Ten Across Conversations

Every one of those [petrochemical] materials floats on water. So if the flood waters reach your home but they’re only an inch deep, you’re still contaminated for a long time. —Rob Rogers, founding partner, Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers Episode Description Eighteen years after Hurricane Ike showed the catastrophic storm-surge risk to the Houston area’s industrial and petroleum complex,...

"We like to remind people that the voting process doesn't belong to us. We facilitate it. But the voting process belongs to the citizens of the jurisdiction." — Dean Logan, Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, Los Angeles County “…To those folks who are sowing this distrust, making sure that we challenge them with, ‘Hey, why don’t you come work for us? You will get the training that every staff member...

"…we can still get stuff done in this country when people's lives are on the line." — Bill Updike, Director of U.S. Policy & Programs, Smart Surfaces Coalition Cities are getting hotter, but some of the biggest opportunities to change that may be hiding in plain sight—in the roofs, roads and parking lots that surround us every day. Why it matters: Extreme heat is the leading weather-related ca...

"The foundation of the immigration system and the battles... all of that had been built brick by brick in El Paso, through both Republican and Democratic administrations." —Jazmine Ulloa Episode Description: To much of the country, Interstate 10 reaches El Paso on its way to somewhere else, the city seen as little more than a name on a sign between San Antonio and Phoenix, or as a backdrop for wha...

"This is really a story about... the people who are causing the pollution, harming the people who basically did nothing and are suffering the damages. And do those people who cause the harm owe the people who suffer the damages anything?" —Jeff Goodell, contributing writer at Rolling Stone and author of The Heat Will Kill You First   July 2026 was the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous...

"There's maybe a more practical way to look at it, which is just understanding water as a communal resource, as something that is necessary to share rather than this thing that we divide up and profit on." — Kyle Paoletta Kyle Paoletta opens his recent book, American Oasis: Finding the Future in the Cities of the Southwest with a claim similar to the one on which Ten Across is based: the Southwest...

"A large portion of an emergency manager's time is not doing active response. The administrative burden of writing grants, developing plans, reviewing plans, all of those tasks are what takes up a significant portion of time... So where we would say, hey, these smaller jurisdictions don't have time to go do this [adopt AI tools], the return on investment is almost higher in some of these places."...

"If you use low-cost capital, you don't need tax credits to make the economics work. That's what excites me the most about how to scale this thing up. [...] How do I help every other community bank get in the game of building their green lending muscle and thinking about resilience? And if we can do that, then we don't need all of the tax credits and all the incentives that everybody has thought w...

Among the diverse professional perspectives featured over the years, few have resonated as consistently with Ten Across participants as those from the field of insurance and reinsurance. Insurance is often underappreciated as a knowledge industry in everyday life—yet serves a powerful translational role, converting detailed observations about the physical world into applied economic signals that s...

As water scarcity intensifies across the Colorado River Basin, public attention has increasingly focused on data centers, AI, and the growing demand for resources in the Sun Belt. But are these technologies really driving the region's water challenges—or is the story more complicated? In this episode of Ten Across Conversations, host Duke Reiter speaks with water policy expert Sarah Porter about t...

As the Colorado River approaches a pivotal moment facing historically low flows and record-breaking shortages, decisions made in 2026 will help determine the future of water, energy, and economic security across the American West. Today, Ten Across Conversations shares an episode from Arizona State University's Labcoat Optional  podcast, featuring Ten Across friend and water law expert Rhett Larso...

As artificial intelligence has grown globally, so has the construction of immense, resource-intensive data centers. The arrival of these projects-- both the facilities and the powerful tech companies behind them-- in communities throughout the U.S. has created some controversy. Ten Across cities like Tucson, El Paso and San Antonio have made headlines recently for community resistance to developme...

As conflict in the Persian Gulf threatens global oil supplies and artificial intelligence drives unprecedented demand for electricity, Texas is in a race to unlock the full potential of its diverse and deregulated grid. The path it chooses may arguably shape the U.S. economy and global energy markets.   In this third episode of our series on Texas water, energy, and growth, host Duke Reiter is joi...

Texas has emerged as a frontrunner in President Trump’s push for U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence and is poised to become the nation’s top data center market. With data centers rapidly scaling across Texas, the state is emerging as a bellwether for the nation—highlighting how rapid, resource intensive AI-driven growth can outpace infrastructure planning and strain limited resources.   In...

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including a water crisis. According to the Texas Water Development Board, population and industrial demand could outpace existing supply by 7 million acre-feet by 2070—an amount equal to the current annual water demand of the entire state of Arizona.   Last November, Texas voters approved the largest investment in water infrastructure in the state’s history: $20 billi...

Ten Across Conversations returns next week with a limited series, a three-part narrative look at key intersections of water and energy in Texas.   What does a severe statewide drought, ambitious industry buildout, and rapid population boom tell us about the future in this part of the country and beyond?   Join us over the next three episodes as we take you from the halls of the Texas legislature,...

This 2025 Ten Across podcast year in review takes a deep dive into the critical issues shaping the future of the Interstate 10 corridor.   We’ve curated a series of interview clips and reflections that will examine contemporary U.S. climate, economic, and governance-related concerns as presented along this transect. From rising risks in insurance markets to the shifting responsibilities for disast...

Economic and social science research suggests climate risks are beginning to inform where people choose to live, raise families, and invest, foreshadowing the decline of a near 75-year trend of domestic migration to the Southern U.S. This is the focus of urban planner and trusted climate adaptation scholar Jesse M. Keenan’s new book, North: The Future of Post-Climate America.   As the costs of env...

Despite more than two years of intense negotiations, the Veterans Day deadline to agree on the allotment of reduced water supplies under the Colorado River Compact passed without a consensus. If the seven states divided into the upper and lower basins of the river cannot put forward a joint proposal by February 14, the federal government will institute its own plan—which will likely result in appe...

In October, stakeholders representing an unusual combination of sectors — public, private, academic, non-profit and journalism — gathered with insurance industry experts at the 10X Convergence in Jacksonville, Florida , to explore solutions to unsustainable insurance and disaster recovery costs throughout the Interstate 10 region. Insurers continue to cancel homeowners policies across California,...

As a prelude to the Ten Across Convergence in Jacksonville coming up on October 22nd—where insurability planning will be a focal topic—we’re sharing a conversation Charlie Sidoti and Stephen Brandt, founders of the nonprofit InnSure. Concerned about the risk protection gap growing with climate change in the U.S., these two have applied their combined decades of insurance industry expertise to form...

The Ten Across Resilience Network convened in Jacksonville, Florida , in April to share strategies from their communities—the hottest in the nation—for mitigating the mortality and economic loss caused by extreme heat, and to identify common obstacles to both long-term planning and immediate response. Representatives from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) joined the exercise to discuss a...

The human interventions intended to make Louisiana's coastline habitable and productive over the past century have contributed to the region's most existential threats. Without redress, displaced river sediment, compromised wetlands, and land subsidence will increasingly expose the state to extreme storm surge and sea level rise.   In 2007, following the devastating impacts of Hurricanes Katrina a...

Negotiators representing seven states, 30 tribes, and Mexico are running out of time to agree on new rules to guide sharing of Colorado River water before a federally mandated deadline next fall. Failure to do so would forfeit water allocation authority to the Bureau of Reclamation , and costly state and tribal litigation would be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.   Potable water supply for mu...

Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast from Florida to Louisiana in 2005 and is still the costliest disaster in U.S. history . New Orleans, a city resting below sea level, is uniquely dependent on engineering for its safety. On August 29th, nearly every defense seemed to fail, allowing storm surge to flood 80% of the city.   As terrible as the storm itself, arguably, were the human failures t...