cheaper than lithium, largely benign, and makes batteries that are easier to recycle. Like other lithium alternatives, zinc sacrifices energy density, but makes some of it back up in savings on safety systems at the battery-pack level, thanks to the lack of any need for fire suppression. This puts it in the same markets as LFP: smaller commuter/city vehicles, robo-taxies, scooters, e-bikes — and energy storage.Some in the zinc crew have larger designs: “We think we can coexist with lithium-ion and replace lead acid,” says Michael Burz, president and CEO of EnZinc, which has developed a new zinc anode it says can come close to LIBs on energy density. Remember, lead-acid batteries are still ubiquitous. “Forklifts use them. Airplanes. Snowmobiles.“ says Burz. “Data centers have huge banks of lead-acid batteries they use for switchover power.” It’s still a $45 billion global market.EnZinc thinks it can hit a sweet spot: close to the energy density of LIBs, close to the low cost of lead-acid, safer than either, and good enough to substitute for a big chunk of both. Zinc anodes are “cathode agnostic,” so Burz envisions, rather than becoming a battery manufacturer, becoming an anode supplier — “Zinc Inside,” modeled on “Intel Inside” processors. Research is underway on a number of cathodes, from manganese and nickel to, just as with lithium, air. A zinc-air battery “has a system-level specific energy of anywhere between 250 to 350 watt-hours per kilogram,” says Burz, well above most LIBs. The trick is making it controllable and rechargeable. There are zinc-air battery companies offering commercial products that believe they’ve solved those problems, like NantEnergy (formerly Fluidic), which is targeting its zinc-air batteries at off-grid markets in developing countries. There are other zinc-based technologies as well. A company called EOS is making a “zinc-hybrid cathode” that it says is safe and long-lasting. The much-hyped Zinc8 has developed a zinc-air hybrid flow battery that it claims can beat LIB costs at higher storage durations. Most of these batteries make the same basic claims: they are less energy dense than LIBs, but they are safer (no fires), they are made with benign and plentiful materials (no supply problems), and they are cheaper at high capacities/durations. It’s just that last part that’s tricky, since the price and capabilities of LIBs are a moving target. Zinc backers are confident that as the 100-percent-clean-energy pledges being made by cities and companies start to bite and the market for grid storage expands, demand for longer duration storage will expand with it. (California, for instance, is putting lots of money toward zinc battery demonstration projects, with an eye toward diversifying its storage options.)Sodium-ion batteriesLithium, nickel, and cobalt all have their issues. You know what material doesn’t? Salt. Sodium compounds can be substituted for lithium compounds to create sodium-ion batteries (NIBs), which have been the source of considerable hype for at least five years now. The basic idea and manufacturing process is the same for NIBs as LIBs — “you could use existing gigafactory structures to produce a sodium-ion battery,” says Steingart — but unlike the latter, the former can’t use graphite for the anode, because it can’t capture enough of the relatively bigger sodium ions, so something called “hard carbon” is typically used instead. Research is underway to find more energy-dense sodium compounds for the cathode and cheaper materials for the anode. “Sodium-ion has a lower energy density than lithium-ion,” says Tim Gretjak, an innovation analyst with Con Edison, “so all the materials that go into it have to be correspondingly that much cheaper.”There have also been some high-profile NIB failures. A promising startup called Aquion, backed by Bill Gates and showered with awards, declared bankruptcy in 2017. But here, too, there are surviving challengers. A company called Natron Energy is currently selling a NIB that uses Prussian Blue (a dark blue synthetic pigment) as the anode and a sodium-ion electrolyte. It has received “a total of more than $50 million in venture funding and more than $5 million in ARPA-E and DOE funding,” reports Eric Wesoff, and has a product currently on the market. Like enZinc, it is going after some lead-acid applications (data centers and forklifts) and some LIB applications (stationary storage), hoping its long life and safety can carve out a niche.To my eye, NIBs appear to be stuck in the same spot as the previous two batteries: better than LIBs on some metrics, for some applications, but so far behind on manufacturing and bankability that scaling them up is a Sisyphean task.Liquid metal batteriesA company called Ambri was spun out of MIT back in 2010 and has been threatening ever since to commercialize a battery for low-cost, long-lifetime grid storage. It too has received money from Bill Gates. It ran into problems with its initial battery in 2015, laid off a quarter of its workforce, started over, and now produces a calcium-antimony battery with (according to Ambri’s website) “a liquid calcium alloy anode, a molten salt electrolyte, and a cathode comprised of solid particles of antimony.”The liquids and suspended particles are contained in a positively charged stainless steel box with a negatively charged electrode plug on top. The battery will pass no current at room temperature, but on site, the contents of the boxes are super-heated (to 500°C), which activates the materials; the metals alloy and de-alloy, with the cathode being entirely consumed and then reformed, as the batteries charge and discharge. Because the contents are liquids, the battery has no “memory” — it is not affected or degraded by absorbing or releasing ions. This means it suffers virtually no loss of capacity over its lifetime; in fact, it works better if completely charged and discharged every few days. From the time they are first activated, liquid metal batteries require no outside heating or cooling for the lifetime of the system, eliminating a ton of system costs, and they can operate in a wide range of temperatures and conditions. Ambri claims the batteries contain materials less than half the cost of LIB materials, can be manufactured for less than half the cost of LIBs, and will run for 20 years at a “fraction of the cost” of LIBs. After a decade of hype, promises, and false starts, Ambri is currently building a 250 MWh project on the 3,700-acre Energos Reno project in Reno, Nevada. It will be, finally, a field test of the technology. If it pans out, it could establish a foothold in grid storage. Should we worry about lithium-ion’s headlock on grid storage?LIBs worked their way up from consumer electronics to appliances to cars to trucks to stationary storage, building momentum and scale. At this point, they have locked up the EV market and the short-duration grid storage market. At this point, there isn’t much demand for mid-duration storage. The question is, as the grid integrates more renewables and that mid-duration market develops, whether LIBs will simply continue their march to dominance. Right now, a few LIB competitors can claim lower kWh costs over longer (20+ hour) durations, but Steingart thinks that some variant of the basic LIB architecture is “going to get to somewhere between $45 and $60 per kilowatt hour” eventually. That’s just an incredibly difficult trajectory to keep pace with. Is it going to make LIBs uncatchable, even in the grid storage space? “I co-wrote a paper last year that basically says, up to eight to 10 hours, the answer is probably yes,” Steingart says, “at least for the foreseeable future.”Even if they weren’t still sprinting ahead on costs, simply by virtue of their ubiquity and familiarity, LIBs have gained an enormous institutional advantage. When it comes to grid storage projects, says Lou Schick, director of investments at Clean Energy Ventures, “the installed cost is so high that the chemistry of the battery doesn't really affect the cost.” He explains: “The soft costs of applications engineering, designing the contract, getting permission to do it, satisfying all the building codes, and so forth — by the time I'm done with all that crap, the battery itself is 20 to 30 percent of the installed cost, at most.”In that context, the differences in performance among different chemistries are less important than simpler criteria, Schick says: “Is it bankable? Can I get insurance for it? Is it standard consumer product?”This, even more than total long-term costs, is the biggest barrier to LIB competitors: LIBs are bankable. They are familiar. Their performance and failure modes are well-understood. Any competitor has to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of convincing the first several investors to take on greater risks. This gets us back to an argument I raised in my introductory post: if it is true that a) we will soon need more and longer-duration storage than LIBs can provide, and b) LIBs currently have an unbreakable hold on the market, then perhaps the federal government should proactively take steps to encourage competitors to LIBs.Recently, the research outfit ITIF released an excellent paper by Anna Goldstein making just this argument, in the context of flow batteries: “in the absence of ‘first markets’ that can rapidly pull flow battery innovation, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) should push it forward with investments in research, development, testing, and demonstration.”The same argument could be made on behalf of any of the battery chemistries discussed above. The market probably isn’t going to mature them fast enough; the feds should help.After all the time I’ve spent thinking about batteries, I am of two minds about this argument. On one hand, Goldstein makes a good case that the storage needs of the electricity system will soon push past what LIBs can provide. If that’s true, it does seem like it would be better to innovate alternatives now, to be prepared. On the other hand, analysts have been wrong about the ultimate capabilities of LIBs again and again. LIBs weren’t going to be able to handle cars, then they weren’t going to be able to handle short-duration storage, then they weren’t going to be able to hit $100/kWh, but they’re doing all those things. If LIBs follow a steadily declining cost curve down to $40-60/kWh, it’s difficult to imagine any competitor that could catch up. The only markets where competitors might have a shot is 20+ hours of storage, and it’s not even clear how much of that will ultimately be needed.Nonetheless, I think I come down in the “better safe than sorry” camp — there’s no harm in making multiple bets when the stakes are so high. Researching and innovating medium- and long-duration storage technologies will bring all sorts of learning and networking benefits that we can’t predict now. And if LIBs continue to defy all predictions and get so cheap nothing can compete, well, that will be a nice problem to have.Guest pup! My darling niece and her family got a darling new puppy. His name is Oscar. 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

Greetings! Last week, I wrote about the ambitious slate of climate and energy policies that the state of Washington has put in place over the last two years — culminating, a few weeks ago, with the passage of the Climate Commitment Act, which would cap the state’s emissions and reduce them 95 percent by 2050. It’s a dizzying amount of progress in a short period of time. As I talked to those involved about how it happened, one name came up again and again: Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon (D) of the 34th District, which encompasses West Seattle and areas southwest of the city. Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, had this to say: “Representative Joe Fitzgibbon is now a living legend for his miraculous legislative diplomacy and pure, selfless heart; he deserves to win every legislator of the year award in existence.” This is not the kind of thing one typically hears about legislators after years of difficult negotiations, but in this case, it was a fairly typical sentiment. So I knew I needed to talk to Fitzgibbon — about his entry into politics, his approach, and what enabled this burst of progress. Please enjoy our conversation. And please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber, so that I can continue to do this work. David Roberts:   Hello, welcome to Volts. I am your host, David Roberts. As longtime listeners know, Volts is headquartered in Seattle, in the great state of Washington, on the superior of America's two coasts. As it turns out, this is the place to be for climate policy. Over the last few years, the Democratic legislature in Washington has been engaged in a veritable frenzy of activity, cranking out climate and energy bills, a 100 percent clean electricity bill, bills on hydrofluorocarbons, bills to decarbonize buildings and boost electric vehicles – bills, bills, bills. Most recently, the legislature passed what are arguably the two key remaining pieces of the carbon policy puzzle. The first is a clean fuel standard, or CFS, like the one in place in California, Oregon, and BC, which will slowly ratchet down the carbon content of liquid fuels in the state. The second, the big kahuna, is the Climate Commitment Act, or CCA, which puts in place a cap and invest system that will ratchet down economy-wide greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels 45 percent by 2030, 70 percent by 2040, and 95 percent by 2050. With the passage of the CCA, Washington now has, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and ambitious climate policy plan in the country – and yes, I have heard of California. I just got done writing a big story on this, and according to everyone I talked to, one legislator was particularly important in shepherding the CCA and some of the other bills in question through the House, while ensuring that they remained ambitious: Representative Joe Fitzgibbon of the 34th Legislative District containing West Seattle and Vashon Island.Fitzgibbon was elected to the legislature in 2010, when he was just 24 years old. Yes, he's a bona fide millennial. But instead of moping around his parents’ basement and eating avocados, which is what I'm told millennials do, he has been immersing himself in the wonky details of climate policy, and pushing his state into the future. So I'm happy to have him with me today to discuss climate policy and state progress. Representative Fitzgibbon, welcome to Volts.Joe Fitzgibbon:  Thanks for having me, David.David Roberts:   Let's start with a little bit of your history. I was thinking back on what I was doing when I was 24. I was in grad school, snowboarding a lot, smoking a bunch of pot, definitely not fit for running anything. What drew you to politics at such a young age? Is it the people aspects or the policy aspects?Joe Fitzgibbon:  To your credit, you went to grad school. I'm a grad school dropout.David Roberts:   Oh, I dropped out eventually. But I just stayed longer.Joe Fitzgibbon:  I've always been really motivated by environmental issues, and that included a general concern for the direction things were going. I don't know how much of that can be attributed to Captain Planet and media when I was a kid. But as the climate crisis came into focus for me, probably in college, I realized, whatever I'm going to do with myself, whether that's nonprofit work or government work or something else, I want it to be about doing the most I can to make progress on the climate crisis. When I got out of college and looked around to figure out where I could do the most, state or local government seemed much more appealing to me than going to DC and being a really, really small fish in an enormous ocean. I had enough friends who had gone and done that and become disillusioned that I thought state seemed more exciting to me, so I'm happy that's where I landed. I started out as a staffer; I worked in the legislature for my predecessor in the House. She went on to serve in the Senate as Senate Majority Leader, and when she ran for the Senate, I ran for her seat in the House in 2010. It definitely was not part of some ambitious long-term plan that I was going to run for office when I was 24, but it turned out that was when the seat opened up, and I had just enough experience by that point that I thought I could make a case that I was a credible candidate. It was clear to me at that point that we weren't going to be making climate progress or other environmental progress at the state level unless we had more people in office for whom that was their motivating thing. The good news for me was there were few enough other legislators at that time for whom that was their main issue that I got to carve out a space for myself as one of the experts – not that I was or am an expert, but in the legislative context, the bar is grading on a curve. The downside was nobody else cared about those issues, so we didn't make a lot of progress for those first couple years. For five of the 11 years I've been in office, we had a Republican Senate, and we had absolutely no climate progress during that time. But it did mean I had the time to become a committee chair and become what counts in the legislature as an expert, so that when the time was right for us to strike with some climate legislation, I was ready to go.David Roberts:   You were around from 2010 to 2018, which were pretty bleak years in Washington climate-wise; there are long-standing complaints about the Washington legislature and climate during those years. Then you were here from 2018 to 2021, which has been a veritable renaissance of activity and motion. What explains this? What happened in the legislature that uncorked this burst of activity?Joe Fitzgibbon:  The most important thing happened in November of 2018, when we gained a substantial number of seats for the Democrats in both chambers of the legislature. Washington has 98 House members and 49 senators, so a majority in the House is 50, and a majority in the Senate is 25. We have a comfortable working majority, more in the House than in the Senate, but increasingly in the Senate as well. We don't quite have a supermajority, so we can't pass a constitutional amendment, for example, with Democratic votes alone. But we went into the 2018 election with a one-seat majority in each chamber; we had 50 in the House, 25 in the Senate exactly. So we couldn't get a lot done then, but we weren't negotiating bad budgets with Republican senators anymore. In 2018, we picked up seven seats in the House and we picked up three seats in the Senate. That broke a logjam and meant that we had enough breathing room in both chambers that things that seemed like pipe dreams just a short time before, like our 100 percent clean electricity law, were actually within reach. There's nothing that changed in the wider political environment. Governor Inslee obviously has elevated climate to a central role in our discourse, but the thing that mattered the most was picking up those seats for the Democrats in both chambers. I rue the day that climate became this partisan of an issue, but it is, and that's made me a very partisan legislator, because it feels like climate progress is more correlated to the size of our majorities than to just about anything else.David Roberts:   Has all that the legislature has done over the last two years – on climate and energy, but also prison reform, capital gains tax, a million other things – been an entirely partisan affair? At any stage, did you get help from any Republicans? Or have they just opted out? Joe Fitzgibbon:  On climate, the answer is no. There have been good bipartisan working relationships on issues like behavioral health funding, some of the things that I don't work on as much. Land use is an area where there are some unusual alliances with Republicans. On climate, it's not that way. In 2019, we passed four big climate bills. We passed the 100% Clean Electricity bill, we passed the Clean Buildings bill, we passed my hydrofluorocarbon bill, and we passed an appliance energy-efficiency bill, which is honestly the most no-brainer of all of them. No Republicans in the House voted for any of those bills. One Republican in the Senate voted for the HFC bill. Then that, again, was true this year. The Clean Fuel Standard, which has been my baby that I worked on for years and finally got over the finish line this year, never got a Republican vote in either chamber, any of the times we passed it. The Climate Commitment Act got no Republican votes, with one asterisk: the Democratic senator who caucuses with and normally votes with the Republicans ended up voting yes on the bill. On the HFC bill, again, the same one Republican senator who voted for it two years ago voted for it this time. So these are Democratic achievements. We don't hear as much straight-up climate denial in the Washington State legislature as you hear in DC; there are some fringe Republican legislators who will deny climate science, but their leads on these issues say different things. They say things like, Washington's only 0.2 percent of global emissions; you're going to hurt our economy; this isn't going to do any good, you should focus on more cost-effective solutions like buying carbon offsets – just things that we would never do. So it's essentially a partisan exercise as much as anything. As much as taxes. There's not really an issue that I could say is more partisan in the Washington legislature than climate.David Roberts:   You might think that once Democrats have a sufficient majority that these things become inevitable that Republicans might want to get at the table to affect the outcome, to have some say at all. But just to be saying no, and then be shut out of the negotiations, doesn't seem even particularly smart on a self-interested basis.Joe Fitzgibbon:  I keep waiting for that to happen. You see this in legislatures, and Congress as well: when the Democratic majorities grow, the Republicans we’re beating are the ones in the most moderate districts, so the ones who stick around are not the ones who are most motivated to come to the table. When California reauthorized their cap and trade bill in 2017, I think it was, either the Assembly or the Senate Minority Leader for the Republicans ended up supporting the compromise, and the next day, there were RNC people flying out from DC to California to find his primary challenger. There's not a lot of breathing room, especially if you're in one of those dark red districts, to be collaborating with Democrats on climate.David Roberts:   It's not as though having a Democratic majority is entirely the key to the kingdom, either. Even this time around, the CFS and the CCA were arguably weakened in the Senate by Democrats. Presumably there are not climate denialists among the Democratic caucus, but there are issues that cause tensions, areas they push back, and things they tried to take out of the CFS and CCA. What are the internal tensions to the Democratic caucus? What are the issues that surface disagreements?Joe Fitzgibbon:  In both the House Democratic Caucus and the Senate Democratic Caucus, we lost votes on the Climate Commitment Act on both the left and the middle. We had two House Democrats from pretty moderate districts vote no, and one very progressive member from South Seattle vote no. Then the bill passed the House with 54 yes votes, which is a lot for a bill like this. In the Senate, they lost two votes from more progressive senators and one vote from a more moderate senator. On that bill in particular, the dynamics were multifaceted, because you have opposition from some of the environmental justice organizations like Front and Centered or Puget Sound Sage, and you also had, of course, opposition from the Chamber of Commerce, the Association of Washington Business, the Farm Bureau, and organizations like that. So it's taking fire from both directions, which is part of what makes it feel miraculous that it passed.David Roberts:   Let's focus for now on the fire coming from the right. For the Chamber, is it just, “This will cost a lot of money and we don't like stuff that costs a lot of money?” Or is there something more specific than that?Joe Fitzgibbon:  The fire from the right is stronger in the Senate, generally. The Senate has an organized caucus of moderate Senate Democrats who tend to stick together if they think that the progressive Senate Democratic center of gravity is overreaching. The Clean Fuel Standard did not have opposition on the left; all the opposition was coming from the middle and the right and from the oil industry. Their argument on that was all about costs: How much is this going to make a gallon of gas more expensive? Every argument they had stemmed from that. The hard thing about that critique is there's not a crystal clear answer. It's a speculative answer based on a lot of factors that go into how much gas costs. It tends to be that the price of gas is much more influenced by the political situation in Venezuela or Saudi Arabia than it is by what kinds of emission standards are in place for gas and diesel. So that was the main one there. The criticisms mostly revolve around energy-intensive, trade-exposed manufacturing. I've always felt like in carbon pricing debates, it's about 10 percent of the emissions and about 90 percent of the pain.David Roberts:   Which is why so many systems exempt them just to avoid that. But you didn't exempt them. They're getting free allowances that ramp down over time to nothing, is my understanding. Is that a compromise? Was that hard-fought?Joe Fitzgibbon:  It was hard-fought, and it was hard-fought in the sense that we actually don't want them to leave. It is a legitimately economic and environmental failure for the steel mill in my district to close and us to import all the steel from China or Ohio instead. That will also serve as a political failure, because every future climate bill will be critiqued based on the closure of the steel mill. The pulp and paper industry in particular in Washington is politically influential, because it’s a legacy industry. They're not new high-tech mills; they're operating on fairly old, fairly inefficient technology, and they tend to be located in parts of the state that are economically struggling more than the Seattle area is. Losing 500 pulp mill jobs in Longview or Port Angeles would be a huge blow to those communities. So there's a lot of political sensitivity around those folks in particular. I would say it was a victory to have them covered at all. The last couple carbon pricing efforts, including the cap and trade bill I sponsored in 2015 and the carbon tax initiative that the progressive left, including labor and environmental justice and environmental organizations, rallied around in 2018, Initiative 1631 – both of those efforts totally exempted EITE manufacturing. So the fact that we were able to keep them under the cap was a big deal that they weren't thrilled about. They accepted that they were going to be under the cap, but they essentially wanted free allowances that didn't decline in perpetuity. So getting allowances to decline at all was the compromise that the EITEs grudgingly accepted toward the end. This is somewhere where actually playing industry against each other was impactful, and that's because most of the rest of the coverage under the cap – essentially electric utilities, gas utilities, and oil refiners – felt that EITEs were getting too good of a deal and that the EITEs were getting a treatment that was more generous than they really deserve. They recognized that as the cap comes down, if the EITEs are still getting free allowances, that means there's that many fewer, and it's going to be that much more expensive for those who have to buy allowances, essentially oil refiners, to have to go to the market and buy theirs. So that was somewhere where it was useful to be able to say, well, every other industry thinks that they should maybe not complain quite so much.The other element of that, and I know that linkage with California is a controversial prospect for this program in the future, but if we don't cover the same sectors that California covers, California won't link with us. So BP, our largest oil refiner, Puget Sound Energy, our largest electric utility: their worst-case scenario, as they said many times, would be a cap and trade program that cannot link with California. If we exempted the EITEs entirely, we'd be looking at a program that was an island, where allowance prices actually probably would get more expensive than we could really bear. That is where being able to play some of the direct emitters against the EITE manufacturers came in really handy. David Roberts:   To clarify, EITE industries are industries that are thought to be particularly sensitive to changes in energy prices, and particularly mobile, such that a boost in energy prices in Washington could either shut them down or send them to a different state. So if we exempted them entirely, we couldn't link with California because California doesn't exempt them entirely? Is that what you're saying?Joe Fitzgibbon:  Pretty much. California doesn't have really clear rules about this, but probably the most important consideration that they would take into account when evaluating whether linkage was practical is, are you covering the same sectors as us? They don't have pulp mills in California, so there maybe is a question of whether we could have exempted pulp mills, but by and large, aerospace, steel, aluminum, cement, which are the other main sectors besides pulp and paper, California would almost certainly have said, we can't link markets if you exempt them.David Roberts:   So for them, the loss of having to pay for allowances is more than offset by the benefits of linkage. Joe Fitzgibbon:  Yes, particularly for BP and Shell, who were the oil majors who were in a largely supportive position.David Roberts:   You mentioned that fire came from both right and left within the Democratic caucus. Let's talk a little bit about the left and the pushback you got from them. I’m curious how productive you felt the climate movement was throughout this process. There are a lot of discussions within climate circles about the demand for ideological purity that comes from some quarters, and whether that's appropriate, whether that’s activists’ role, and whether it actually helps politicians. What was your relationship with the climate left as all this came together?Joe Fitzgibbon:  Big question. To start with, you learn very quickly with a bill this expansive and this controversial how much the climate movement is not monolithic. That seems self-evident, but it was really true in this case. Part of our task in the House was to take a bill that came over from the Senate in a more business-friendly posture, and the Sierra Club was one step away from coming out in opposition to the bill. The Washington Environmental Council, which is like the center of gravity of the environmental movement in Washington, was not willing to say that they supported it, but they weren't opposed to it, they were just asking for some specific changes. So part of our challenge was to try to reel those folks back in, keep the Sierra Club from coming out in opposition.The most troubling piece, to them, that came out of the Senate was provisions exempting from environmental review law any ability for local governments or state agencies to deny a project a permit based on its greenhouse-gas emissions. The theory there was, if we're covering greenhouse-gas emissions under cap and trade, then we shouldn't also be evaluating it on a project-by-project basis. Now – and they were somewhat right, I largely agree – some of this concern was that not all emissions are covered under the cap. What if they're exporting fuel to China? That's not going to be covered by our cap. For example, the methanol plant, which is very controversial and is strongly opposed by the environmental movement, would have had to be cited under the bill that came out of the Senate, even though all of the methanol they were going to export to China was not going to be under our cap. So that, in particular, was something that we had to work a lot in order to rein in that provision, and in doing so, keep Sierra Club, Washington Environmental Council, tribal nations comfortable with the bill. The other part was, there's a fundamental rejection of cap and trade from environmental justice organizations, particularly if they have close ties with environmental justice organizations out of California. I think a lot of this comes from the fact that when cap and trade passed in California, it was oversold as, “This is going to solve air pollution. We're going to see huge improvements in air quality in the most polluted parts of our state.” That isn't actually what it is designed to do. It's designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. If I can cut emissions by 5 million tons over here, but then they grow by 2 million tons over here, that's a win for the climate, but it's not a win for the co-pollutants that are emitted in the place that the 2 million tons are increasing, and the neighbors of that plant. So the people focused on protecting environmental justice as a part of this bill decided, we need a separate policy for air quality. We need a policy that says, here's how Department of Ecology is going to focus its Clean Air Act authority, monitoring, enforcement tools on the communities that are most overburdened with pollution. That's on top of cap and trade, that's not a part of it. It was in the same bill, but it's not doing justice to environmental health disparities to just claim, trust us, it's all going to get better over time. I do think it actually will, in the long term, get better over time as the cap comes down, but that's not a satisfying explanation to a community that's currently experiencing much worse fine particulate matter than a wealthy community down the road.David Roberts:   California's cap and trade system doesn’t have anything like this in it, right? They have air quality regulations elsewhere in law, but nothing meant to integrate with the cap and trade system.Joe Fitzgibbon:  That's my understanding. California also just has much dirtier air than Washington, and that's a baseline problem. Washington, other than one tiny little community next to an oil refinery, is in attainment with the national ambient air quality standards everywhere in the state. Los Angeles County is in non-attainment for all six criteria air pollutants. So we have a little different context there already. But the California experience colors how everybody showed up to this debate, whether from the oil industry saying, “This actually worked better than we thought it would,” to EITE manufacturers on the right and environmental justice proponents on the left saying, “This did not work as well as we thought it would.” From beginning to end, we had to be asking, how are we going to do better than California on this particular question?David Roberts:   It ended up with air quality standards that say to air regulators that every community either has to be in accordance with NAAQS or equal to the best air quality of neighboring communities, whichever is more protective. As you say, all of Washington more or less meets NAAQS standards, which means that a lot of these communities, even if they meet NAAQS standards, are going to get help getting better air if they are close by other communities with better air than them. It really seems like it's specifically targeting racial and class disparities in air quality. That's the first I've heard of that kind of policy, and it struck me as pretty bold. Were you involved in that particular bit?Joe Fitzgibbon:  I wasn't involved in coming up with the idea, but I was involved in trying to make sure it was worked in the best way possible, that communities worried about health disparities were going to see some benefit there. One of the things that some of our community-based environmental justice groups have been asking for for a long time is more monitoring. They just want to know, what are the air pollutants that are harming our community? Where are they coming from, so that we can then think about, what do we do about them? That was where this provision started: Let's get more resources into monitoring in communities that we know are experiencing heavier pollution burdens, but what are those pollution burdens? What I think we're going to find there is that the pollutant that we can improve people's health the most by targeting is fine particulate matter, because that's one for which there's no safe level. Many of the NAAQS standards are probably too high, for ozone, and others, but fine particulate matter is the one that there's no amount that you can breathe that doesn't harm your health. That's also one where the communities that are experiencing the greatest pollution burdens tend to be in proximity to transportation infrastructure. This is not, largely, in Washington, coming from large stationary sources. It's highways, seaports, airports, diesel-burning trucks. So I think that's part of what we're going to find. There was a lot of fear about this provision from the same EITE manufacturers, until they understood that this was not really about, how are we going to ratchet down on you stationary sources even more than we already do. They're largely not producing a lot of fine particulate matter. The pollutants that they're most regulated for are NOx, SOx, ozone to some degree. We're going to have to watch how Ecology and the local area authorities implement this to make sure that this is not just a cosmetic thing, not just new data that goes into a hole somewhere, but actually guides some policymaking. I do think it was really critical in taking some of the intensity down from the environmental justice standpoint, even if those same organizations didn't necessarily get to a neutral or supportive posture.David Roberts:   I read the Front and Centered essay against this bill, and it was a little weird, because it would say, cap and trade harms local air quality – but there's a specific provision in the bill addressing that. Then it would say, environmental justice communities have traditionally been locked out of these processes and not been at the table when these things are decided – the bill has a specific provision saying environmental justice communities have to be at the table when these things are decided. It seemed to me as though all their specific objections had been answered directly by the bill, and yet it hadn't seemed to change their orientation toward the bill at all. The overwhelming impression I got from that is that I must be missing something, or there must be history, or something going on here that's not clear on the surface. Do you have any understanding of why they have stuck to their position despite efforts to address those things?Joe Fitzgibbon:  I would not presume to speak for Front and Centered, their coalition members, or their steering committee members. I had a lot of conversations with Front and Centered in the runup to session about, what would it take to get you guys to feel good about this policy? Their answer was basically, “Nothing.” It was a respectful conversation. It was like, “We have very clear directions from our board that this is not a policy that we are engaging on, but thanks for asking,” essentially. So the approach that I took there – recognizing that they had legitimate concerns, not all of which I agreed with – was a similar outlook to how I thought about some of the business groups: How do we address as many of their specific objections as are addressable? Knowing that they're still not going to get to yes, and they're not going to get to neutral, but that to the legislators who are responsive to those concerns, we can say: if you are anxious about allowance trading with California, or if you are anxious about air quality getting worse in disproportionately overburdened communities, here's what I can point you to in the bill that we've done to address that. But to be clear, that doesn't mean Front and Centered is okay with this bill. Ultimately, the legislators are the ones who are making those decisions, and we answered those questions to the satisfaction of enough legislators that were motivated by environmental justice that we got the bill.David Roberts:   Another thing that has seemed weird to me is they seem to really view carbon taxes as fundamentally different in some way than cap and trade. But all the same dynamics are there: you're still paying to pollute, you still have to do something with the revenue, you're still exempting some businesses and not others. Joe Fitzgibbon:  I can’t fully explain that one. That was a frustration of mine as well. Does a cap and trade allow polluters to continue to pollute? Well, carbon tax does that even more.David Roberts:   I've been in dialogue with far-left activists for 15 years now, and there's this tension between being productive and helpful and being the loyal opposition always pushing further. I’ve talked to a lot of people who think, it's our job to say, “This isn't good enough” and to demand more, no matter what. Often I talk to legislators who say, “When you complain about X,Y, and Z, and we respond by doing stuff that addresses those complaints, it would be nice to hear a kind word, or get some support occasionally from the movement, instead of just an immediate pivot to ‘this isn't good enough’ and demanding more.” Is that resolvable? Is it healthy, the net effect the climate left loyal-opposition approach is having on the legislative process?Joe Fitzgibbon:  At a problem of this magnitude, the answer always has to include “and you need to do more.” We're not close to having solved the problem. I do think it is helpful to creating a positive feedback loop to take a breath and say, “It's good that we're moving this direction.” That's what has happened with the passage of the Climate Commitment Act; 350 Seattle was very strongly opposed to this bill, and I think some of that was out of fidelity to environmental justice values and Front and Centered’s position, but some of it was an anticapitalist, “We don’t trust this program.” I had a lot of conversations with constituents who were activists with 350, and said, “I'm sorry, I disagree with you about this. But I think we share an intensity of feeling around climate.” Since the bill’s passage, I haven't seen that much in the way of, “You all are sellouts. Why did you pass a market-based system?” I did expect a little more of that, so that's good. I think that it is important for people who care about climate change to take a minute to say, this is good progress – and we have to do more. That's largely what I've been seeing around this. It's my experience that the most successful social movements are the ones that know how to declare victory sometimes. I'd see this in the labor world: the unions who are able to go to their members and say, “You won this victory through your hard work,” create an empowering feeling of “we can change things and let's do this again.” That’s the lesson that I think the climate left should internalize: If we never declare victory on anything, we're going to lose momentum, and we're going to lose followers. It’s not actually the goal with climate change to feel good about how pure we are.David Roberts:   Another conventionally problematic constituency in climate and energy matters is labor. This is subject to some anguish among various people in the Democratic Party, because, of course, the Democratic Party wants to be, and is, pro-labor, and wants to be, and is, pro-climate. But then there are some elements of labor that are, to put it frankly, big impediments to action on this; specifically the building trades, especially in California, and here, too. How do you navigate that tension? Do you think that tension is resolvable; going to be resolved; on its way to being resolved? What's your forecast for how that plays out?Joe Fitzgibbon:  The tension is maybe not resolvable, but I think it's manageable. On each of these individual issues there's going to be some suspicion, particularly among the building trades, around, what's this going to do to our jobs? What's this going to do to our cost of gas, in particular? Not all, but many of the building trades unions remained opposed to the Clean Fuel Standard right up until the end. That was too bad. There was not the same intensity among labor around the Climate Commitment Act, and that, I think, was largely because so much of the revenue was booked for transportation purposes. For them, more investment in transportation, which is good-paying jobs for their members, superseded any concern, at least as far as I could tell, about what this was going to do for the cost of gasoline or the cost of natural gas or so forth. It's a good tradeoff, because legislators also want to see investments in transportation. One of the big changes we made to the bill when it moved from the Senate to the House was the Senate allowed the transportation dollars to be spent on anything; we amended it so they had to be spent on transportation stuff that reduces emissions, like transit, or electrification. It's a huge bucket of money. This is maybe underappreciated on some parts of the climate left: we essentially have cracked the code on being able to use gas tax for transit, which is prohibited under the Washington Constitution to use the motor vehicle fuel tax for anything other than highway purposes. By some measures, this is a 14- or 15-cent gas tax that's going to be required to go to transit or electrification; that's an enormous thing. I'm just waiting for that to sink in for folks a little bit. Anyway, with labor, I think building trades cared more about seeing those dollars invested than they did other things. They were opposed to Clean Fuels until the end, in part because “clean fuels,” they interpret that as going to raise the price of gas, and it's not generating money for the state, actually, it's generating money to lower the cost of other fuels. That was what they were reacting to there. The other thing, which is probably more true in Washington than in a lot of states, is the bigger part of our labor movement is not building trades, it's service employees, public sector workers. So SEIU, AFCSME, were resolutely in support of this throughout, and that largely comes from their members saying, “We want this to be part of our union's legislative agenda this year.” Those are the unions that have the most clout in Olympia. So it wasn't possible for anybody to say, “Labor doesn't support this.” Some building trades labor was skeptical to varying degrees about either bill; the unions with the most membership and the most political clout, like the nurses and the teachers and the public sector workers, were resolutely in support of these bills.David Roberts:   In the clean energy transition, one of the things that unions have said, generally speaking, is, “We have these good, high-paying, union jobs. We'll acknowledge that transitioning our entire energy infrastructure will create a lot of jobs; we just think it's going to create a bunch of crappy jobs.” If you look around at the clean energy industries today, across the country, it's true: they pay, on average, less than the jobs they're replacing, and are less unionized. So how important is this labor standards piece? I know it was a big part of the Clean Energy Transformation Act, and it's in here too. Is that something that unions trust, and should trust? How confident are we that those things are going to work to really create good jobs?Joe Fitzgibbon:  That was a big part of it, too. I probably should have emphasized that at the outset, that having provisions to say that the new stuff that's funded by all the dollars that are going to be generated from this program is not going to be spent on projects that don't provide health care or pensions to their workforce. In actual experience, many renewable energy developers are not signing project labor agreements, do not have unionized workforces. I think it is highly, if not motivating, at least comforting to know the clear direction that those dollars be spent in ways that maximize economic benefits for local workers and diverse businesses, and have paid sick leave and pay practices in relation to living wage indicators. Those belts and suspenders, which very closely parallel the things that we included in the 100% Clean Electricity law two years ago, went a long way toward alleviating the legitimate fears from some of the construction trades.David Roberts:   Does the business community push back against that? Because it's them who will have to raise their labor standards, which will, of course, raise labor costs, etc.Joe Fitzgibbon:  Yes, they do push back against that, but it's not in their top five list of concerns. So we're able to say no.David Roberts:   The theme that I noticed as I'm reading through the bill and reading the coverage is, “Let's do California's thing, but better than California.” So what were the specific features of the California system that y'all consciously designed around, or designed differently?Joe Fitzgibbon:  So, we talked about the air quality monitoring and air quality improvement piece. Within the framework of the cap itself, a couple of key things: One, our cap is going to decline quite steeply relative to California’s. We're on a trajectory toward net zero by 2050; that's going to be a steep decline. I do think a legitimate criticism of California's program is that the cap was set high enough in the early years that it didn't do that much, and it generated an oversupply of allowances that could then be used for compliance in later years. Other policies in California were doing the heavy lifting, like their RPS and their low carbon fuel standard, and so forth. As the cap has come down in the last couple years, it's pulling its own weight more, but it took a while. Ours is going to be pulling its weight from the start. Another important lesson was the inclusion of offsets under the cap. I know that you wrote about this. This is a critical piece in the legitimate fear around offsets and what offsets are going to do, particularly if there are bogus offsets. There was reporting this week about questionable offset verification protocols in California, which is timely, because Ecology hasn't adopted any of those protocols yet for our law, so they can learn from some of those mistakes. But including offsets under the cap is critical. The regularity of the reviews that Ecology is required to do to ensure that the allowance budget is set in the right place to achieve the statutory limits gives not just an opportunity, but a directive to Ecology to course correct if we do find that the allowance budget is too generous. Those are probably the things that are most, but none of them are more impactful than the steep decline that the cap is going to experience.David Roberts:   The California system places really an enormous amount of discretion on the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the regulators behind the scenes. I don't think the Washington bill puts quite as much discretion in the Department of Ecology, but it does put a lot: the Department of Ecology is supposed to be evaluating whether the environmental justice targets are being met, whether the offset protocols are good. A lot of the quality of the system presumes good decisions on the part of the Department of Ecology for the coming decades. Should that make us nervous? I go back and forth about this all the time, whether it's better as a general matter for more decisions to be made democratically through the legislature, or by purported experts behind the scenes. Do you have a position on that? How much confidence do you have in the Department of Ecology to maintain quality?Joe Fitzgibbon:  This is an example of where it's good to have Jay Inslee as governor. Jay Inslee’s Department of Ecology is not going to be making a more generous decision around offset protocols or allowance budgets than the Washington State Legislature would. They are more insulated from the political pressure that we the legislature would be under to keep allowance prices low and to allow the broadest ranges of offsets possible. I also think, as it is, the bill pushed the limits of our expertise; the more layers of detail we get into, the less confidence I have that I know enough to make an informed decision about these things. We're also up against an extremely tight clock. The Senate passed the bill out two and a half weeks before the end of session; we had two and a half weeks to get it through two committees and off the floor of the House, and then it had to go back to the Senate for a final concurrence vote. We didn't have time to make really well-informed decisions; this is just a function of a part-time legislature and the very strict clock that we operate under. Ecology is going to have 18 months under the Administrative Procedure Act to undergo their full rulemaking process. That's going to lead to a little bit better decisionmaking than we were really capable of. Now, do I have any fear that a potential future Republican governor’s Department of Ecology might make bad decisions? Well, that would be bad. We're lucky in Washington; we have the longest run of Democratic control of the governorship in the nation. In my entire life, we’ve only had Democratic governors. Our last Republican governor lost reelection in 1984. It helps that we elect our governors in presidential years; most states do not. But if something changed, and we elected a Republican governor in a future year, then I would be nervous about the Department of Ecology’s latitude in making decisions around this program, and you'd probably see an intensification of legislative oversight about some of these key decisions. We're certainly going to be conducting a lot of oversight into this, but there's just a degree of trust with the expertise that Ecology has to make a rational decision about, say, offset protocols.David Roberts:   Something of passionate interest to many in Washington, particularly in Seattle, is the connection between land use and climate. Lots of people on the left these days are saying, electric vehicles are great and all, but what we really need is more public transit, better urban design, more density, more livability, walkability; we need to get people out of their cars. There isn't really a ton in the CCA along those lines. There was a Growth Management Act floating around Congress this session, but it died in the Senate. So I'm curious: What killed it in the Senate? Having talked to a bunch of your fellow legislators about this now, what's your sense of whether they connect those issues? Do you think the Growth Management Act has a chance if it comes back? What would you like to see done on these lines? Joe Fitzgibbon:  I think that legislators are certainly understanding that connection better than they used to, that land use decisions are very impactful in emissions – generally on a longer time horizon, though. Land use policy is important because you're building a built environment that's going to look that way for a lot of decades. But it doesn't reduce emissions a lot in the near term, and we need to be doing both. So I don't see the land use stuff as a silver bullet, because it just doesn't change the urban form fast enough. Also, it doesn't matter how much you increase density if you're not also increasing access to non-polluting modes of transportation, like transit and walking and biking, which the CCA does help do by providing new dollars for that. The bill this year was an awesome effort, and it's amazing, actually, that it made it as far as it did. We have the existing state Growth Management Act, Washington's 30-year-old planning framework, which requires cities and counties to have a very robust set of things that they think about when they adopt their zoning and development regulations and all that. It includes protection for forest lands and wetlands and critical areas and housing supply and transportation; think about your capital facilities; restrict urban sprawl; if you're a county draw an urban growth boundary, etc. Very fundamental to how local governments have to do things in our state. This bill would have required that climate considerations be a part of that planning: that when a local government is doing their zoning updates, require that they use that process to reduce their emissions, and also that they increase their resiliency to changing climate, whether that's increased wildfire risk or rising sea levels or more floods or whatever. It didn't say this super explicitly, but it was clearly the intent that the regulations that the Department of Commerce was going to adopt – that cities would have to at least look at as part of their inclusion of this consideration – were probably going to include things like more density around transit. The bill made it out of the House. That was one of our livelier floor debates this year, because the Republicans don't just hate climate policy: they really hate the Growth Management Act.The bill seemed to be doing well in the Senate. Unfortunately, after it passed out of two Senate committees, it was referred to a third committee, which is unusual. It was referred to the Senate Transportation Committee, which is often where climate things go to die. It's where the Clean Fuel Standard died in 2019 and 2020, because the chair there is our most moderate, least constructive on climate and environment, Democratic senator, and he killed the bill. The good news, though, is that we got into the state budget a provision directing the Department of Commerce to do the same things that they were going to have to do under the bill. We're going to try to come back and pass it first thing next session, and hopefully with a little bit more coordination with the Senate about how to stay one step ahead of that problem in the Senate Transportation Committee. But it would have been a big step forward. The other good news, particularly for folks in Seattle, is that the central Puget Sound counties are already doing this; maybe not at quite the level of detail that the bill would have required, but King, Pierce, Snohomish, and Kitsap have already agreed as part of the multi-county planning process that climate is something that they look at in their comp plan. So it's not like the work isn't happening. It's just not going to be mandated everywhere in the state until we get that bill passed, hopefully next year.David Roberts:   Wasn’t that a key part of the way the CCA passed this year, by not getting referred to the Transportation Committee?Joe Fitzgibbon:  It did help. That senator, Senator Hobbs, did vote for the bill; part of his price was all the money for transportation stuff. I don't want to speculate too much about the internal workings of the Senate, but I do think it would have been a scarier prospect if it had had to go to that committee. More broadly, on land use: A lot of legislators used to be city council members or county commissioners, so the tension that we have on the Democratic side is people who want to see density and housing supply and climate incorporated into big giant upzones around light rail stations, and people who either came from local government or just really sympathize with their local governments who say, “Don't tell us what to do.” That's our problem. On the Republican side, we try to make common cause with the Republicans from a property rights standpoint, saying, “Wouldn't you like to deny your city the big government telling me I can't build a duplex, because that's big government?” Sometimes we can get somewhere with that. But then there's also the base Republican “you're trying to make everybody live in a townhouse” suspicion too. So both parties have a little different dynamic around this one than on the other issues. We've gotten some good land use stuff through from time to time, but it's a much less linear debate than you see on the other climate stuff.David Roberts:   The clean fuel standard and the CCA have passed, but their implementation is contingent upon the passage of a transportation package that has to contain a gas tax of at least 5 cents a gallon. Some Seattle urbanists are upset about this because they think the transportation package is full of highway spending and highway expansions. As someone who hates highway expansions, what is the proper level of freakout for me about this? Should I worry about this transportation package? How much can it change before it passes? Does this bother you at all, that this contingency got stuck on?Joe Fitzgibbon:  Yes, I don't like the contingency, for more than one reason. I just think it's bad lawmaking to say this law only goes into effect if this unrelated law also passes. I think it's questionable whether it's even allowed under the state constitution. But it's what we had to accept in order to get the votes in the Senate. I don't think a 5 cent gas tax increase is a bad thing, though. We have enough transportation needs, even highway needs, that we could spend 5 cents easily without adding a new lane anywhere. We're supposed to spend $4 billion fixing fish passage barriers on state highways between now and 2030; you could spend all 5 cents on culverts alone and not expand a single lane mile anywhere. We're also significantly behind on maintenance and preservation of the existing road system.David Roberts:   The bill could theoretically boost the gas tax more than that, though, right?Joe Fitzgibbon:  Absolutely. We probably will have to. I think a lot of people look at Senator Hobbs’ transportation package in the Senate, which is the one that made it the furthest, and think, that must be the template for what you guys are going to do. We're a long way away from what that package is going to look like, and there are a lot of opportunities for people to weigh in along the way to say, this project is bad, and please don't pass a transportation package that builds a new 12-lane highway in East Snohomish County; that, we're also not going to do. Sometimes a highway project is actually a safety project. Sometimes there are actually dangerous roadways that it does cost a couple hundred million dollars to make a highway safer, and in some parts of that roadway that might involve adding a lane. But that's not the same as, we're going to go now open up huge swaths of farmland to suburban sprawl with a giant new freeway. So it's a legitimate thing for urbanist climate champions to keep their eyes on, but also, it's not something that I would say that folks should feel like they need to freak out about quite yet. Because we actually do need a lot more money for transportation in the state, even if we don't expand highways, and if we are going to expand highways anywhere, just look at that contextually, look at that actual project, and if it's actually the thing that you're most worried about.David Roberts:   I have to say, even as someone who hates highways and wants to ban cars, it would take a lot of new highway lanes to offset the benefits of 95 percent carbon reductions locked in through 2050.Joe Fitzgibbon:  Even if we were going to spend it all on giant new highways, there's still a cap. If a bunch of people were going to try to move to rural places and drive a bunch more, well, then transportation emissions would presumably eat up all the remaining allowances and all the other pollution would have to decline in an even greater amount. Or maybe there's a shortage of allowances and the allowance prices get so high that people in those rural areas actually just have to carpool or drive electric cars. That's not a likely outcome, but even if it were, it doesn't change the fact that the cap isn't going up.David Roberts:   You mentioned earlier that this being climate change, the work is never done. It's never good enough. But on the flip side, right now, Washington is specifically regulating electricity, transportation, and buildings, and there’s this economy-wide cap in the background, reducing emissions. So what are the pieces left? When you come back next session, in terms of climate and energy, is there a next big thing, or is it just mostly little things filling in gaps at this point?Joe Fitzgibbon:  We're going to have to do more big things. I don't know that the crystal ball is quite clear enough this soon after the end of session to know what all the next big things are, but the biggest thing that we didn't get done this session is a law around residential buildings. The buildings law that we passed two years ago was really awesome; it was the first of its kind in the country regulating the energy performance of large commercial buildings. We don't really have a policy in place for residential heating, particularly water heating and space heating. I think a lot of people worry we're going to come for their gas stoves.But the bill that was introduced this year – it passed out of my committee, it died in the Appropriations Committee – would have tried to put the state on track toward decarbonizing space heat and water heat in residential buildings. As often with an ambitious bill, it didn't make it the first session; we're going to have to do more work on that. That one ran into a hot storm of opposition from both building trades and gas utilities. We did get some pieces of it incorporated into other bills: one piece of it into the operating budget, one piece of it into a different bill about utility ratemaking. But we have to think more about what policies we need in order to accelerate the decarbonization of residential buildings, recognizing that that's not going to change the cap either. Essentially, if you're going to lower carbon emissions from residential buildings, that just means that many more allowances for other sectors. But it's still something that, of course, the faster we do it, also probably provides some breathing room for Ecology to lower the cap more.David Roberts:   Are you worried about backlash to this? Because when you talk about people being forced to do things about the way they heat their home, it's very personal, and people have very strong feelings. Do you feel like the climate movement, or politicians, or anyone has done the education work to prepare people for this? Are you worried about citizen backlash, if a regulator in the end comes to your home and tells you to get rid of your furnace, which is not totally implausible?Joe Fitzgibbon:  I don't think that is something the public is ready for, even in Seattle. I don't think that Seattle homeowners more than anyone else want to have someone come say, “Turn off your gas.” The bill that we considered this year wouldn't have done that. But I think that we need to learn from how it was communicated. Most of the proposals that I've seen, both at the local level and at the state level, involve stopping new gas hookups, not forcing current gas users to turn off their gas. We need to be really good about talking about that aspect, so everybody knows, nobody is going to be told you have to go get rid of your furnace and buy a heat pump. At some point in the future – our energy codes probably are going to require this already, without new legislation – new construction is probably going to have to be electric only. How do we ensure that we're ready for that? How do we ensure that utilities are ready for that? How do we ensure that the gas utilities are not building new gas lines that are going to be obsolete in 10 years? Those are the policy choices we have to make, and we have to be really, really clear about what we're doing and what we're not doing. Because that is a recipe for backlash, if people do think we're going to be coming in and telling them to have cold houses.David Roberts:   What about your personal political plans? Are you happy doing your work in the House, or do you have your eye on other things?Joe Fitzgibbon:  I don't see myself running for office at a different level of government. I feel good about the work where I am in the House right now. I don't see the federal government as a really rewarding or productive place for me to be; I'm glad that good people are there doing what they're doing. I had an open Senate seat in my district three years ago that I chose not to run for because I felt like I was just getting the hang of things in the House, and I was committee chair – and I think that turned out to be the right decision. So I plan on doing this until I get a little more burned out on it, and that's as far into the future as I can see.David Roberts:   Well, you're passing bills and seeing actual changes made – why anyone on Earth would want to go from that situation to the US Senate is utterly mysterious to me. I don't even know why it's viewed as up anymore. It's more like lateral or downward.Joe Fitzgibbon:  That's a more clear way of saying that, for sure.David Roberts:   Thanks so much for taking all this time, and thanks for all the work you're doing. Joe Fitzgibbon:Thanks, David.  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 May 2019, I wrote in Vox that “one weird trick can help any state or city pass clean energy policy.” Spoiler: the one weird trick is electing Democrats. My home state of Washington elected a whole mess of Democrats over the last several cycles and it is paying off handsomely. Without much national attention, the last few years have seen Washington quietly put into place the most comprehensive and ambitious slate of climate and energy policies of any US state. Yes, I’m talking to you, California.The legislature just passed a carbon cap that will reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 95 percent by 2050 (it awaits Gov. Jay Inslee’s signature). I want to talk about that bill, but first, to understand its significance, we need to quickly review all the other stuff the Washington legislature has been up to lately. Let’s run through the last three years. It’s a lot. (And this is only the climate stuff; there’s much more: police reform, a capital gains tax, reduction in penalties for drug possession, etc.)In 2019, the legislature passed:* the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA), the most significant energy bill in state history, which will require state utilities to reach carbon neutrality by 2030 and 100 percent self-generated carbon-free electricity by 2045; it also contains a bunch of sexy utility business-model reforms;* the Clean Buildings bill, a first-in-the-nation program that requires large commercial building owners to address the energy efficiency of their existing buildings;* a bill on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which will phase out dangerous ozone-depleting (and climate-warming) aerosols, foams, and refrigerants (making Washington the second state, after California, to do so); and* HB 2042, which puts about $170 million toward transportation electrification, through tax incentives for mid-market EVs, money for charging stations, and money to transit agencies to electrify buses. In 2020, it passed:* SB 5811, which adopts California’s Zero-Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) program and California’s Advanced Clean Truck Rule, requiring rising sales of ZEV passenger vehicles and heavy- and medium-duty trucks, respectively; and* an update of the state’s greenhouse gas emission goals: 45 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2030, 70 percent by 2040, and 95 percent/net-zero by 2050. In 2021 so far, it has passed:* HB 1050, another HFC bill that goes beyond recently adopted federal standards;* HB 1084, the Healthy Homes and Clean Buildings Act, which would take a number of steps to gradually phase out natural gas utility service and boost building electrification [Correction: 1084 did not actually pass; it died in the Appropriations Committee, but several of its provisions passed via the state budget]; and* HB 1091, which would establish a clean fuels standard (CFS) that gradually reduces the carbon content of liquid fuels in the state, similar to laws already in place in California, Oregon, and British Columbia (making a declining carbon standard for fuels the law of the land from the Mexican border to the Yukon). This has been a long fight in Washington — the CFS is one of Big Oil’s least-favorite policies — and this is the third attempt to pass it, so victory is sweet.So, the legislature has already passed laws specific to electricity, transportation, buildings, and fuels. All of this activity sets the context for last week’s finale: SB 5126, the Climate Commitment Act (CCA — here’s the bill text). I wrote last year that carbon pricing has been dethroned in left-leaning carbon policy circles, in favor of industrial policy — sector-specific standards, investments, and justice (SIJ). But the dream of carbon pricing never died in the hearts of Jay Inslee and Washington legislators. The CCA is a “cap-and-invest” program that would impose a declining cap on emissions and distribute allowances under the cap, thereby placing an escalating price on carbon. There’s lots to say about this, but the first thing to note is that this is not carbon pricing instead of SIJ — note all the sector-specific policies passed before and alongside it. It is carbon pricing as a complement, part of a comprehensive suite of carbon policies.Note also that this bill comes at the tail end of a long record of failure on carbon pricing in Washington, including two citizen-led ballot initiatives, one based on economists’ recommendations and one based on the environmental left’s recommendations, both of which were defeated. There’s a lot of history here. Politically, there are two salient facts bounding the bill. On the downside, implementation of both the CFS and the CCA is contingent on the passage of a transportation package containing a boost in the gas tax of at least five cents per gallon. Many state climate activists are angry about this, because in its current condition, the transportation package is highway-heavy. (I’ll get into this more later.)On the upside, once it is in effect, the CCA is authorized to stay in effect until its emission goals are reached. This is a really big deal: there won’t be a big legislative fight over re-authorization like there was in California in 2017, which weakened that state’s program. There is no sunset or time limit on the CCA. It stays in place until the state is net-zero. A declining cap is now the status quo, and it’s always more difficult to pass a new bill to change the status quo than it is to keep it in place.Before we get too deep in the politics, though, let’s look at what the CCA does. It adopts the same broad outlines as California’s cap-and-trade system, but with this guiding principle, as articulated to the Seattle Times by state Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D-Seattle), the bill’s key Senate architect: “I had a check list, and I made sure in my own head that we addressed these criticisms and weaknesses of the California bill, and not just danced around them.” Cap-and-invest will issue a declining number of allowancesThe CCA is a program to achieve the state’s carbon targets, as updated last year: 45 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2030, 70 percent by 2040, and 95 percent/net-zero by 2050. Keep in mind: this is not just the electricity sector. It’s electricity and transportation and oil and gas and more — somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Only California has comparable economy-wide aspirations, but Washington’s rate of reductions will need to be much more rapid than California’s to reach its targets. In terms of the sheer pace of change to which a state has committed, Washington has taken the lead.With a few exceptions, the cap will cover all entities that emit at least 25,000 tons of energy, process, or landfill emissions a year — around 100 entities total. Each year, a declining number of allowances will be issued. Most of them will be distributed via auction (sold to raise revenue for the state), with a few exceptions. Electric utilities are already covered by CETA, so they get their allowances free. They can use their allowances for compliance and, if they reduce emissions ahead of schedule, auction off the remainder. Any benefits from those auctions are to be used “for the benefit of ratepayers, with the first priority the mitigation of any rate impacts to low-income customers.” Natural gas utilities get free allowances equal to their emissions the first year, with that number declining by about 6.5 percent a year through 2030, commensurate with the cap. Starting in 2023, natgas utilities must auction 65 percent of those free allowances, with the number by rising by 5 percent a year up to 100 percent. The auction proceeds must be returned to customers “by providing nonvolumetric [equal for each customer] credits on ratepayer utility bills, prioritizing low-income customers, or used to minimize cost impacts on low-income, residential, and small business customers through actions that include, but are not limited to, weatherization, decarbonization, conservation and efficiency services, and bill assistance.” But there’s a twist: excepting low-income households, only households that are already connected to the natural gas system when the bill goes into effect can receive these rebates. Subsequent hookups do not, a significant disincentive California doesn’t have. Finally, so-called energy-intensive trade-exposed (EITE) entities — industries where marginal increases in energy costs could prove a competitive disadvantage and potentially push them out of state — are not exempt from the cap. They will receive a steadily declining share of free allowances through 2035, based on their output. Note: some environmental-justice activists have criticized this provision, but a) the carbon-tax bill the EJ community supported earlier this session, Washington STRONG, would exempt all EITE entities from its cap, forever, b) EITE entities can have their access to offsets cut off if they are harming local air quality, and c) the air-quality regulations in the CCA serve as a backstop for local air quality. This is about as good as you’ll find any state doing on EITE businesses.The price of allowances will have a floor and a ceilingThe price of allowances, as established by auctions, will have a “collar,” meaning it will have a rising floor (to ensure the program produces reliable revenue) and a rising ceiling (to make sure it doesn’t get too expensive). The ceiling will take the form of an allowance price containment reserve, which basically means that if the price hits the ceiling, unlimited allowances at that price can be released from the reserve until prices go back down.The price collar will effectively cause the system to behave a little more like a carbon tax, with price fluctuations confined to a predictable range. There will also be an “emissions containment reserve,” set to a trigger price, that will allow the department to withdraw subsets of allowances from the system if the targets are not being met. (For more on emissions containment reserves, see this post from Resources for the Future.)The state Department of Ecology will set the floor, ceiling, and trigger prices through rulemakings involving public and stakeholder input. In 2027, 2035, 2040, and 2050 — and whenever else it elects to — the department will review whether the program is on track to meet its targets and take any corrective action necessary. For instance, in the event of oversupply of allowances, a problem that bedevils the California system, the department can withdraw allowances from the system to push the price as high as necessary to get on the right trajectory.Offsets will come in under the capRegulated entities may meet 8 percent of their compliance obligations through carbon offsets in the first compliance period (2023-2026); from then on, it is 6 percent. Of those offsets, 3 and then 2 percent respectively must go to projects on tribal lands; 50 and then 75 percent of the benefits, respectively, must be within Washington state. Offsets are a huge source of controversy, in this system as in all systems where they play a role. A recent blockbuster investigation by ProPublica revealed that California’s biggest forestry offset programs are basically bogus — failing to reduce emissions and blowing the state’s carbon budget.The dangers of offsets — explained in more detail in my interview with energy analysts Danny Cullenward and David Victor — are very real, but the bill contains a few key provisions that reduce those risks.First and most importantly, unlike in California, offsets in Washington’s system are beneath the cap. This is a tricky concept to get your head around, so let me walk through some idealized examples.Say, in a California-style system, the state’s emissions limit for the year is 1,000 tons. It allows 8 percent of compliance via offsets, so in addition to issuing 1,000 allowances, it allows 80 offset credits. Note: there are now 1,080 tons worth of compliance instruments on the market (allowances + offsets). However, California believes that each offset represents a ton of carbon reduced elsewhere, outside the covered sectors. So 1,080 tons of compliance instruments - 80 tons of carbon reduced elsewhere = 1,000 tons, the state emissions limit. So far so good.However! If the 80 offsets turn out to be bogus — if they don’t represent real carbon reductions elsewhere in the economy — then the system will net out at 1,080 tons of emissions, blowing past the state’s purported limit.That, basically, is what critics say has been happening in California: because so many of the millions and millions of tons of offsets in the system are bogus, the state is actually permitting emissions well above its stated limits.Washington legislators learned from California’s example and designed their system differently. Say Washington’s emissions limit for the year is 1,000 tons. It also allows 8 percent compliance via offsets. However, its offsets are beneath the cap, meaning the state will issue 920 allowances and allow 80 offsets — a total of 1,000 tons worth of compliance instruments.If all 80 offsets are bogus, then the state comes in at its limit: 1,000 tons. If the 80 offsets are valid, if they represent actual emission reductions outside the covered sectors, then they push emissions below the statutory cap. The system will actually have netted out at 920 tons of emissions, well under the state limit. This is worth repeating: in the Washington system, insofar as offsets represent valid emission reductions, they are effectively a bonus, over and above the reductions required by statute. (This could help push the system to net-zero eventually.) Because the Washington system doesn’t rely on the validity of offsets to hit its caps, some of the political pressure is taken off of them.That’s the first thing. The second thing is that the CCA directly addresses the long-standing concern over “hot spots.” The concern is that some heavily polluting facilities, often located in low-income or minority neighborhoods, will buy tons of cheap offsets and continue to pollute. The CCA — in addition to setting up a whole apparatus to measure local air quality and screen for vulnerable communities — says that if the state determines a particular facility is harming an “overburdened community,” it can restrict the facility’s access to offsets (a provision also absent in California).Third, the Department of Ecology will be charged with determining which of California’s offset protocols to accept; it is not required to accept them all. Critics of offsets have long said that the incentives are inevitably skewed in these systems: offset providers want lax standards so they can sell in bulk, regulated entities want lax standards because cheap offsets bring down the overall cost of compliance; politicians want lax standards because they also benefit from the optics of cheap compliance. Regulators, the only participants with an interest in maintaining standards, are under constant pressure. It’s definitely true that the success of Washington’s program, on offsets and elsewhere, will depend on judicious action from future regulators. But that’s true of any system.The revenue will go to climate mitigation and adaptationAuctioning allowances every year will bring in billions of dollars in state revenue, the exact level depending on the price they bring. The state estimates that, if allowances sell at the California floor price, they will raise around $500 million a year, rising up to the high 600s over time — about $8 billion total through 2037. In reality, the Department of Ecology will set its own floor and in practice the price is likely to exceed it, given Washington’s ambitions.Here’s how the revenue is allocated.First, between the start of the cap-and-invest program and 2037, $5.2 billion of CCA revenue will go to transportation projects that reduce carbon emissions, mostly transit but also electrification, including electrification of Washington ferries (a huge win for local air quality). We will get into the controversy over Washington’s transportation package later — remember, implementation of the CCA is contingent on its passage — but it is worth emphasizing that the CCA itself will spend roughly five times what the last transportation package allocated for transportation decarbonization projects. From 2037 on, 50 percent of CCA revenue will go to such projects. None of these funds can go to roads. Second, every two years, $20 million will go to the Air Quality and Health Disparities Improvement Account (see below).Third, the remaining funds — around $3 billion, assuming California’s floor price — will go to the Climate Investment Account, which will divide it as follows:* 75 percent to the Climate Commitment Account, which will fund climate mitigation and some adaptation projects; it will also set aside $250 million to help relocate tribal communities threatened by sea-level rise; and* 25 percent to the Natural Climate Solutions Account, which is dedicated to natural resources management and resilience.All of the Climate Investment Account spending is subject to high labor standards, like the money spent in CETA (more on that here). The intent is to use the investments to create high-quality in-state union jobs. Air-quality standards and targeted investments will address environmental justiceThere are provisions throughout the CCA related to environmental justice. First, one of the objections EJ communities often have to cap-and-trade is that it doesn’t guarantee improvement in local air quality, especially in overburdened communities. The CCA addresses this in Section 3, which sets up a system for local air-quality monitoring and regulation. The state will identify overburdened communities using a tool like the Washington Environmental Health Disparities Map (which grades communities on over a dozen metrics) and deploy air-monitoring systems in the identified communities — something Washington, like many states, now lacks. It will direct state and local air agencies to adopt new standards and regulations such that the overburdened communities either meet federal National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) or have air quality equal to nearby communities, whichever is more protective. Since all of Washington complies with NAAQS, these standards will go beyond federal air quality standards to specifically identify and eliminate wide disparities often based on class and race. Every two years, the Department of Ecology will review the state’s progress to ensure that criteria pollutants in overburdened communities are declining on schedule.Second, all the investments made with CCA revenue must target:* at least 35 percent to overburdened communities, with a target of 40 percent, and* and additional 10 percent to projects sponsored by tribal nations.In California, a similar provision has meant roughly $3 billion invested in that state’s overburdened communities since 2014. Now Washington’s overburdened communities will receive a steady stream of investment as well. Third, Washington’s Environmental Justice Council — created by the Healthy Environment for All (HEAL) Act, also passed this year — will provide oversight on the design of the program, the revenue, and any plans to link the system to California’s. (The council is a 12-member group, appointed by the governor and approved by the Senate, drawn from affected communities and state agencies.) The state is also instructed to create a tribal consultation framework and ensure that tribes are involved in all Climate Investment Account spending decisions that affect tribal lands. (Tribes can halt projects if such consultation hasn’t taken place.)So, the bill contains a combination of specific air-quality standards for overburdened communities, revenue for overburdened communities, and formal environmental-justice oversight of design and revenue decisions. We’ll touch more on the politics around this below. Linking to California could be sketchyWashington may eventually want to link its system to California’s, which is a politically dicey prospect, given familiar criticisms of that state’s system. To do so, the two states would have to agree on mutual exchange of allowances, align their price floors and ceilings, and integrate their auction systems, among other things.Section 24 of the CCA instructs the Department of Ecology to analyze whether a link would do any harm to Washington’s system. Any linkage must not only integrate the systems properly, it must ensure that:* the jurisdiction being linked to has environmental-justice provisions in place to get revenue to overburdened communities, * the linkage will not harm overburdened communities in either jurisdiction,* the linkage will not harm Washington’s ability to hit its targets, and* Washington retains “all legal and policymaking authority over its program design and enforcement.”That’s a pretty stiff set of requirements, and it’s an open question whether a linkage with California can meet them any time soon, given that state’s problems with oversupply and local air-quality concentrations. (More on that below.)The politics around the CCA are pretty good, but there are objectionsThe nature of the news cycle these days is that stories come and go and are forgotten in a matter of hours. The passage of these landmark climate and energy bills is probably going to see the same fate — it will be gone from the headlines long before you read this, insofar as it got any headlines at all. (This should teach Democratic lawmakers something: they can pass big ambitious policies and people will barely register that it happened. Might as well let loose and pass more!)Most people, if they noticed the bill passing at all, felt happy that something was getting done. Climate action is, after all, extremely popular. Among those engaged with the process, however, there has been some pushback, falling into three buckets.1. Some urbanists hate the transportation linkage.As I said in the intro, the CFS and the CCA have both passed, but their implementation is contingent on the passage of a transportation package (containing a gas tax of at least five cents a gallon). Some Seattle urbanists are upset about the state of that transportation package; they believe it spends too much on highways, undercutting the CCA’s goals. They are therefore opposed to the linkage, and want Gov. Jay Inslee — who has a line-item veto — to strike it from the bill and allow the CCA to be implemented without restrictions. (That would severely piss off several moderate Democrats in the Senate.) One thing to note on this is that all highway spending is not equal. Big chunks of the Washington highway budget will be taken up by court-mandated repair of culverts (to help fish). And there are lots of projects — like the new Columbia River Crossing bridge, which will include light rail — that most everyone agrees are necessary. More importantly, through a twist of Washington law, the CFS and CCA will likely prevent billions of dollars in road spending. The use of bonding to borrow money for road spending requires a 60 percent majority in the Washington legislature, which means it will require several Republican votes. And Republicans are absolutely not going to vote for a transportation package that triggers the CFS and the CCA, two policies they passionately hate. That means no Republican votes and no bonding, which will sharply curtail, by several billion, the amount of money the transportation package can devote to roads. And finally, remember, the CCA will put $5.2 billion toward transportation decarbonization, five times what the last transportation package spent on that, none of which can go to roads. It seems to me that the benefits of the bill, in transportation alone, vastly outweigh the harms of a few highway-widening projects, irksome as they are. 2. Some environmental justice groups oppose cap-and-trade.The state environmental justice community is divided on the CCA. Groups like Puget Sound Sage and Front and Centered have spoken out against it, but it has received support from 20 state tribes, El Centro de la Raza, the Washington Black Lives Matter Alliance, and Washington Build Back Black Alliance.The opposition arises mainly from opposition to cap-and-trade itself, which some EJ activists believe is inherently inferior to a carbon tax like the 2018 state ballot initiative (1631) or Washington STRONG. To my mind, most of their critiques — especially around local air quality and participation — are directly answered by provisions in the bill. And some, like the idea that cap-and-invest allows companies to “pay to pollute,” are more true of the carbon taxes they support (which contain no mandatory emission reductions). But make up your own mind: the Sage and F&C essays make the case against; Vlad Gutman-Britten of Climate Solutions addresses the objections at length here.3. Some wonks worry about hooking up with California.There’s long been a strain of thought in Washington that hitching up to the much larger California carbon market will effectively put California in charge of Washington policy. That critique used to come from the right, but lately there have been versions of it on the left as well.There are two basic worries. The first is that California’s offset protocols are garbage and if Washington adopts them it will flood its system with bogus carbon reductions. The second is that California’s system suffers from chronic oversupply of allowances. The oversupply suppresses prices, and a governor facing a recall election and needing the support of the building trades is not going to support reform that raises prices any time soon. That could drag down Washington’s prices.To some extent, these objections are answered in the bill. Offsets are below the cap, so the risks are lower; the Department of Ecology is not required to adopt all of California’s offset protocols, it can independently assess them; and the criteria for linkage specifically include that it not suppress prices.Nonetheless, there is some tension here. There will be pressure to link the systems, to hold prices down in Washington. (Unlinked systems are, by some analyses, three times the cost of linked systems.) But it’s not totally clear how, once linked, Washington can enforce its own standards. Since linkage won’t happen until the middle of the decade at the soonest, the best-case scenario is that California wrings some of the oversupply out of its system by then. And Washington linking could actually help lift prices in California — Washington will represent a lot of demand, given the steepness of its proposed emissions trajectory. Washington is kicking assAll of these objections are worth taking seriously, but in my judgment, on balance, Washington’s new bill — or more broadly, the comprehensive suite of policies the state has constructed — is overwhelmingly worth celebrating. Among other things, the CCA will bring billions in investment and new economic growth to the state, along with hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Given all the scorn heaped on Washington legislators over the last decade, especially by climate advocates (including me), it is worth noting that credit for the CCA goes largely to legislators, negotiating directly with one another. They finally got sick of Washington f*****g around on climate pricing, pulled together the lessons of previous attempts (and California’s example), hashed out a bill enough Democrats could agree to, and passed it. And they did a good job: the wonky i’s are dotted and t’s crossed.Every success has many parents, and this one is no different, but special credit goes to Representative Joe Fitzgibbon in the House and Senator Reuven Carlyle in the Senate, who by all accounts (and I mean all accounts — one or both were praised by everyone I contacted, even some bill opponents) were central to coalition-building around these bills and improving them as they moved through the process. Once Inslee signs the CFS and the CCA and a transportation package passes, both of which most observers expect in relatively short order, Washington will have the full suite: legally enforceable programs and standards in place to decarbonize electricity, transportation, and buildings, and in addition to that — as a complement, not an alternative — a declining cap that ensures the rapid emission reductions the state needs to meet its targets. The Washington legislature is showing Democrats across the country that climate politics are good politics, that voters respond to big climate ambition. Now it’s up to Washington to show other states that reducing carbon emissions is good for the economy and good for the health and welfare of state residents. The fight goes on for effective implementation and enforcement, but for now, Washington residents are justified in popping some champagne corks. The state has finally charted a clear path to a healthier climate future. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

(Hey Volties! The following was going to be a column on Vox, but they decided they wanted something newsier, so I’ll be doing something about Biden’s pledge over there, soon. In the meantime, enjoy this writeup of a fun new paper, or listen by clicking play above. We’ll get back to Battery Week next week.)Climate change can sometimes seem like an intractable problem, so it is useful to remember periodically that progress is possible — indeed, that we are making progress, and know how to make more.This is especially true of the electricity sector.Electricity is the focus of some of our biggest ambitions. Climate policy analysts (and Joe Biden) agree that we need to decarbonize the electricity sector entirely by 2035 — that’s what Biden’s Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Standard aims for, if he’s able to pass it. That’s an incredibly ambitious target for the next 15 years, but a look at the last 15 years shows that rapid change is possible.The US electricity sector is decarbonizing faster than expectedTo illustrate the point, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory senior researcher Ryan Wiser undertook a simple project. He went back 15 years and looked at the US Energy Information Administration’s 2005 projections for the electricity sector, to compare them with what actually happened. Specifically, he looked at the EIA’s business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, its projection of what would happen if 2005 policy were frozen in place. (He also looked at other projections, to make sure EIA wasn’t an outlier.) Here’s the top-line conclusion:Fifteen years ago, many business-as-usual projections anticipated that annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power supply in the United States would reach 3,000 million metric tons (MMT) in 2020. In fact, direct power-sector CO2 emissions in 2020 were 1,450 MMT — roughly 50% below the earlier projections. By this metric, in only 15 years the country’s power sector has gone halfway to zero emissions. [my emphasis]Not bad!Of course, as Wiser acknowledges, this is about the rosiest possible lens through which to look at this data.2020 was an unusual year; the pandemic drove demand (and emissions) down. Using 2019 numbers instead, the decline from BAU is 46 percent.If you measure how much power sector emissions fell from 2005 to 2020 in absolute terms — rather than relative to expectations — the decline is 40 percent. Measuring absolute decline with 2019 numbers gets you 33 percent. If you look at total energy-related emissions — not just electricity but all energy — they are down 39 percent relative to BAU. It’s evident that electricity is making the fastest progress.Nonetheless, no matter how you look at it, in terms of emissions, we’re doing much better than BAU in the electricity sector. Here’s a breakdown of emission declines in the electricity sector (and its component subsectors), relative to BAU projections and absolute levels, for both 2020 and 2019.(Look how much difference 2020 made in transportation — that’s the pandemic talking.)That’s how electricity GHG emissions did. Let’s look at a few other metrics.Coal died while natural gas and renewables grewFour big trends in the sources that power the electricity sector helped push emissions below BAU. First, coal died — just absolutely plunged relative to expectations. Second, natural gas boomed, thanks to the shale revolution, and stayed much cheaper than expected. Third, renewables boomed, thanks to policy support that drove rapid cost declines. And fourth, demand stagnated, thanks to declining manufacturing and energy efficiency.Here’s a graph that shows, on top, how supply and demand sources came in relative to EIA’s 2005 BAU, and on bottom, how they performed in absolute terms.You can see the four stories plain as day: coal plunged, natural gas and renewables boomed, and demand stagnated. Here’s another way of looking at the data:Electricity bills have not increased …The dynamic in electricity prices is interesting. EIA’s 2005 BAU projection had electricity retail prices falling slightly by 2020, but average consumer electricity bills rising substantially, thanks to increased demand. What happened instead: retail prices stayed about the same, and so did average bills.With all the cheap natural gas and renewables flooding the system, why didn’t prices go down? Wiser cites research uncovering the primary culprit: “declining power production costs due to decreasing prices for natural gas, wind, and solar have been offset by increases in sector-wide transmission and distribution costs.”Curses, transmission again! (Time to spend some infrastructure money.)… but pollution has plungedCoal is the dirtiest electricity source, so the unexpected plunge in coal means a commensurate plunge in local air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Wiser calculates both the climate damages (by using the government’s social cost of carbon) and the air pollution damages avoided by sectoral changes over the last 15 years. They are stunning.Even these numbers probably understate the benefits, since every new round of science reveals that the impact of air pollution is greater than previously understood. Employment grew thanks to renewables“The renewable energy sector is job-intensive, requiring more jobs per unit output than natural gas and coal,” Wiser writes. “As a result, though jobs in the coal sector are considerably lower than might have been the case, natural gas and especially renewable energy jobs boost the overall total to 920,000.”Measuring employment impacts is a little trickier — Wiser only measures a limited set of job categories, and calls these “rough first-order approximations” — but it’s clear enough that domestic renewable energy also involves lots of new domestic jobs. What to learn from our unanticipated success in electricityWhat’s happened over the past 15 years in US electricity is remarkable: for no added cost to consumers, we have radically reduced the social cost of power. Hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, will be healthier in the future for it.In part that came through a few strokes of luck. The fracking boom was responsible for somewhere around half the reductions. But a great deal came through organized activist and public-policy effort, to push coal out of the system, expand renewables, and hold demand down through energy efficiency. (Given how much research and public policy was devoted to expanding natural gas, even that could be seen as largely intentional.)When I asked Wiser how much credit he would give to deliberate policy, here’s what he told me:Policy has driven growth in wind, solar, and energy efficiency. For wind and solar, state RPSs, federal tax incentives, net metering, R&D. For efficiency, efficiency standards for equipment and buildings and utility energy-efficiency incentives. As it relates to renewables and efficiency, the glory goes to policymakers, and also to innovators in many cases directly or indirectly supported by policy. For coal to gas switching, the story is more nuanced. Surely fracking was developed in part with federal government assistance. Aswell, pressure campaigns by many advocates have supported the retirement of coal assets. But one also has to accept that this story line is not one that solely relates to policy intervention. So, I can't give you a precise percentage (I'd love to have one), but the role of policy has surely been decisive.“In the end,” he says, “I strongly believe that our fate is in our hands.”Given the mix of purposeful policy and happy fate in the outcome of the last 15 years, the paper itself draws two lessons:First, policy and technology advancement are imperative to achieving significant emissions reductions. Second, our ability to predict the future is limited, and so it will be crucial to adapt as we gain policy experience and as technologies advance in unexpected ways.Push on policy and technology and be open to experimentation and revision: not bad guidelines in any area of politics.One thing the last 15 years in the electricity sector does not teach us is that getting the rest of the way to net-zero by 2035 will be easy. For one thing, there will be a rebound in demand as the economy recovers from Covid-19. For another, many of the easiest low-hanging fruit have been picked; subsequent reductions are likely to be more difficult. And finally, the pace of reduction will need to substantially increase.We will have to beat the EIA’s BAU case again. Here’s what the agency projected this year, relative to a net-zero pathway.Getting the rest of the way to net-zero“Past success does not trivialize the challenges that remain for further decarbonization in the power sector and beyond,” Wiser writes. “Nor does it offer a specific roadmap for how best to achieve those additional reductions.”The final section of the paper is a brief review of the scientific literature on net-zero power. Obviously, coal-to-gas switching, a major engine of past reductions, can not be a long-term strategy, unless carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) scales up. So the next 15 years will primarily be about scaling up solar, wind, and battery storage, which are rapidly falling in cost. They can build on “existing low-carbon resources (nuclear, hydropower, geothermal, and other renewables) and energy efficiency,” Wiser writes, and research shows that “collectively, these low-carbon resources could reliably meet as much as 70% to 90% of power supply needs at low incremental cost.”Getting there means overcoming numerous challenges: preparing the grid for it, in part by adding more transmission; scaling up batteries and other sources of flexibility; improving the operation of wholesale markets; aggressively pursuing energy efficiency and demand response; and more. It won’t be easy, but the path to 90 percent electricity sector reductions is relatively clear. After that — wringing out that last 10 to 20 percent of emissions — things get a little trickier. Doing it only with today’s clean resources, especially relying on batteries to provide all the flexibility, gets rapidly more expensive as zero approaches. We will need more backup from “clean firm resources” — Wiser cites “longer-duration storage, hydrogen or synthetic fuels, biofuels, fossil or biomass with CO2 capture and sequestration or use, nuclear, geothermal, and concentrating solar-thermal power with storage.”The cheapest option for that additional flexibility, at least from what we can perceive today, is just keeping open a bunch of natural gas plants, but running them only rarely. That won’t get us to net-zero, but it will get us close. When I pressed Wiser on which clean-firm resources he would bet on eventually replacing those plants, he cited “using hydrogen in existing retrofitted gas plants, and new longer duration storage techs.”It will be important, over the coming years, to research and innovate on those clean-firm sources, even as we rapidly scale up the clean tech we already have.It’s a daunting task. But recent history shows we can make rapid progress, even with a patchwork of uncoordinated state policy efforts. Imagine what we could do with a concerted, well-funded federal effort. We could beat expectations again. A Mabel blep for your weekend: 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