Volts

In this episode, transportation planner Warren Logan shares his expertise on how cities can make fast, cheap, impactful improvements to safety and walkability. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts When it comes to reducing transportation emissions, two main ideas compete for mindshare in the climate space. First is switching out internal combustion engine vehicle...

A long-range transmission plan just announced by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, lays out a roadmap for $10 billion worth of investment in some 2,000 miles of new transmission lines, potentially unlocking more than 50 gigawatts of renewable energy. In this episode, attorney Lauren Azar celebrates this win and traces the years of work and advocacy that went into it. ( PDF tra...

In this episode, two Volts favorites — Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins and UC Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes — join me discuss the Inflation Reduction Act, the somewhat miraculous last-minute agreement between Senators Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer. It represents the tattered remains of Build Back Better, but many if not most of the climate and clean energy provisions remain intact. We disc...

In this episode, Zale Schoenborn shares about emphasizing sustainability at Pickathon, the Northwest music festival he founded. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts Listeners, today at Volts we've got something a little different, a little off our beaten path. It’s an episode about one of my favorite music festivals. It might not seem obvious to you why you shoul...

In this episode, Jean Su and Maya Golden-Krasner, attorneys at the Center of Biological Diversity, discuss which executive actions President Biden could take to aggressively address climate change, and what might happen if he did so. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts It now seems fairly clear that no climate legislation is going to pass this Congress before th...

In this episode, journalist David Wallace-Wells raises the alarm about how incredibly unsafe our air is, the impact it’s having on human welfare, and why it doesn’t get as much attention as it should. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts Back in 2020, I wrote an article about some eye-popping new research on air pollution which found that the damage it is doing t...

In this episode, Lori Lodes of Climate Power discusses how climate activists can maintain momentum when federal action feels entirely out of reach. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts It is a dark time for climate activists. The immense hope they felt at the introduction of the original Build Back Better bill has curdled. It is still possible that some kind of d...

In this episode, lawyer Jay Duffy, who represented environmental groups in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency , explains the ins and outs and potential implications of the Supreme Court’s final ruling in the case. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts On June 30th, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in the case of West Virginia v. Environmental P...

In this episode, Charles Marohn of Strong Towns discusses why urban planning too often creates money-sucking suburbs, what it might look like to build healthy communities, and why there are so many barriers to doing so. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts Charles Marohn — “Chuck” to his friends — grew up in a small town in Minnesota and later became an urban pla...

Readers, I am keenly aware that you subscribed to this newsletter to get articles and podcasts about clean energy, not to hear about my life and travails. And I’ve already sent you one life-and-travails message this year. So I debated with myself a long time about whether to send this one, especially given all the other horrible stuff happening in the world. But, in the end, there is an unavoidabl...

In this episode, Kimberly Nicholas discusses her published research on the most effective policies to reduce car use in cities. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts In the US, the movement to get cars out of cities is … what’s the nice word? … nascent . But in Europe, where many cities were built before cars and big-box sprawl never completely dominated, there is...

In this episode, political communications expert Dan Pfeiffer speaks to the wide influence of right-wing media, why Democrats keep losing messaging battles, and what they need to do about it. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts You probably know Dan Pfeiffer best as one of the hosts of the wildly successful Pod Save America podcast, part of the growing Crooked M...

In this episode, Johannes Ackva of Founders Pledge discusses his thinking on the most effective forms of climate philanthropy. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts Say you’re a private individual (or a company, or a foundation) who cares about climate change and has some money to spend on it. What’s the best way to spend that money? How can you ensure the largest...

In this episode, Dr. Ye Tao discusses his vision for combatting climate change by using fields of mirrors that reflect solar radiation. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts Geoengineering — using large-scale engineering projects to directly cool the Earth’s atmosphere — is an intensely controversial topic in climate circles. On one hand, such schemes strike many...

In this episode, Chris Hayes of MSNBC discusses how American politics and society changed after the Obama years, where things might head in the future, and how his own views have shifted along the way. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts I often reflect on a particular moment in the summer of 2015. It was not long after the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal...

In this episode, policy analyst Danny Cullenward of CarbonPlan talks about the disconnect between California’s ambitious climate goals and its actual practical plans for achieving them. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts California has long been known, nationally and internationally, as a leader on climate policy. The sheer scale of its economy and the stringen...

In this episode, Abigail Hopper of the Solar Energy Industries Association discusses the trade complaint that has cast a pall over the US solar industry, why she believes it should be dismissed, and the complexities of tariff policy. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts Back in 2012, the Obama administration levied tariffs on solar panels from China, to punish th...

In this episode, Lauren Melodia and Kristina Karlsson of the Roosevelt Institute explain why it’s counter-productive to increase domestic oil and gas production when energy prices rise, and how building out clean-energy infrastructure is the actual best way to address the price volatility of fossil fuels. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts Americans are struggl...

In this episode, Jesse Morris of international nonprofit Energy Web discusses his group’s work toward building a transparent and trusted “operating system” for distributed energy resources, with an end goal of enabling a more sophisticated and resilient energy grid. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts Recent years have seen an explosive rise in distributed energ...

In this episode, Doug Thompson, associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina, sings the praises of bureaucracy and its essential role in the fight against climate change. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts It’s well-understood that the modern US conservative movement is a mix of two primary forces, fiscal and social conservatism....

In this episode, Andy Frank, president and co-founder of Sealed, discusses his company’s pay-for-performance model for home electrification. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts One of the greatest riddles of the decarbonization effort is the residential sector, responsible for about 20 percent of US energy-related carbon emissions. There are about 142 million ho...

In this episode, UC Davis assistant professor Fran Moore discusses her research team’s effort to construct a climate model that includes (instead of ignores) effects from the interplay of social conditions and policy change. ( PDF transcript ) ( Active transcript ) Text transcript: David Roberts One of my long-time gripes about the climate-economic models that outfits like the IPCC produce is that...

In this episode, Nan Ransohoff, head of carbon at Stripe, discusses the company's new spinoff, Frontier, which will pool money from partners and make it available to early contenders in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) market. We chat about that market, the technologies that show promise in it, in the role of private industry in accelerating it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss t...

In this episode, Google’s director of energy, Michael Terrell, explains the company's new goal of supplying all of its facilities with clean energy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We discuss how its going, what kinds of new technologies will be needed, and what new policies could help move things along. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers...

In this episode, I discussed swappable, rechargeable batteries in two-wheeled electric scooters with Horace Luke, the CEO of Gogoro. Luke’s company is selling subscriptions to batteries in bustling emerging-market cities like Taiwan. We talked about consumer requirements for swappable batteries, the other kinds of technologies that might use them, and his plans for expansion. Full transcript of Vo...