LoginMe, on the Climate Papa podcast
In this episode, the tables are turned: I'm the guest of the Climate Papa podcast, interviewed by host Ben Eidelson. We discuss the nested fractal puzzle of decarbonization, the critical importance of the grid and urban land use, and why now is the most exciting time to jump into climate work. Plus, I share some thoughts on parenting and avoiding tech-bro culture as the climate space evolves.
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(Active transcript)
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Greetings and salutations, this is Volts for April 25, 2025, "Me, on the Climate Papa podcast." I'm your host, David Roberts. Have you ever listened to Volts and thought, "But Dave, what about you? When are you going to talk all about yourself, your own precious history, and opinions for an hour?" Well, friends, do I have good news for you. A couple of weeks ago, Ben Eidelson, host of the Climate Papa podcast, invited me down to record a live episode in Seattle's newish 9Zero Climate Hub. It's a cool work and collaboration space downtown. Definitely worth checking out if you want to hook into Seattle's climate community.
Anyway, about 100 people showed up and we had some audience Q&A at the end with a ton of really sharp questions. It was a super fun time, so I thought I would share it with y'all. Enjoy.
Ben Eidelson
Welcome to Climate Papa and Volts. Climate Papa is a show where I talk to folks like David about the intersection of climate change, technology, and parenthood. I'm Ben Shwab Eidelson — I'll be hosting the conversation this afternoon with David Roberts of Volts. When I'm not making fun podcasts like this, I invest in early-stage software-based climate startups with a fund called Stepchange and along with David, I'm based in Seattle. I live in Madison Valley with my wife who's back there and our three kiddos, our seven-year-old daughter, four-year-old son, and a ten-month-old. The seven-year-old and four-year-old are not here, but the ten-month-old is back there.
I'm also a member here at this lovely 9Zero Climate Hub. David, it's an honor and privilege to have you here for the conversation. Before we dive into your career in climate and all of the things that you've done over the last 20 years professionally and on the Internet, I would like to hear a little bit about the human behind the keyboard. Could you tell us a little bit about your life outside of Volts, your family, your kids, and maybe even more about your dogs?
David Roberts
Sure. Volts is definitely the most interesting part of me. My life outside of Volts is very boring.
Ben Eidelson
Your dogs might listen to this.
David Roberts
Oh well, my dogs are exciting. I guess the short story is, I went to college, didn't want to leave college. So then I went to grad school, didn't want to leave grad school. So, I started on a PhD in philosophy in 1998. This was in Edmonton. Then I tried to transfer to a better school. I didn't get in. I didn't want to stay in Edmonton, which at the time was extremely bleak and awful. And so, I dropped out, moved to Seattle with no job skills or job experience or anything to recommend me at all, really, and, like, started working low-level tech jobs.
I worked in customer service for Amazon for a while. I worked for IMDb back when they first started putting ads on their site. If you remember the old ad-less IMDb, I am — I was a key figure in ruining that and putting ads all over it. I worked for Microsoft for a while. I moved to Seattle for a girl; that exploded quickly. And then, less than six months later, I met my wife, who I married in 2001. And we have two kids, one of whom is a junior in college this year — my God. The other one is leaving for college in September — my God. That's very sad.
And then, we have two dogs and a cat. My older dog, Forest, who we've had for 15 years, passed away earlier this year. But we have two. Mabel and Abner are two pit mixes. Abner is a psycho. Subscribers of Volts will know.
Ben Eidelson
We'll know their faces.
David Roberts
He's an absolute psychotic, but very sweet and endearing. And yeah, he's young. He's a little over one. Mabel's five. Annie, Anakin, the cat, is 15 now. We bought Anakin and Obi Wan. My wife got them when I was in D.C. at Barack Obama's 2008 inauguration.
Ben Eidelson
Hopeful times.
David Roberts
Yeah. And Annie's still around. Yeah, that's it. Walk the dogs, do yoga, podcast — that's pretty much it.
Ben Eidelson
Ready for empty nesting, or is that...?
David Roberts
No, you know, I was waiting. I always read these things like, "Oh, by the time they moved out, we were sick of them. Everybody was ready for them to go, blah, blah, blah." I kept waiting to, like, get sick of my kids. I'm still not sick of them. So, I miss them. I miss them dearly. Yeah. So, no, I'm not prepared for that at all, nor do I have any wisdom to impart on that. I don't feel like I'm dealing with it gracefully at all.
Ben Eidelson
Yeah. Well, before we get into climate, I mean, your PhD in philosophy —
David Roberts
Doesn't exist.
Ben Eidelson
Doesn't exist. But your master's exists and your master's thesis exists.
David Roberts
Holy. No! This is an ambush. This is like Jerry Springer.
Ben Eidelson
And the Internet exists that contains your master's thesis, "In Defense of Ethical Naturalism."
David Roberts
Oh, my.
Ben Eidelson
1998. I only printed the first three pages as a prompt, but I did skim the 153 pages and a conclusion, and used LLMs to help me understand a little bit.
David Roberts
This is all very disorienting.
Ben Eidelson
That was the hope.
David Roberts
AI reading my thesis, my God.
Ben Eidelson
Are there any philosophy folks here? Does ethical naturalism mean anything? Okay, good, I wasn't alone. I am curious because, first of all, skimming, reading the thesis and conclusion, I'm like, "Oh, you've been a good writer for a very long time." First of all, it is very well written. The conclusion had some beautiful twists of words in there. So it goes through. Curious, when you look back at that time, did that set in motion some of the foundations and principles through which you look at the world over the following 20 years? And if so, how do you think about that?
David Roberts
Well, yeah, I guess there are two ways to go. One is like the things that attracted me to philosophy. I am, in a sense, doing much more now than I would have had I become a professional academic philosopher. Because if you become a professional academic philosopher, you're writing a paper on this guy's interpretation of chapter three of that guy's interpretation of this other — you know, it's just all. There are too many students, too few jobs. You know, people can't just sort of have brilliant new ideas on command. So it's all just, you know, very, very hyper-specialized and technical at this point.
So now, what I wanted to do is like, I like thinking about systems. I like thinking about how systems hang together and, you know, I like thinking in big picture terms and then sort of connecting it to the day-to-day. I'm doing that much more via a blog than I could have as a philosopher. But the skills, not necessarily the content of philosophy, but just the skills you learn in a philosophy program, which is just like how to argue, you know, like what is an argument?
Premises, conclusions, just the skill of, like, you know, how they taught you to diagram a sentence in middle school. It's a little similar to that. It's just like diagramming an argument. Just like, what are the pieces, you know, and like, where are the weaknesses and what are the junctions? It's just good training and especially, I don't think I appreciated how rare those skills and habits are outside in the regular world. So, there's a reason that there's a bunch of journalists who are philosophy refugees. I mean, it's a weirdly common thing. As for the content, like ethical naturalism, the whole thing is just like, "How do you create an ethics without God or the supernatural or souls or foundations of being or any of these?"
Any of this sort of imported quasi-religious metaphysics. Like, if we're just biological creatures on a planet, what does it mean to be good? Why be good? You know, all that. All that kind of thing. And that's obviously still quite relevant. The other part of philosophy I was into is cognitive science, you know, Daniel Dennett and all this sort of like embodied cognition. I don't know if anybody follows all that stuff, but that also, I think, is always. It's helped me remember that when you think about reason and thinking, take it out of the abstract, think about embedded embodied creatures doing it.
And in a sense, I think that transfers quite neatly to politics. Like, the more you're in politics, the more you realize that, like, you don't start with some abstract perfect system and then try to cram flawed individuals into it.
You have to start with the flawed individuals and do the best you can with individuals as they exist in the world. So, yeah, I mean, there are connections, but more it's just like I like thinking and talking about ideas and I don't think there's enough of that in the public realm. And public response has been such that I think a lot of people desire that.
Ben Eidelson
Yeah, to the point about that public thinking. And I imagine most people here know David from Volts, but before Volts, there was Vox. Before Vox, there was Grist. And you were at Grist for over a decade. I went to the website — this is all last night. I just went down my rabbit hole.
Still going, crazily, one of the oldest —
It's amazing.
David Roberts
It was born in like 1999. And like, what other independent media operation is still going? It's bizarre, that thing's longevity.
Ben Eidelson
It's amazing. But, if you go to David Roberts on Grist and you go to the author page as they did, and you look at the bottom, each page shows four to five articles. It shows like 1, 2, 3 ... 1601 pages of articles, meaning you published, I think, around 7200 articles there.
David Roberts
Yeah, a lot of these were blog posts. I started our blog, Gristmill, back when blogs were the sexy new thing.
Ben Eidelson
Then, you went on to Vox. Looks like those are slightly longer form, over 650 articles. And then, you've been at Volts, I think, since late 2020 and have done a number of pieces and over 300 episodes of the podcast. So, how did you go from this 150-page beautiful thesis on ethical naturalism to a prolific blog? And I didn't go into your Twitter account in Bluesky and add that up. That's a whole — probably as many words.
David Roberts
We'll stop talking about the number of tweets; that's where it gets depressing. I had what is, in retrospect, an incredibly fortunate and increasingly rare experience in journalism, which is like, you know, everybody who's in or around journalism knows all the lamentations. All the daily newspapers are vanishing. You know, it's just all the jobs are vanishing. Like there used to be kind of a ladder. You sort of like learn the ropes, cover your city council meetings, you know, like work your way up before you become prominent. But now there are so few rungs on that ladder that like, you know, you get these like 22-year-old college grads who are immediately on Buzzfeed.
And like, what does a 22-year-old college grad have to write about but "What it's like to be me," you know, "My personal experience," just like whatever, like live a little, you know, but like people don't have a chance to work their way up. So, I was lucky in that I sort of snuck into Grist. I think I was like the fourth or fifth employee, something like that. I'll never forget when I was first hired, we had a woman named Sherry who, one of her jobs was, every morning she would come in at like 7 and take the static HTML homepage down and upload a new static HTML homepage.
So, I started just as an editorial assistant. Like we had — again, like before it was cool — way back when we had a daily news email. And that was sort of our signature thing. It's very funny. The headlines are funny and filled with puns and sort of like the writing was very funny. And so that was a joy for me because I like, you know, I like fun and funny and like puns. Like we used to like, we'd write the five blurbs. I would send the five blurbs to an editor and then to a fact checker and then rewrite them and then we would come up with funny headlines and then we would have like a meeting.
There were like three of us. Every day we would meet to figure out the funniest possible headlines for these news blurbs. It was all so luxuriously slow. Now, in retrospect, it all looks so... Imagine having all that time to, you know. So anyway, I started on a news update email, which meant I was sort of like, had an excuse to read all the news every day because I knew nothing going in. Like, I had no environmental anything history.
Ben Eidelson
Did something drive you to it because it was environmental or just so happened to be a job that was available and you could have become like a financial reporter sitting here 20 years later?
David Roberts
Desperation, purely desperation for a job. Like, I was stuck in these crappy tech jobs. I was going to be a graphic designer. It was such a joke in retrospect. So, I saw this, it was literally the first time I ever went to Craigslist. First time I ever found out about Craigslist, literally the first time I went to that site, it was just an ad and it just said, "Editorial assistant at a publication. Journalistic publication." I was like, "I'll do whatever, I'll do whatever." I wrote this long, overwrought, two-page cover letter to Lisa, who was working there, who hired me, who worked with me there for 10 years and now works for Canary and still edits me to this day, bless her.
She read my cover letter and she's like, "Oh, there's no grammatical errors in the cover letter." Which turns out to be incredibly, incredibly rare, even for journalism applications. I can attest, having seen a bunch of them now. So, I knew nothing. I got to read the news, I got to just write blurbs. And then I got to start with the — you know, we started our blog and Grist was small and obscure. So, I just sort of like, you know, I was raised by wolves. I didn't really have any mentorship or any help.
So, I was completely self-taught in everything. But I got to do that in obscurity, you know, like over time I got to sort of develop my skills and learn without being kind of in a big spotlight, which is rare now to be able to make a living in journalism... Yeah. So, I slowly built up my knowledge over time and what I discovered to get back to the philosophy thing is like, because Grist was just environmental at first and it was sort of climate change that I honed in on. Because climate change, especially at the time, especially in the mid-2000s, climate change was not just a sort of environmental problem, it was a conceptual, still is kind of a conceptual problem.
Like, people just don't know how to think about it. What kind of thing is it? What kind of problem is it? It's what they call a hyper-object, you know what I mean? It's so big that it's literally — you don't know how to squeeze it in your brain. So, there was a role for someone just doing sort of like conceptual intellectual spade work. Just sort of like talking through, "How do we think about this thing, how do these pieces fit together, what kind of thing is it?"
So, like philosophy, actually ended up being incredibly helpful, and there weren't a lot of people sort of approaching it. Just the final thing I'd say is what I think has been an incredible asset for me is that I didn't come to all this from the environmental movement. I did not come up through that. I did not imbibe and absorb all those —
Ben Eidelson
What was that like at the time, if you could go back?
David Roberts
Well, there's a lot to say about the environmental movement now and then, but I didn't come in through a "love of nature" or anything like that. And I didn't come in through this long history with sort of point source pollution problems as kind of the model in my head for what I'm doing. Like, I was able to approach it very much from the outside with no baggage, which I think was relatively rare at the time because there were climate obsessives who talked to one another.
And then, at the time, like mainstream media, the rest of the world didn't pay any attention at all. So, always one of my goals in my career has been to build a bridge from these people to these people to explain to the larger world why this is not some unique environmental thing. It is economic, it's national security. It implicates your concerns. Like, you don't have to put on Birkenstocks to care about this. Like, it already affects —
Ben Eidelson
They are very comfortable, though.
David Roberts
It already affects the things you care about. And trying to convince the people in the climate bubble, "Look outside your bubble. Like, learn how politics works. Like, learn what else other people care about." Like, learn where climate — you know what I mean? Expand. So, trying to build a bridge between these and like, I don't know how much of it was me, but like, I feel like now there's much more, you know what I mean? Climate's a little — not as much as one might like, but like more integrated into the larger political picture.
Ben Eidelson
I mean, in a way, what it sounds like those first couple years at Grist, I mean, both of all, they set you on this path, but they also set the way in which you engage in the path that I feel like resonates to — you know, the last Volts episode you did. One thing that at least I find unique is the fact that your writing style and also your conversational style is not that stilted, journalistic, objective. "Oh, this thing happened as though there were no human actors." I mean, that feels like maybe a gift and a reason for success or how do you think about that?
Because by default, if you were doing the climate beat at The New York Times, you wouldn't have been able to write like that.
David Roberts
Yeah, not having any training at all was a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing in that I think that formal journalism training ill-equips one to be in the actual world of journalism as it exists today, which I think is widely acknowledged now. But at the time, like, again, journalism was very set and old-fashioned. And so, you know, I never learned like the inverted pyramid. I never learned this sort of voice of God, third party. I never learned this sort of like strained affectation of judge — like, lack of judgment, you know what I mean?
Like, "Who am I to say whether things are good or bad?" You know, like, "It's like a pile of poop with broken glass in it, some say, others say..." You know, like, I never, I never got trained in that. And it never occurred to me, like, "Why would you talk like that?" Like, who would spontaneously come to that weird... You know, always my approach — and this again is just like, it's just the way I wrote, nobody told me otherwise. I always just try to write like I talk and like I wrote an article about Grist, actually about my approach to writing.
And the sort of analogy was like: I'm sitting in a bar with a friend, and it's like an intelligent, educated friend, but a friend who doesn't know about my things. And I'm telling my friend about my things. And like, if you're telling your friend about your things in a bar, the number one guiding rule is don't be boring, right? Because your friend doesn't have to listen to you, right? There's no obligation for them to learn about your thing. There's no reason, you know what I mean? So, immediately vary your rhythm, throw some jokes in, whatever. Just like, throw a picture of a cute animal in.
Like, it's just whatever to break up the monotony of that journalistic, like a fact, fact, fact thing, you know. So, like, if you're talking to a friend, be entertaining, make jokes, be a human being. Show that you care and why you care and what parts you care about and why you care about them. Don't pretend like you're some robot. What draws people to a subject is not the sort of objective subject itself. It's like, is the person telling me about this engaged? Do they care? Are they fired up by it? And if you are fired up by it, you can talk about it in a way that's engaging, even if it's very technical, very wonky stuff, you know, like every editor I've ever had tried to rein it in, like make it shorter, less wonky.
But every bit of feedback I've ever gotten from the audience is, "Thank you for doing it fully. Thank you for laying it all out." You know, like my goal is always like if I'm going to cover X, I want you to be able to read my article and feel like, "I get it." Like, "I get X, where it fits in, how it works. You know, I'm not an expert, but like, I get it." And so many news articles still today are just like — there's nothing false in them. That's sort of like how you make a good news story.
Like, you don't say anything false, but it's just like: factoid, factoid, factoid. How do these things relate to one another? What's the connection to one another? How do they connect to the other? You know, it's just like they're not telling you a narrative to situate all the facts because that feels, I guess to journalists, like editorializing or whatever, but people need narratives to make any sense of facts. So, I just wrote how it felt instinctive and nobody ever stopped me.
Ben Eidelson
People seem to like it. People seem to like it.
David Roberts
Especially at the time, climate journalism has gotten a lot better and a lot more fulsome. There's a lot more of it, a lot more people doing a lot of different things. But at the time, it was science journalists writing science pieces in a science journalism tone, which always bored the pants off me. I never cared about it, not really a science guy. Still to this day, I don't care that much about the science of climate change. I don't write that much about climate change itself. Just, like, it's getting hotter, fossil fuels are doing it.
I know what I need to know. Let's get on with it. Like, let's do this. You know what I mean? So, like, if you're interested in science, sure, go dig in all you want, but what's relevant for public policy and for being an engaged human is just like: it's getting hotter, we know why, we gotta switch that stuff off.
Ben Eidelson
What drives you to kind of consistently stay on it? Because a lot of people might be like, "Okay, I did my 10 years of the problem and like, now I'm tired, I'm ready to move on." What keeps you going, intellectually looking at this?
David Roberts
Yeah, it's funny, if you'd asked me in 2005, "Would you like to still be writing about climate change 20 years later?" I would have said, "No, I'll go insane." But like, it has evolved. The nature of the problem, the nature of what's going on, lots has evolved and changed. So — I've told this story a bunch of times — but, like, I feel like for the first, call it 10 years, I was covering climate 2005-15, something like that, solutions were just theoretical, mostly. There weren't solutions. You know, like, solar and wind were wildly expensive.
Ben Eidelson
You couldn't turn off the coal plant.
David Roberts
Far out. You couldn't turn off the coal plant. Biofuels, people kept going on and on about biofuels, but they never were amounting to anything. So really, like, it was like, you scream about the danger of climate change, and if you want to do something about it, you pick up a placard and march, right? Like, you're an activist. But, like, and that was pretty much it. And that's like a boring dynamic. Like, God bless the people who pick up placards and march. But, like, they're not that interesting to me. That side of things is not that interesting to me intellectually.
And like, yes, the problem's bad, we get it, we've said it. You know, say it again. Like, it's the thing about climate change. If you're just going to write about climate change itself, like, you know, you write about it, you're like: "It's bad. Things are getting hotter, it's going to cause a bunch of ill effects." And like, the next day you're like, "Still bad, still going to cause a lot of..." You know, "It's like 0.001 degrees hotter today." Same basic situation as yesterday, you know, and like, again, again, again, again. Like, quickly you get sick of that and want to move on.
But what's happened is, like, starting with sort of like Obama's era and then really ramping up, you know, like 2015 and then especially like around 2020. And now we're like, we're fully in the S curve. But now it's like, solutions are within reach. They're tangible, they're economic. People are doing it. And so now my topic is no longer climate change. My topic is, here's a big, wealthy, developed, complicated economy. Every bit of that economy runs on fossil fuels. So it's a big puzzle. How do you take all those fossil fuels out and achieve all those services without fossil fuels?
And so, it's a big puzzle. And you squint at it, any little bit of it, and it's a little puzzle and you squint further at it, and there's a bunch of little puzzles in that puzzle, like nested fractal puzzles to solve. So, like, intellectually it's bottomless. There's no end to the complexity and the extent of what it's going to take to find every bit of fossil fuels and do it without fossil fuels. Like, there's just no end to the technical challenges, scientific challenges, political challenges, economic challenges, financing challenges, business models. Like, just name it. Every area of it encompasses every area of human activity.
How could you ever get sick of it? Like, there's no end to it. You know what I mean? So, like, every day now is like, every little bit that solar power gets cheaper opens up a new area of things that you can do with cheap electricity. Like, the cheaper it gets, the more things you can do with it. And so literally, it's getting cheaper, like day to day. And so every day there's new things you can do with clean electricity that you couldn't do before.
And so it's been so fun. Like, you know, like five years ago, I was like, "Electrify everything!" And it was like, "Actually not everything." You know, "Airplanes, industrial..." Five years go by and I'm like, "It just did that, that you said it couldn't do. It just did that, that you said it couldn't do." Like, the bowling pins are falling. And it's like, what a fun thing to...
Ben Eidelson
To that point, how do you choose what piece of the puzzle to spend some time on in a given week or twice in the week, as your recent rates have been busy?
David Roberts
Some of it is just like personal preference stuff. I'm personally interested and then I have my thoughts about which direction broadly we're going to go. And so, you know, like I would say broadly, in the war of electrons versus molecules, I think electrons are going to mostly win. So anybody who's figuring out new things to do with electrons, I'm interested. Like, tell me. And if somebody is like, "I've figured out yet another baroque way to dig something up and turn it into sustainable aviation fuel," I'm like, "feels like it's gonna die in a few years."
I'm not going to get too into it. So, you know, I might be wrong about those things. But basically, the broad theme is sort of electrification, right? That like encompasses a bunch of different things. But like that's sort of what I'm interested in on the one hand. And then, that's the sort of technical side and then there's the political side — what to cover politically. It changed vertiginously several times throughout my career. But like the reason, you know, if you heard my sort of mailbag on this, but like these days with the federal government off the board, basically, except as a malign force of destruction, like I don't want to become a chronicler of degradation and destruction.
There's plenty of other people out there who can do that on a day-to-day basis. I have my sanity to worry about. So, my two big things right now are — these, I think, are both the two most substantively important things in climate and, helpfully, two things where most of the action is not on the federal level, most of the action is at the state and local level. One of that is the grid. We can talk about this more later if you want. Happy to go off on a rant about the grid.
But, like in my mind, it's insane that the grid is not at the heart of US industrial policy, economic policy, national security policy, foreign policy, like, name it. Like, the grid is the lodestone. It's everything. Everything goes through the grid. Everything depends on the grid. Everything. And it's handy now that, like, a bunch of companies, hauling giant sacks of money behind them, suddenly want a lot of electricity really quick. It's definitely like, you know, giving that whole area a lot more impetus. So, grid on one hand. On the other hand, housing, urban land use, cities, YIMBY, that whole nest of things. Both on a climate basis but, like, to me, housing and urban land use is a nexus of, like, climate and particulate pollution justice.
And just like — trying to think about how to summarize this without going off on yet another rant. But like, if I was going to start, I say this a lot, I was going to start a political party in the US today, the slogan would be "We can have nice things." Like, we have been sold scarcity by jerk-offs who are hoarding resources. We have plenty of resources. We could live nice lives. We could be happy. We could have nice things. We could have healthcare. We could have daycare. We could have tons of housing. We could have an abundance of clean energy.
Ben Eidelson
I was waiting for you to say it.
David Roberts
Yes, we could have nice things. And one of the nice things we could have — I think one of the reasons people are in this scarcity mode is that land use in the United States, 95% of it, call it, is just unpleasant. It's just unpleasant to be in it. You know, like you're, you're — it's just big, loud cars everywhere and people scuttling along the margins, hoping not to get hit and crushed, which they do constantly, all the time. More than in any other country in the world. It is possible to create human settlements that are nice, where people are walking around and they're seeing each other, they're seeing their neighbors, they're walking their kids to school.
Like, you know, I went to Barcelona in 2015 and became one of those — this is what my kids always say, I'm like one of those exchange students that goes abroad and they will never stop talking about it — I'm not allowed to say the word Barcelona in my home anymore. But one of the things I saw in Barcelona is these little kid trains of a teacher walking kids to school. Like 20 kids laughing, frolicking, and playing, just walking through the city to school.
And I was like, imagine allowing a child out of your literal physical hold in any part of any American city, you know what I mean? So, like, just the sense of everyone competing with everyone else for parking, for road space, it just puts people in the mindset of scarcity. So, I really think that just showing people that it's possible to construct a nice place to live where things can be pleasant is a big part of changing the American psyche and politics. So, to me, the land use, the urban land use — plus, I don't have to probably tell anybody in this room or you or anybody else that the housing crisis is screwing up everything.
It's screwing up everything, including politics. Like, I don't think the Democratic Party has fully absorbed the fact that by refusing to build new housing in its centers of power, it is sending people away to red states. So, we're literally losing seats in Congress. You know, this is like Ezra Klein discusses this on his podcast all the time. If we ran the election again, got the same votes in 2024 just because of population shifts, we would lose. Kamala would lose, and she would lose even if she won most of the swing states.
So, blue areas are repelling people. And one of the strongest, most crazy correlations you find in social science, which blows my mind how tight the correlation is, is that the denser an area is, the bluer it is. It is almost mechanical. It holds at the national level. It holds at the state level. It even holds within cities. The denser parts of cities are bluer than the less dense parts. It's almost like it's a bizarre natural law we've found. Like, no one quite knows exactly why or which way the causation runs.
But, to me, if I'm a Democrat and I'm wondering, "How do I make new Democrats?" Make more dense areas and you make more blue people. The tool is right there. Use it. You're doing the opposite. Blue Democrats are doing the opposite of that. They are uncreating Democrats.
Ben Eidelson
So, this gets on — you've kind of said the words, but I want to yank them out explicitly. Yesterday, the book "Abundance" by Ezra Klein came out. For those of us that might be a fan or have feelings about it, I'm curious what yours are. And it came out yesterday. I don't know if you had a chance to look at it. You've been around the —
David Roberts
I know those guys. I know the history.
Ben Eidelson
To what extent — I mean, it's not just abundance in isolation, but as we think about the conversations we've had about growth versus degrowth, abundance versus scarcity, conservation versus permitting reform. Just like, what is your kind of threading of this as you've built in that part of the puzzle?
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, one thing I would say right off the bat is that, like, I read who was — might even have been a review of that book — somebody in The Atlantic the other day was talking about the history of the abundance movement and talked about how the abundance movement has sparked this YIMBY movement. Of course, let's — YIMBYs coming out of the woodwork like, "Excuse me. Like I was doing this shit when Ezra Klein was in diapers," which you know, was not that long ago. The notion of abundant housing has been around for a while now.
But I would just say that the broad philosophical thrust of it, I totally agree with. Growth promise. Looking forward, getting rid of that scarcity mindset upon which I think a lot of the environmental movement is based and still clings to that culture. Still clings. I'll say the good things about it first. I think philosophically it's right. I mean, factually, just mathematically they're right. We got to build a lot of things very quickly if we want to decarbonize. Like, I think it was unfortunate in retrospect that climate came into public consciousness via the environmental movement which has a very specific model of scarcity and the way to stop point source pollution is to find the polluter and stop it.
Yeah, so, but, this is not like that. Like, you can stop every fossil fuel emitting source in the world and then you're just in darkness. You have to transition, substitute these things, you have to build substitutes. That's the problem. So, and as a political matter, like this has been beaten into me through rough experience. Like, people don't like paying more for stuff, in fact, they hate it and they like paying less for stuff. So in retrospect, you know, like, you're an average citizen, you know nothing about climate, the environmental movement shows up at your door and says, "Hey, we've got a brand new problem and the cure is to make everything you do and buy more expensive. Let's do this. Hop on board. Grab a placard." You know, so that's disastrous. Like just as a, like in a perfect world, obviously a balance of carrots and sticks are the ideal sort of mix of policy. Right. Like, you would, it would be great to have some kind of climate carbon tax somewhere in the system. But just as a political economy matter, it's just true that like if you want to build support and momentum and a broad coalition, you need forward-looking optimism, promise of wealth and growth and you know, something to reach for.
So, I think it's on the right track. I have worries about how it's going to evolve, like, the specific people involved, some of their proclivities, some of their, you know, like, it's real easy to see how this could just become another excuse for Atlantic writers to bash the left. Which, like, is their bread and butter. And they love it. And I'm sure there will be some of that. It'll just sort of curdle into like, "Environmentalists are stupid and they're in the way and they're NIMBYs. And we should crush all environmental laws."
You know, you can see a lot of ways that, like, it could be absorbed by the status quo and subverted, misused, and screwed up. But politically, as a way of waving the flag of sustainability and decarbonization, I think it is necessary and in some ways obvious and in some ways would have been nice to come sooner. But as I said, this is one of the things that has been enabled by renewable energy getting cheaper. It enables new politics, too.
Ben Eidelson
We saw this with — I've gone off a little bit with you on the history of coal and what we saw from going from wood to coal. It was purely economics driven or scarcity driven of wood as a fuel source. While Trump in every term says, "We're going to bring back coal," more coal power plants closed in Trump's first administration than in Obama's second because of the economics of coal versus, at that time, primarily methane gas. The same thing's going to happen here with solar. Now, carrots and sticks can nudge things faster, make things harder, but at the end of the day, I think it's like I'm heartened by where we are with solar and batteries and these technologies to say, "Hey, you can try and hold back the physics for a few years with some policy, but you can't hold it back indefinitely" because it's going to burst through whether. If it's not in the US, maybe it'll happen around the world or it is, right. Pakistan's whole story of grid defection and just putting solar on your house and just going right.
David Roberts
It feels good to be on the right side of history. It's nice, and history's moving in our direction, and like, there's an inevitability to it, and we're futzing around with speed. The speed and the equity of it are the dials we have our hands on. But it is happening regardless. And as you say, like in the way I try to describe it in general terms, I've found this helps people, I think, who don't follow this area sort of cognize why this is happening. So I'll give you the short version, my version of the short version.
So, for fossil fuels, there are two broad forces that determine the price of fossil fuels. On the one hand, you dig the easy stuff and then the next bit gets harder and the next bit gets harder. Intrinsically, the more you pursue fossil fuels, the more challenging it becomes to reach them. And all things being equal, the price rises. Then, you have this other force, technological change and development, which is pushing the price down, as technology always does. So, these two contrasting forces mean that fossil fuels cost on an inflation-adjusted basis, roughly today what they cost 100 years ago, 200 years ago.
It's weird. Like, these two forces basically balance out. And, like, if you remember peak oil and all that stuff about running out of fossil fuels, it was always people sort of over-indexing on this first force and under-indexing on this second force. Like, technological innovation always is miraculous. Like, we're really good at it and it always goes faster than people think. It achieves miracles people think they can't. So, blah, blah, blah. So then you turn your gaze to wind and solar. This first force does not exist. They never get any more difficult to find. They are abundant and effectively endless, and will be as long as we're on the planet.
So, there's no natural force pushing their price higher and higher. There's just this force, there's just technology, which is why they only go lower. They only go lower and lower and lower. That's all they've done since they were invented. Lower and lower and lower. That's all they're ever going to do is go lower. I mean, with fluctuations with — you know, we can talk about land use, we can talk about all this other, I mean there are, this is an approximation, but like roughly we're just going to get better and better and better at harvesting them, which means they're just going to get cheaper and cheaper, which means over time they're going to win.
Like, it's just built into the process that they're going to win and get cheaper and cheaper. And already, we're seeing it; like, already solar is cheaper than anybody thought. And if you just — this is another thing that I wish I could like convey to the general public. Like, you know, solar's on this learning curve. Listen to my pods on learning curves, we know that like learning curves for a given technology are weirdly steady. Like so, like for a doubling of solar deployment, you get a very reliable X percent drop in cost, right?
And that's true every time it doubles. And it has been true since the 70s. So, you get this line of cost going like this. And I'm sure everybody's seen the famous graph where coming off that line of costs are predictions about future costs from the EIA... They're all like, "It's going to level out, it's going to level out, it's going to level out." Like so on and on and on, like over decades, you know, which has led many people to say to modelers, "Stop, stop..." But if you just drop this obsession with the idea that they're going to level out and just follow the line on its current trajectory and project 10 years forward from today, you are in a world of energy abundance.
You are in a world of like, trivially cheap, endlessly available energy, which is a fundamentally new state for our species to be in. Like a fundamentally new state for any species to ever be in. A new, a new state for life itself to be in. Like, it's a big deal.
Ben Eidelson
To that point, I think it was. Was it 2013 or 2011 when you wrote, "Is humanity smarter than a protozoan?" I think 2013.
David Roberts
Yes, yes, I think about that all the time.
Ben Eidelson
It gets to this growth/degrowth, are we coming up against our petri dish of the planet? And we're not. How do you think about that now? I mean, when you wrote that piece, we were not so clearly at the solution.
David Roberts
Right. Well, just to frame it, this was based off an essay by Charles Mann, the great science writer Charles Mann. You know, and his point was, as far as we know, any biological species, if you remove their competitors, follow a very predictable arc. They grow and grow on an exponential curve, hit some sort of limit, and then fall apart, whether it's lions or protozoa. You know what I mean? So his point was this seems like a characteristic of life, right? A characteristic of what it is to be living.
And so, here we are. Human beings have removed all our competitors and are growing exponentially. So, if we are like all other life, there's a crash and a collapse coming. The whole premise of the article is, are we smarter than a protozoa? Can we consciously know that that's coming and act collectively with foresight to avert it?
That is the question of our life, that's the question of our species. And so, you know, like once solar panels, you know, like we're still digging up the materials, but once solar panel recycling gets really, really good, which is, it's happening fast enough, you can envision a closed loop and then you're somewhere close to energy that is almost impactless, you know what I mean?
That's very, very close to genuinely sustainable energy, which opens up not just desalination, it opens up a greening steel and industry, but it opens up geoengineering. It opens up developing or bringing back species or bringing back biomes that we've lost. Once you have effectively endless energy, all kinds of doors open to you and to the species. So, it's sort of like if any species is going to be smarter than a protozoa, we've got all the tools, you know, we've got what we need.
Ben Eidelson
It's interesting, his piece and yours, I think, framed it around, you know, do we kind of notice that we're 80% full — I forget the Japanese term for it. And kind of like self-regulate. But actually, what you're getting at is, I think, the way that history has tended to solve this kind of population cliff problem, which is, do we actually kind of innovate and invent our way out of that cliff? And, that seems to be actually the end of the story.
David Roberts
Elon Musk's whole thing is: Earth imposes a certain scarcity, which gives you that S curve. But if you just go to other planets, you just lift the ceiling and theoretically through cheaper and cheaper, more abundant energy, more abundant land, more abundant planets, like you just raise the ceiling and never hit it. I think that's sort of like the economist's — like you're just dematerializing, you're breaking the connection between growth and prosperity and human well-being and material throughput. If you can just break that, there's —
Ben Eidelson
More petri dishes to hop over to.
David Roberts
Yeah, break that almost completely. Then, in theory, you could have infinite growth. But, like, you can think of a lot of ways that could go wrong. Let's just say.
Ben Eidelson
If we zoom back on the kind of cycles that you've seen in climate tech and climate reporting, and you're here in this space in Seattle where we're trying to do climate innovation. We have a room full of people trying to work in this space. Some of them, myself included, have kind of come in over the last couple of years. What is your zoom out message about where we are and where, what do you hope that the room would take away?
David Roberts
Well, I mean, the great thing about how this whole area has evolved is like you have more choices than marching now, right? Like, if you want to be involved in this, you can do so as an accountant. You can do so as an engineer or an inventor, as business models. Like, there's so much business model innovation needed. And I think what I've seen is like, this is just like humanity, you know, like the older people who first got a hold of this are in a lot of senses trapped intellectually by the status quo. They're thinking, "How do we take this existing system and tweak it to make it cleaner?"
I mean, of course, like the young people coming in are like, "Who told us we had to have that system?" You know, like, "Why don't we just make it, make a new one?" So the curve of the ingenuity and brain power and creativity and public spirit that's being applied to this problem is also hitting that S curve. Like the cavalry is arriving at long last and we're headed up that curve. So, like, I just say to young people whenever I talk to students, whenever I talk to young people of any kind, like, "Do you really want to go into finance and figure out a way to shave 0.001 seconds off a trade or whatever?"
You really want to go into a hedge fund? This is the challenge of our time. You can make a real — because we've used cheap fossil fuels for so long and developed habits around them for so long, there are just lots of low-hanging fruit around.
Ben Eidelson
That are major.
David Roberts
You can, like, come into this area and make a real, genuine contribution to the future of the species. Like, it's not like there are ideas all over the place. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you don't have to be a physicist to come up with the idea of, like, putting rocks in a box and heating them up. Like, it's just like nobody thought of it before because nobody needed to. We just didn't — that just wasn't a thing we needed to have. So, like, the ground is littered with low-hanging fruit. It's never been a more exciting time to, like — if I were a young, bright kid, this is, like, this is where I would go. And that's what I wish that, like, national leadership could say that a little bit more and more clearly.
Ben Eidelson
You know, I'll say Rondo's a great name, but I do like Rocks in a Box. I don't know if I'm like —
David Roberts
The problem is, there are like 12 rocks-in-a-box companies.
Ben Eidelson
Yeah, it's a category, the rocks in a box. Well, thank you. I think we have about a half hour for Q&A, so Vikram here has a mic for us, so please use that. You can line up here while folks are lining up. I'll kick off with one that I got on the service formerly known as Twitter. "Do you think utilities are capable of reacting and scaling over the next 20 years, or will we be increasingly relying on distributed and other commercial energy sources?"
David Roberts
That is a little bit of a false binary, as anyone who has listened to my recent episode with Pier LaFarge can attest. If you haven't heard the episode, Pier LaFarge, his whole thing is — everybody's vexed because given the current utility model, distributed energy, much like energy efficiency, et cetera, just means we require less utility infrastructure, which means they spend less, which means they make less money. So they hate it. They hate all that stuff.
Ben Eidelson
They decay and then —
David Roberts
And so, everybody's vexed. Like, how do we get utilities out of the way to build this stuff? But Pier LaFarge's idea is just like, "Well, why don't we just let them do it?" Like, let them rate base it. Like, let them find where it's needed and send out RFPs for bulk distributed energy and like, bulk this market up. Doing it on a hobbyist, individual consumer level in his mind is just like never going to work, never going to add up. You need big institutions that can see where it's needed and where it could be used in bulk.
And he's like, "We have those institutions and we have control over them. We have public utility commissions that can literally tell them to do it." He's like, "Look around. Do you see any other institutions in better shape? Like, do you see any other institutions that are more trusted?" Like, utilities are not in great shape, but, like, compared to what? So, like, TBD, I guess I would say on that question, is a very much alive and interesting question, the role of utilities.
First Audience Question
I'm Holly.
David Roberts
Hi, Holly.
First Audience Question
This question is also grid-related, and I'm still figuring out how to phrase it, but generally, you've touched on a handful of these things with the grid. The grid is very much a technological system, but it's also an economic and political system, and it's enormous. This is the foundation of our economy, as you have mentioned. So, it strikes me that it has the potential, if rebuilt and redesigned in a more distributive way, to also distribute not just energy, but like political power and wealth. And you opened this talking about this like hoarding being a problem.
We have the opportunity for this distribution of lots of things. So, I'm wondering, like, how you see, if you kind of agree with that framework, and like, how you see that manifesting, say, like wild success 10 or 15 years from now?
David Roberts
Fantastic question. And yes, distributed energy distributes political power, social power, and economic power and is on the side of the angels for that reason, among others. You know, like you can make a purely technical case for it, but it also, I think, is part of a larger effort to sort of redistribute power to a local level. So, you know, like anybody's listened to my episode with Lorenzo Kristov, he talks about a new kind of grid architecture, a bottom-up grid. So his thing is just like we have a transmission grid, regional operators, regional grid operators.
His whole thing is, we should do what they do in the UK now, which is have distribution level analogs, distribution system operators. Because his whole thing is like what you want at the local level is for energy planning to be integrated with transmission planning, housing planning, and economic planning at the local level so that all these things work together. You want as much energy generated, stored, and shared at the local level as you can. And so then, you know, there will be communities that cannot reach self-sufficiency and thus need electricity from the transmission grid.
But that should be the last resort, not the first resort, right? Like, you start with self-sufficiency and work up from there. And so, this will give every community the ability to design a grid that works for its community's priorities, needs, economic needs, and social needs, and gives self-sufficiency. Energy self-sufficiency is political self-sufficiency in a lot of ways or translates to a lot more physical power or physical autonomy. This is true not only for like, you know, developing countries getting off imported coal on to domestic solar and wind — you know, that's going to have huge geopolitical effects.
The same basic dynamic is true for any old area of the US, to the extent it can generate and manage its own energy. It is healthier, more self-sufficient, and more resilient against both physical weather and political weather, if you know what I mean. Like, more resilient against the rise and fall of politics. So yes, I think distributed energy and distributed power generally should be thought of as all kinds of power, and that's a good instinct. So yeah, like all these people who are working with models of local self-sufficiency, working to make local power work better, working to make local trading work better.
All this is on the side of the angels. I love all that work. Great question.
Second Audience Question
Thank you guys for an awesome discussion so far. It's been really cool to watch.
David Roberts
And it's out again. Let's use this irony that batteries are turning out to be the —
Second Audience Question
Yeah, interesting. Oh, wow. Now I've got the power. My name is Skyler, by the way. I have an unanswerable question that I would just love your thoughts on. You had a very lovely description of the climate crisis as this large puzzle with, as you look closer, a bunch of kind of interlacing fractals. And I think everybody in this room is interested in finding which part of that puzzle they fall into. And as I talk with people, I feel as though most people fall into generally one of two camps where they say, "I have these skills, how does that skill apply?"
Or, they take the high-level look of saying, "As I understand it, here is the kind of missing gap and so I'm going to try to somehow find a way to contribute to that." And I'm wondering your thoughts on either how you personally, and you talked about this through your story, have thought about your own contributions to climate but selfishly, and maybe also selfishly for other people in the room, how would you kind of advise someone else to think about navigating what could be an overwhelming or exciting or both collection of puzzles.
David Roberts
Yeah, that is unanswerable. I mean, you know, like every individual has to make their own judgments. You know, I imagine for any given individual, it'll be a balance of those. Like, it depends on how devoted they are to their training in their career to date, like how early they are in their career, all this kind of thing. I would say that the opportunities are so numerous that almost any skill set, you can find a productive use for almost any skill set, you know what I mean? Like, whatever it is you're trained to do, you can do it on the side of decarbonization, you know what I mean?
So, I'm not sure that it's that stark of a choice in a lot of ways. But, you know, if I were in school or early, I would be thinking, like, where's the puck going? You know, in the old Gretzky quote, like, where are things going? And as I said, I think they're going in the direction of electricity, software, the intelligent management of electricity at the local level and the integration of local electricity management with local land use, etc. Like, those are my passions. Those are, I think, the big growth areas.
But, like, that's a huge landscape. Like, that's an enormous landscape. You know what I mean? Like, you can — you need lots of planners, we need lots of software people. You know, we need people to keep the trains running on time. You know, like this really undervalued skill. Like, I interview lots of companies, and it's like the line between the ones that live and the ones that die are not the sort of brilliance of the founding conceit. It is the banal block and tackle of like executing a business plan. So just like, if you know how to manage a spreadsheet, just like, go find some genius inventor who, you know, can't find his shoes and like, manage the spreadsheet for him.
You know what I mean? So, like, there's endless ways to get involved. I would say, no matter your skill set.
Ben Eidelson
I also just want to add, there's this notion, I think, when — I'm only two and a half years into this, after 20 plus years of this — but I have a notion of like what I call studying the globe, or the almanac, or the map. And then there's a difference between that and traveling to go see cities. And so, there's a bunch of great books, Speed and Scale, Gates' Book, and others that give you a view of the whole puzzle at some altitude. And that can be an interesting way to study what's going on over there in France and in Paris.
But if you want to know what it's like to live there, you got to go stay in an Airbnb and walk the neighborhood. And I think there's value, especially early on, to kind of do this broad depth search thing, pop back up as you're kind of discovering what that is. And sometimes that leads to a scenario where you land in a position where you're always doing that. I think that's kind of what this is a version of — twice a week you get to go deep on something and pop back up.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's very fun. I don't get stuck in any of them. It's like I can learn and move on. It feels luxurious.
Ben Eidelson
But then, sometimes you get down there and you could have gotten or one could go then and get stuck in a great place for them. And so, I think letting yourself, giving time, especially, especially in those first couple years, to be exploratory.
I would add one other high-level thing which may or may not be particularly useful, but it's just been on my mind. So, like, one thing I've noticed is that lots of people have good ideas, lots of people have grand theories, lots of people have their article on the grand plan that could decarbonize everything in 10 years, et cetera. What the world lacks is people who can make things happen. And like, the longer I've been involved in politics, the less I value the cleverest boy in the room and his clever new plan, and the more I value the person who can just like get some people together in a room and make anything happen.
David Roberts
Anything, like making anything happen. It's like those people are rare. The doers, organizers, and actors rather than the thinkers are rare and prized to me. To me, that's what we need more of, just organizers. It's like if you can make one actual thing happen, that is more valuable to me than any number of tomes of genius political science or whatever. Whatever it is, even if you are daunted by the big picture, just find a little thing and make it happen. You're a frigging superstar.
Second Audience Question
Shockingly cogent answer to an unanswerable question.
Third Audience Question
This is really useful. Hi David, I'm Samantha Weaver. I work in the DER and community solar space. But my question is actually about parenting advice. Since we're here with Climate Papa, I thought some Dr. Volts words of wisdom would be nice. And my question is, could you just share a little bit about when you talk with your kids about the future, particularly in the current context of national politics, climate change threats, etc.? Can you share a little bit about how you talk to them about the future?
David Roberts
Yeah, I guess I could. I've gotten this question a lot over the years and I sort of think this is like a question that parents ask other parents, you know what I mean? And like, how many kids remember what their parents said to them about, you know, like, parents worry about this with one another but like the kids aren't listening. They don't give a shit, you know what I mean? They don't remember. So like, you know what I mean on the specifics, to me the goal is to make good people. That's what the world needs, good people.
So, like, make good people who are kind and generous and have some, you know, love, secure enough to feel safe and content within themselves and don't feel this need to go out and fuck up life for everybody else out of some sense of incompleteness, which we see all around us. Like, to me, the problems of masculinity and maleness, etc., are all around us right now. And the world desperately needs good men, kind men who care about others and who don't view washing the dishes as some sort of tyranny from the gatekeepers trying to suppress the founders. Yeah, like, you know, like "Mom!" That's what I hear when I hear tech founders, it's just like "Mom!" So, I am, I just like, if you create good — like "create," what am I talking about?
Hope, hope for the best. But, like, do what you can to make open-minded, curious, kind people. They'll absorb the world around them and they'll find good ways to engage with it. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not gonna be able to direct that process. I'm not gonna be able to tell them like if I start talking about climate change to them, that's just gonna like... you know what I mean? It's going to end up in Barcelona, it's going to end up in the Barcelona box.
Ben Eidelson
Didn't you have blah, blah blah on your wall?
David Roberts
Yes. If anybody's seen my Zoom background, there's a big poster that says "Blah, blah, blah," which was my kid's present to me on Christmas a few years ago. Yeah.
Ben Eidelson
My seven year old asked me, "So what is working on climate change? You just talk to people?"
David Roberts
Yes, someone asked my younger son what I did for a living and he's like, "Batteries, batteries, blah blah, blah." So, that, and I would just add on here there's a little thing I wanted to say and I have not had an opportunity to say yet and this seems like a good opportunity which is one of my big worries right now is climate world is moving into tech and software big in a big way for all the reasons that we all understand. And like, I look at the software world. I look at the tech world in the US and just like I don't want that in my — you know what I mean?
Like, there are lots of dysfunctions in that world that I would really, really, really prefer clean energy people avoid. And they are dysfunctions that I associate with, like, adolescent masculinity, basically with like poorly developed men, you know. Like, you know, I did this pod on enshittification and all this kind of stuff, like capturing people on platforms and extracting value from them the way tech did. And just like this sort of like dick swinging Mark Zuckerberg, like "Break things!" whatever, you know, like, shut up. You know, just like, just like I want people to be good and responsible.
And so, this gets back to a previous question too. Like, if you go into software and tech in the clean energy world, please try to make it a healthier, more productive, more pro-social environment than the larger tech world it comes from. That's part of what I try to do with my boys. You know, you can't ever lecture them, it's all bank shots, you know what I mean? But I try to talk to them about like, "This man in the news clearly has a gaping void inside him that he can't fill. He clearly was not loved enough and now is out trying to make you miserable because he's not happy. Like, don't be like that. What a pathetic, weak man."
Strength, strength is, strength is like being confident enough in yourself that you can be generous, that you can be outward-oriented, that you can listen and care about other people. That's what requires strength and courage. This sort of like tantrum on the floor, "I want all my toys and none of the responsibility." That's not manhood, that's not being a man, that's being a fucking baby. So this is all far afield. But just like, boy, the world needs better men.
Ben Eidelson
I want to add, not in defense of the software industry, but I think a layer of nuance.
David Roberts
Been a sweeping generalization, or two.
Ben Eidelson
I see it as, "Incentives drive, people do," and business models are the incentives around products. And so, I think for people building businesses and business models, and then products within those business models, thinking through what incentive alignment that ultimately creates. There's a big difference between a company that builds software to help people be more productive in their writing and building a nice Microsoft Word writing tool, versus a company that says, "Hey, I need your time and engagement and attention." They're going to lead to different product decisions to optimize, you know, the outcome of the company.
So, if you're building a new business, a new product, and you're thinking about the pricing of the product and how it's all going to work and what value it's going to provide, those are choices you get to make kind of at the founding of the thing that then set in motion, I believe, what will be, if it's successful, the downstream incentive structure around the system at play.
David Roberts
Leadership. I mean, leadership is so important. The final thing I'd say on this is, if you care about this particular thing, being a good person and productively engaging. Go back and listen to a pod I did with a guy — I can't remember his name, but he's making electric planes. I think his first name is Kyle. I don't remember his name, but all I remember is that he is deliberately not building his business in California or in Silicon Valley. I think he's up in, like, Maine or Vermont or somewhere. He's built this sort of complex.
He's hired a diverse group of people. He has free daycare on site. He's flying electric planes. And instead of just, like, breaking things and then asking forgiveness later, like a "cool dude" does, you know, he went to county officials and worked proactively to get their trust so that everybody could win and so everybody could gain something. You know what I mean? Just talking to the guy, I was like, "Please replicate yourself. Please go to Silicon Valley and replicate yourself." If you want a model of what, like, and this is literally one of the smartest human beings I've ever talked to.
He's one of these people, you talk to him for five minutes and you feel like you can, like, warm your hands on his brains. But, like, you can be smart and you can build things and you can be nice. There's no conflict between those things. So, that pod, I think, is a good illustration.
Fourth Audience Question
I'm Steve. Thanks so much in general for your work and, like, making complicated stuff interesting and meaningful and bringing some hope. Like, we could not do stupid stuff, we could do smart stuff and be better off. That's a good story. I've been working more than 25 years connecting smart growth and climate change. We did this book, Growing Cooler, almost 20 years ago, and your recent podcast appreciated you sort of just talking about how urban form is so critical for building energy, for transportation, for embodied carbon. And you talk about how your kids talk about your work.
My son? "Oh, dad? Oh, he does gentrification." Oh, thanks. But your point — a little bit. But your point about all right. If we don't bring the equity side, the sort of social equity side, we're in trouble. We know we need the financial capital, but we need the social capital to connect with stuff that people care about. So one thing I want to throw out there, I know the statistics for Ontario, I don't know it for Washington. There's like 4 million empty bedrooms in Ontario where I run a foundation right now. Like if we could fill some of those with people like home share to help ground reach the high shelf, put an ADU in the basement, add something on the property and we need sort of capacity to help folks sort of do that.
Plan it, construct it, finance it, manage it. Because there's all this underutilized property, we don't have to change how our urban form works. Worst case, we're giving homeowners some more income. Hopefully, that extra income is helping to do a deeper retrofit and maybe it's contributing to sort of solving housing. But this multi-solving is complicated. But if we don't, we kind of know what's going to happen.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, this is a complicated answer to how to solve the housing crisis. But, I think step one is to stop making the things you want illegal. So, there you go, like legalize the things you want. It seems easy enough as a first step. But, you know, there's that online meme of dense urbanism being illegal in most parts of America. That's true. Almost everything you want to happen is basically illegal almost everywhere. So, let's not outthink ourselves. Let's just start by legalizing what we want to happen and then see how much it happens and then we can accelerate it.
But, just begin. I feel like we need to understand that the scarcity of housing is a problem bigger in scale than any other problem in housing. So, I just think that there's nothing to be lost by just beating that drum over and over again. Solve a lot of problems just by building more. Look at Austin, they just built more. And so, all prices along the entire income scale of housing come down when you build more. It's supply and demand. You know what I mean?
So, that's not a brilliant answer to your question, but every locality and municipality should begin just by looking at its bylaws and standards. And looking at its building standards and its road standards, "Let's stop mandating crappy stuff." Step one.
Fifth Audience Question
Hi, I'm Tyler, a big fan of the podcast, David. Thank you. "Long time, first time," as they say. Volts is good at connecting people and ideas in the climate space, at least for me personally, that's how it's worked. I'm curious if you have any plans for growth and further impact as your subscriber base grows. Should you be leading group trips to Barcelona?
David Roberts
Once my deep-pocketed patron shows up, I've got all kinds of ideas about taking people to Barcelona. You know, this is an interesting point. There's a reason I work alone. I'll just say, every place I've ever worked, I've gotten the same performance review at the end of the year. At Grist, it became a running joke because it's the same thing every year. "The work's great. If you could just not be such a dick," you know. So, I don't know what reason of childhood trauma or whatever made me the way I am, but I'm just not a good employee and I'm not a good employer and I'm not a good colleague.
So, subtract all those and you end up with where I am, which is just me. Nobody has to be annoyed about my annoying habits but me. You know what I mean? I don't have to apologize for my procrastination or the irrational, weird way I do things. I don't have to explain it to anybody. I don't have to work with anybody else. You know what I mean? So, to me, that's just like Valhalla. People complain about working at home or working alone or working for themselves or whatever.
And it's like, I love it every day. I've never had a second's hesitation. So, this is the thing. Growth is one of these assumptions that in the business world it's like, I'll just say this, if I could lock in the number of paid subscribers that I have today and trust that that would be steady going forward, I'm fine where I am. I don't feel any need to grow. I don't have any grand growth plans. I don't want to build anything or hire anybody or do any more work. You know, I don't even like working.
I just like, to me, the stuff I do, the whole point of launching Volts is like, what if I could just do the stuff I like and just not do the stuff I don't like? Let's run a test, like, how long can I get away with just not doing any of the stuff I don't like? And it turns out, you can get away with not doing any of the stuff you don't like. So, I've created a work situation for myself where 95% of my work is the work I like doing.
And so, any bringing in of partners, funders, advertisers, patrons, colleagues, or employees, any of that just increases the proportion of stuff I don't like thinking about or doing. So, I'm just not going to. I'm just going to see if I can make this work.
Fifth Audience Question
You have an employee though, right?
David Roberts
I have a guy who works for me 10 hours a week, mainly to handle customer service complaints, which is one of those things I don't like doing.
Sixth Audience Question
James Gordy, Bayou Energy. Hi, Ben. Hi, Dave. To ask it quickly, it's great that energy markets are pretty local, but also, you've talked a lot about public utility commissions and the misaligned incentives of folks like utilities, right? Elephant in the room. You've talked to so many people. What's your short list of things you think we can do to accelerate the inevitability of techno-economics, of clean energy and solar winning?
David Roberts
Today, the best thing we can do in the US is just align utility incentives in the right direction. So, two big things I would propose for utilities, and this is not a complete answer, and each of these requires a lot more explanation, but one is rates of return. The whole premise of the investor-owned utility is to invest your money, you get a guaranteed rate of return that makes it safe, that attracts capital, right? The regulatory compact is you're supposed to get the minimum rate of return necessary to attract the capital, right? Only and no more.
And like, rates of return in the utility sector have been bloating, and bloating, and bloating for 30 some years now. And there's just lots of money being siphoned out of the system into shareholder pockets unnecessarily that could, if you cut that incentive, and that gives utilities even more incentive to spend, spend, spend to get money back. So, cut rates of return substantially, number one, and allow utilities to build distributed energy to determine where it's needed to put out an RFP for what kind they want. You know, people can still bring their own if they want, they can still buy their own if they want.
And this is still going to be a market for it. There's going to be private developers that build it. But, let the utility put its knowledge and perspective to use rather than fighting it, building it. And I think those two things alone would put the thrusters on.
Seventh Audience Question
I'm Aditya, and I work for a VPP. I was curious, along the lines of what James asked, to what extent does the deployment of clean energy rely on global trade, global resourcing? And then, also as someone who works in demand response, I don't get to work with EVs or solar. But I'm wondering, what makes you very confident that we will see that surplus of energy in the future? Because that's ideally what I want.
David Roberts
There's a couple of questions there. I'd say one of the most interesting things, literally tomorrow morning, I'm talking with a guy about global trade, about the relationship of global trade to clean energy. What this drive for reshoring means, like, which flows are going where, what effects tariffs are going to have on all that, you know, because sort of like the impetus, that's the fad now, the thing, the sort of weird bipartisan push is for onshoring things with the notion that other people dominating your supply chains is a national security threat. And I just, like, I find when people describe what the threat is, there's a lot of jazz hands and I just like trying to squint through. Like, if you're my top customer, I need you as much as you need me.
You know what I mean? Like, if I cut you off from my product, I'm just shooting myself in the foot. China could cut off our graphite. Yes. But like, would they? When? Why? Like, that would hurt them badly to do that. So, like maybe in a situation of literal war or like on the verge of war, but just like, I want more about that than like "China..." You know what I mean? That seems to be what's driving half of domestic policy these days is "China, brrr..." Like, "Okay, I'll do whatever you're asking!"
You know what I mean? I hate to be cynical, but in some senses, that's helped. Like, that's probably what got the IRA over the line. It wasn't that people got religion about climate, you know what I mean? It's like being scared of China. But on your other question, the VPP thing and like distributed energy, and I think we don't even know yet the extent of this story, but again, hyperscalers showing up, wanting lots and lots and lots of clean energy is like a giant push behind everything we're doing and want to do.
And it's very important that that force, which is huge and powerful, be managed and channeled in positive ways. Because again, you could see that going wrong. You could see like a bunch of gas plants popping up, which is what a lot of them want. But I think what they're going to find is if you want lots of electricity quick, nuclear is slow, gas is slow, solar is less slow. You know, what's the very fastest is the energy infrastructure that already is built, which is every residence and commercial building and industrial building in the country has capacity, spare capacity that it's not using.
Right? And that's all VPPs are, is just like, "Let's use that capacity if you want to get new electrons on the grid." There is no faster way to do that than by managing and coordinating distributed resources with software. And that is just the logic of the situation. Like, with so much money involved, there's going to be some clarity of vision. These people do not want to mess around, you know what I mean? So they're going to, they're going to see that obvious truth. They're going to come to that obvious truth. You can, you can see it happening in news releases.
Like, they're all like, "We're gonna build SMRs!" And then they call somebody from the energy world, you can see the faces like, "Oh..." So, they're going to get there, they're going to get there. But, VPP is basically just coordinating distributed energy is the energy infrastructure that is there waiting to be deployed. So that's just, in a sense, what I mean about being on the right side of history. That is just the logic of the situation. And they're going to come to it. They are not going to give a damn about carbon emissions.
They're just going to be, we need electricity now, stat. And there it is. Like, that's where you can get it fast. You can get it fastest from existing distributed infrastructure, next fastest from solar and wind, then gas, then, you know, on up the line. So, just the need for speed is on our side. It's working for us.
Ben Eidelson
Great place to end the conversation. Thank you, David. This was very fun.
