Episode 230: David Roberts, Volts
Today’s guest is David Roberts, aka Dr. Volts, who runs the Volts newsletter and podcast.
David has been reporting on and explaining clean energy topics for almost 20 years. He talks to politicians, analysts, innovators, activists, and more about the latest progress in the world's most important fight. David’s work is deeply researched and an invaluable resource for people who want a better understanding of what a clean energy transition and viable future could look like. And he isn’t afraid to share his strongly held opinions.
In this conversation, Jason learns more about David’s background, his views on the issue and how they’ve evolved throughout his career. They discuss some of the fundamental politics ingrained in climate, and some of the solutions that are accelerating our transition away from fossil fuels. There’s a lot of insight packed into this episode and we hope you enjoy it.
Get connected:
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Dr. Volts Twitter
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MCJ Collective Twitter
*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded on September 23, 2022.
In today's episode, we cover:
[4:49] How David got involved in journalism and climate
[9:10] His thoughts on the climate issue early in his career and how they've evolved
[13:54] How concerned he thinks people should be
[23:32] Approaching solutions to climate that also solve other issues
[27:25] Importance of celebrating small victories to motivate future progress
[34:37] David's optimism for a clean energy future
[44:16] The human need to feel some sense of control and how that impacts their views on climate
[54:07] U.S. journalism today
[57:54] Intersection between environmentalism and climate
[1:01:03] David's thoughts on tech and how it’s approaching clean energy
[1:05:02] Speed round including solar geoengineering, nuclear, carbon capture, offsets, and more
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Jason Jacobs (00:00:02):
Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms (00:00:04):
And I'm Cody Sims.
Jason Jacobs (00:00:06):
And welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:00:16):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:00:27):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change.
Jason Jacobs (00:00:41):
Today's guest is David Roberts, also known as Dr. Volts on Twitter. D-R-V-O-L-T-S, and he has a podcast called Volts that's about leaving fossil fuels behind at www.volts.wtf. At any rate, David has been reporting on and explaining clean energy topics for almost 20 years, and he loves talking to politicians, analysts, innovators, activists, and more about the latest progress in the world's most important fight. Now, four years ago when I was first making the rounds and starting to talk to the smartest people I could find as I got up to speed on the clean energy transition, people kept pointing me to David Roberts and his writing, and his writing is intimidating because it is long form, incredibly well researched and incredibly thoughtful, and as the former founder of a fitness app company coming into climate change, it was a lot, but it was also an invaluable resource.
Jason Jacobs (00:01:51):
And I've also noticed from following David on Twitter that he's got some strong opinions, so I was really excited for this one to dig into those opinions, how they formed, why they formed, how they've evolved over the years, and also how strongly held they are. This is a long discussion and probably one of my favorites so far. I can't recommend it enough, and without further ado, David Roberts, Welcome to the show.
David Roberts (00:02:18):
Hey, glad to be here.
Jason Jacobs (00:02:19):
Or Dr. Volts, I should say.
David Roberts (00:02:21):
The doctor is in.
Jason Jacobs (00:02:23):
Yeah. We have never spoken before. Although, when I was first getting into climate, maybe, I guess almost four years ago now, you would not believe the number of people that said that, "You need to read David's stuff. You need to read David's stuff." Or I think they said, were you Dr. Vox before you were Dr. Volts? Is that true?
David Roberts (00:02:41):
Yeah. Four years ago I was Dr. Vox. Yes.
Jason Jacobs (00:02:45):
Yeah. So they were saying, "Dr. Vox. You got to read Dr. Vox. Dr. Vox." And man, you are intimidating to read as a newcomer coming in because you get so deep, and for, you know, a fitness app entrepreneur like me that was trying to figure out what the heck is going on with this type of systems problem, that's a lot, but also so important and so necessary, and it's such an honor to have you here today.
David Roberts (00:03:05):
Well, thank you.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:06):
Well, for starters, how do you categorize yourself and the work that you do?
David Roberts (00:03:11):
Huh. Well, you know, the easiest thing to say to just the average person on the street who asks is that I'm a journalist, but I think when people hear journalist, they have a certain image in their mind, and I guess the term for what I do these days is called explanatory journalism.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:31):
Uh-huh.
David Roberts (00:03:32):
Which I guess is fine. It's a little slightly obnoxious, but I guess works as well as anything descriptively. Basically, I try to figure out what's going on and explain it to people. That's about as simple as I could put it.
Jason Jacobs (00:03:47):
And I guess I have a two-pronged question there. What led you into explanatory journalism, but also what led you into working in climate, and how did those intersect?
David Roberts (00:03:57):
Well, the answer to both is total random chance. I was in school for a long time pursuing a philosophy PhD.
Jason Jacobs (00:04:06):
Now you're going to say it was a part-time minor in snowboarding, right?
David Roberts (00:04:09):
Yes. My lines are so... I've used my lines so many times everybody knows them now.
Jason Jacobs (00:04:16):
I just want to show off that I did a little prep. That's all.
David Roberts (00:04:19):
Okay. Okay. Good. Yes, with a minor in snowboarding. Bailed out of that once I got a look at academia more closely and then just was bouncing around aimless and jobless after my first kid had been born.
Jason Jacobs (00:04:35):
That doesn't sound any fun, although maybe it was really fun.
David Roberts (00:04:38):
It was a low point, let's say, sitting at home in my underwear all day, fiddling on the computer while my wife was at her job.
Jason Jacobs (00:04:43):
I'm picturing Michael Keaton from Mr. Mom, which most people listening to this show probably have no idea what I'm talking about.
David Roberts (00:04:49):
It was like that except for he was doing a bunch of chores and I was mostly sitting around wallowing in depression. So, I discovered Craigslist, and the very day I discovered it, there was ad on there for editorial assistant at Grist, so I did that. I wrote a long cover letter saying, "Hey, I have no background in the environment at all. Also, no background in journalism whatsoever, but nonetheless, I would very much like this job," and got that. And so that's how I entered the field is just sort of slipped in the back door to a tiny little... I mean, I think I was the fifth employee at Grist at the time. It was just this little environmental news site, and I didn't have any, like I said, training or background in journalism or the environment or climate or anything else. So, that came with some positives and some negatives. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, for one thing. I mean, I started out mostly just editing and writing blurbs and the daily newsletter and then moved over slowly but surely into writing.
Jason Jacobs (00:05:50):
When was this, by the way?
David Roberts (00:05:51):
This was 2004 I got hired, toward the end of 2004, I got hired, I think, and so this was the mid-2000s. This is right when Inconvenient Truth came out and that first whole wave of green hype in the 2006, 2007 range. I was there for those heady years. I mean, when I started learning about stuff, it was literally just learning from the ground up, and when I started writing, I just wrote in the way I was accustomed to, which is just conversational. You know, like, "Here's what's going on. Here's what I found out. Look at this. Isn't this cool?" You know, Grist did not have enough staff to really sort train me specifically on just sort of the habits of journalism and the rules of journalism, so I was completely feral. You know, I was completely self taught, and, yeah, so I just wrote the way that felt natural and have ever since, and I think people like it because especially in the area of climate, especially back then, there was a lot of very sort of stilted writing.
David Roberts (00:06:57):
It was just not a lot of good writing about climate back then. A lot of sort of scientific writing and then a lot of... You know, people just... I don't know, there's a lot of sort of like, "When I'm discussing an existential crisis, we have to be very serious," and you know, I was just like, I think I came off as a human being like out in the middle of this, learning about it, you know, and you're sort of there learning with me, and I don't think there was a lot of that at the time, so people gravitated to it. Yeah. It's just ever since I've just been writing the way I feel like writing and learning about what interests me. You know, I started, it was just environment at Grist. I could have gone any direction, but I think I was attracted to climate and started to dig into climate because of some of the same reasons I enjoyed philosophy, which is that it's a very big system with a lot of subsystems and a lot of patterns and connections among the systems, and it's genuinely difficult to think about, you know?
David Roberts (00:08:01):
There's lots of environmental issues where it's difficult to find the information or something like that, but this is, climate is an issue that's genuinely difficult to cognize, to theorize, to think about. It's so big that it's hard to know what kind of thing it is. And so I was like, "Wow, here's a relevant public policy issue where people need help thinking through it," and that's what philosophy trains you to do, basically, is just sort think systematically through things, so it turned out to be quite a lucky marriage of background and subject matter, but it was all very, very random and unplanned.
Jason Jacobs (00:08:40):
Now, I mean, we're not going to cover 18 years line by line, but maybe talk a little bit about as you first started getting your brain around it in those early days of Grist, how did you think about the nature of the problem? And I'm not asking you about solutions right now, and then maybe contrast that to how you think about the problem today, assuming it is different, which it's hard to imagine that it isn't.
David Roberts (00:09:10):
When I started thinking and writing about it, one of the things, and I've said this before and written about it before, but sort of like the climate issue came to American popular discourse via science, via science and environmentalists, basically. Scientists discovered it, environmentalists picked up on it, and so it came to popular discourse as a scientific issue and as an environmental issue, and so if you're an environmentalist with decades of experience in the U.S., you have a certain model for what problems are, and they generally are, there's a pollutant. Industry needs to attach something to its facilities to remove the pollutant so we can clean up the pollutant. Basically a pollution problem with scientific effects, and that's the way people discussed it for a long time.
David Roberts (00:10:06):
Just a lot of sort of, you know, if you remember Al Gore's earliest, the evolution of Al Gore's slideshow is kind of an interesting thing to trace. His early slides were very, there's a lot of technical, there's a lot of graphs and charts and et cetera, et cetera. But sort of over time, it became clear to me that it's a problem of humans and human societies and human organization and politics. Basically politics. The one thing that bugged me most about this sort of environmental movement and the scientists who discovered this back when I was first reading about it, is their sort of pretense of being apolitical. This notion that climate is not a political issue. It affects everyone. It's bipartisan. And you know, like the idea that you're going to fundamentally transform an energy system in any context, much less globally, and that's not going to be political, is just so, it's just so stupid. It's so deeply and intrinsically political, and now I think of it much more as a sort of combination of a political problem and economics and technological innovation. I think slowly over time, discourse has kind of turned that way.
Jason Jacobs (00:11:22):
Would you consider the climate problem an emergency? Are we in a climate emergency?
David Roberts (00:11:27):
That's one of those arguments that it's just almost entirely about words and sort of posture, like sort of what posture you're taking. Like what practical difference does it make if I say yes or no? Like what practical difference does it make if we think yes or no? Like I want to move as quickly as possible solving it, so that's that. Like whether I call it an emergency or not... Whether Joe Biden officially deems it an emergency is a relevant question because that actually triggers a real world effect. That actually triggers some powers, some emergency powers that the president has. But all someone like me calling it an emergency does, it's just an exclamation point. It's just like me pounding the table. It's just like, you know, I call it a threat and you guys didn't freak out enough, so now I'm going to call it an existential threat. Oh, you're still not freaking out enough. Now I'm going to call it an emergency, and you're still not freaking out enough. Like as though endless rhetorical escalation is the solution to something, that if we all just escalated our rhetoric more and more and more, then the problem would be solved. Like clearly, that's not going to work.
Jason Jacobs (00:12:43):
Well, someone should tell Peter Kalmus that.
David Roberts (00:12:47):
Well, I mean, it's fine that he's out there doing that. It's good to have that as part of the mix. You know, it's good to have someone out there ringing bells as part of the mix, but the things that are impeding rapid social response are not going to be overcome by advocates pounding the table even harder. That's not the barrier. That's not what's in our way. So fine, I'll call it an emergency. But I mean, yes, it's an emergency, but also it's a multi-generational. In a sense, it's almost the opposite of an emergency. It's something that's going to be, that we're going to need to be working on for a century. You know what I mean? And that's not what comes to mind when people think of an emergency. We need to be working on this for the rest of our lives and our kids' and our kids' kids'. So I guess I would just say it doesn't make one bit of difference one way or the other, whether I call it an emergency.
Jason Jacobs (00:13:45):
Okay. Let me try a different angle, then. How concerned are you about it and how concerned should we collectively be about it?
David Roberts (00:13:54):
Well, I mean, that's difficult to answer in the abstract. You know, how concerned you should be derives ultimately from your values, what you value. Like I consider myself a liberal, and I want a more egalitarian, a more fair, a more just society, a more prosperous society in which more people share in the fruits of our labors, and climate change is not only going to directly kill and physically hurt a lot of people, it's also going to exacerbate inequality. It's going to exacerbate, I think, various forms of nationalism and sort of authoritarianism. I mean, I think basically climate change is going to push in the wrong direction on every metric I care about, so I'm very concerned about it.
David Roberts (00:14:48):
But again, that's mostly rhetorical. If I say very, if 9 out of 10, if I say 7 out of 10, like what difference does that make in terms of our response? Like we need to be mobilizing all possible resources as fast as is possible for human societies to do, which turns out to be not super, super fast and not as fast as we'd like, so I'm pushing as fast as I can. I mean, could I tell like a single mother with two jobs cleaning rooms in Las Vegas that she should be super concerned about climate? I mean, I guess so. But there's a stack of about a hundred things more proximate that threaten her and her safety and her family. So, you know, I'm not one of these people that say it should be the top concern for everybody, but the whole point of leadership, the whole point of having a society where people learn things and there's science and there's politics, the whole point of leadership is to look ahead to problems that are going to be bad in the future and to take steps in advance to address them.
David Roberts (00:15:57):
Plus, I think lots of the things that will be involved in addressing or solving climate change would be good to do for other reasons on liberal progressive grounds in that they would, it's sort of practically cliche at this point to say that pollution of almost all kinds, that means air pollution, water pollution, but also atmospheric pollution, you know, greenhouse gases themselves, the effects are disproportionately felt by vulnerable communities, communities of color, poor people, people with disabilities, old people, et cetera. But the flip side of that is that all measures to reduce pollution are basically justice policies. Right? They benefit vulnerable communities most. So, working on spreading EVs or working on reducing coal pollution or working on ways to make homes or buildings more self-sufficient and have cheaper energy, all those things serve my other values as well. So in a sense, it's all one big concern. Right?
David Roberts (00:17:12):
It all comes back to my sort of basic progressive values. I view climate change as slotting in perfectly comfortable within that. And that's one of the things, not to go off on a big side tangent, but from the time I started writing, this has been, you know, one of the things that irritated me about the way people talked about climate change is though it's this freestanding other thing that's sort of outside politics and it's outside the normal left versus fight and this sort of pristine other thing that like a certain priestly class of environmentalists and scientists understand and take care of, and everybody else just lets them have at it.
David Roberts (00:17:51):
I've wanted to move climate change. I've wanted to convince just average progressives, this is of a piece with your other concerns and values. Like the things you care about, economic inequality, just the domination of the weak by the strong, like all these basic things that progressives are concerned about, this is of a piece with those and you should integrate it into your sort of worldview and your concerns. So, that's why I hate these sort of efforts to prioritize it relative to other problems. I view sort of the movement toward a fairer, kinder, more prosperous, more egalitarian society as sort of one seamless whole, and climate change is a big part of that. It's going to make that much, much, much more difficult.
Jason Jacobs (00:18:40):
I'd love to stick with this for a second because this attention where some people say similar to what you just said. It's so interconnected and so hard to wrap your brain around, and it's so complicated. And again, you're not saying all this, so I don't want you to then say, "Well, you're putting words in my mouth," but like there's pollution, there's biodiversity, there's carbon, there's methane, there's oceans, there's forests, there's food systems, there's cities. You know, there's environmental justice, there's energy poverty. It's like it's so complicated. And then you have other people that say, "Actually, it's pretty easy." Like, "We need to get rid of fossil fuels and we need to do these three things and it's solved." Right?
Jason Jacobs (00:19:19):
And what I want to ask is, if you track nothing, then there's no accountability and it's ineffective. But if you track everything without prioritization, then there's no accountability and it's ineffective. So if you're Breakthrough Energy Ventures and you have a big gigaton threshold or half a gigaton threshold and you won't invest in anything that won't have the ability to reduce or remove gigatons of carbon, right? Well, then the critics will say, "But there's all these other factors, and that's too limited. It's just carbon blinders." Right? But if you don't have that, then people will say, "Well, then how do you know the thing you're working on is going to move the needle at all?" So how do you reconcile that tension and how do you think about it?
David Roberts (00:20:01):
I mean, I think the carbon blinders thing has somewhat overstated in that, you know, like I said, if you solve the climate problem, you are perforce going to solve other problems, too, whether you want to or not. Like this has been a fight in the environmental community for a while, this idea that the Gates types just want to come in and solve carbon and they don't care about inequality. They don't care about sort of fixing or healing mistakes made by previous environmental movements or previous industrial transformations. But I think that that disagreement is exaggerated, like many others. If you solve the carbon thing in practical terms. I don't mean in theory. Like in theory, you could construct an idea of how to extract carbon from the economy without solving any other problems. Like it's possible in theory, but in practice, in actual social practice, in actual politics, the things you're going to have to do to solve the carbon problem are going to be solving other problems.
David Roberts (00:21:03):
So, it can be both. It can be sprawling and complicated, which it definitely is, because climate is everything. Climate literally includes everything, so every human system, economic or technological, social, name it, interacts with climate in some way or another and is going to be part of the solution. So, it is sprawling and complicated and it does touch every single thing. But it's also, like one of the good things that has happened over the course of me writing about it is it can get so big and sprawling and complicated that it becomes a little bit like white noise, so all you can really say about it is very sort of general things like, "It's an existential threat and we have the tools we need, and all we lack is political will," and these sort of things that people write over and over and over again that just become of abstract and tedious. But now, A, conceptually, we're getting a better sense of a core set of solutions, a core set of strategies that aren't going to do everything but tackle the bulk of it.
David Roberts (00:22:06):
And furthermore, people are working on them, so there's stuff happening to talk about. There's stuff to compare against other things. There's results now to assess. You know, the train is moving. And that just, like for me, is gratifying because that just gives me something to talk about. Like there's only so many times you can talk about climate change in the abstract before you just start repeating yourself before... Like even today when I try to read articles about climate change, my eyes blur. I'm just like, "Jesus, I've read this so many times." But now like getting in the weeds of how do you decarbonize the natural gas heating system in the U.S. northeast? Like then you've got meat. Then you've got something you're really chewing on. Then you've got like actual technologies and actual institutions and actual economic practices, actual results from experiments, like there's stuff to talk about. So, I just think discussing it in the abstract, how big of a problem it is, I just don't know. I'm just tired of that. Just like everybody should just do what they can where they can, and hopefully the aggregate will be enough, you know?
Jason Jacobs (00:23:17):
But then those theorists will sit there when you try to do anything and say, "Do you realize what a small percentage that is" Like, "That doesn't move the needle against anything and you forgot about this and it doesn't touch that." And it's like, well, is it better to start somewhere or nowhere?
David Roberts (00:23:32):
Well, I think what we should learn from the history of carbon pricing, right? So this carbon pricing is the sort of intellectual outgrowth of the idea that climate change is a thing, a problem, and we need a solution that is commensurate with the problem. Right? And so once you see how big the problem is, you're like, "Well, shit, what solution?" Like you have to back up to a level of abstraction because what could possibly be big enough to do that? And that was always the appeal of carbon pricing. Like it's this one lever you could pull that could touch every ton of emissions in the world and get started reducing them all at once. It seems like a solution as big as the problem. But look what happened to it. You know what I mean? The cause is so big and abstract, it's not small enough. It doesn't have the hooks. People on the ground have had a lot of trouble doing it.
David Roberts (00:24:32):
So, the solution to climate change is going to be the aggregation of a million things that all seem small in isolation. Like everything. Like the U.S. could drop its emissions of climate pollutants to zero tomorrow, and in terms of climate change, the problem of capital C, capital C, climate change would still be huge and existential and terrible. You know what I mean? Like it's so big that even giant things when measured against it in isolation seem tiny. So, yeah, everything's going to seem tiny. Every policy, every technology is going to seem small in isolation, but all we're going to get in the end is a bunch of small things that we hope have the sort of aggregate effect, the emergent effect of reducing the overall problem. I just think you cripple yourself if you think that way. If you think in terms of like, "I need to do one thing that's going to make a measurable dent against this giant global problem," you're going to go insane. Like it's too big for that.
Jason Jacobs (00:25:43):
I guess the other side of that is, do you worry sometimes that if all these little things happen and they're all small, and we showcase all this momentum because of all this kindling that's flying around, but at the end of the day, the drum beat keeps going and emissions keep rising and the more GHGs get trapped in the atmosphere and more damages get baked in and we just make a bigger and bigger mess for ourselves while we feel good with all the headlines of progress. Do you worry about that?
David Roberts (00:26:18):
No. This is a variant of a question that comes up a lot in this area, which came up a lot around the Inflation Reduction Act, which is if we celebrate and feel happy about a good thing happening, will that immediately cause people to say, "Ah, we're done. We're going to give up the fight and move on." And that's just, no, it won't. There's no reason in human psychology or sociology to think that will happen. In fact, if you look at successful movements, they are fueled by successes. Successes make people more inclined to continue fighting. Success feels good. Good things happening feel good, and positive reinforcement, you know, like ask any dog trainer. Positive reinforcement encourages a particular behavior, and so if you're fighting against climate change and you get some positive reinforcement, "Hey, we made progress. We did something. We achieved something." You're going to have positive feelings associated with the fight and you're going to fight more.
David Roberts (00:27:26):
This notion that we're constantly on the verge of everyone quitting and we can't let any good news leak out because that's going to immediately drain people's motivation to fight. It's just nonsense. I don't know where it came from. It doesn't describe human beings. So no, I have no fear at all that if we fill the headlines with, "Oh, we made great progress on electrifying freight. Oh, we made some great progress on long term energy storage." You know, "We had a cool breakthrough here," you know, or we, "Look, this utility refined its rates to make them performance based rates, and now that seems to be working." Like I think filling the headlines with those smaller victories is going to build momentum and is going to make people excited, and it's going to give people a reason to join this fight. It's only a particular kind of sort of neurotic, self-hating lefty like me and you who thinks that we need misery and danger and peril to motivate ourselves to do anything.
David Roberts (00:28:35):
I think that's a absolutely misbegotten way of approaching things. I think we need a lot more successes and we need to talk a lot more about our successes. I mean, the most popular things I do are just interviewing a clever person who's thought of a clever new way to do one little thing. Like I talked to a guy who's got a clever new way of measuring efficiency in buildings so that you can commodify it and buy and sell it and make a more rational market out of it. Like, is building efficiency going to solve climate change? No. But if I tell people, "Hey, we made this cool little clever advance in how we do this," are they going to be like, "Oh, sounds like the problem solved. I'm going to quit." No. They love hearing that things are happening, that clever people are out there working on things and solving things. It makes people more inclined to engage, not less.
Jason Jacobs (00:29:31):
So the caveat here is that I agree with you, so I'm going to start there, but because I try to play the role of devil's advocate, I'm going to maybe represent the other side of that viewpoint just for a minute, just to pressure test it. I think, and everyone's going to jump in afterwards and tell me that I didn't represent their views properly and stuff like that, but that what some of the people that might take issue with that perspective might say is, "Well, what's going to stop big oil from viewing their, you know, the hundred million that they slice off for clean energy as a marketing expense and heralding it like they're some kind of green hero while they still continue to green light tens of billions of dollars worth of drilling in the Arctic and other places for new fossil fuels?"
David Roberts (00:30:20):
Nothing's going to stop them from doing that. What could stop them from doing that? You know, if you just lay awake at night stewing about it, I guess more power to you, but of course they're going to do that. Of course a giant incumbent business is going to go through these phases of first denying everything all together, and then second, co-opting, and then third, fading to a size that could be drowned in a bathtub, as they say. Of course that's what they're going to do. You know, that's life. But another thing people need to have more confidence in, and this is something I also try to repeat a lot, is just we've got, we being the people who are trying to encourage a clean energy transition, we've got better shit than they do. Our shit is better. It works better. It's cleaner. It's going to make a more just and prosperous society.
David Roberts (00:31:16):
Like oil, you would only dig up fossils and burn them if you didn't have other ways to do things, right? Like in the minute you have other ways to do things, you can sort of get a fresh perspective on digging up fossils and burning them and realize, "Good Lord, that's primitive and ugly, and it's socially bad and economically bad, and it's bad for our health and it's bad for our social relationships. It's terrible." So, the idea that oil companies are so these big, bad, mega powerful entities that can fend off this transition is just silly. The transition is much bigger than them, and we are transitioning to better solutions than them. So, you know, like EVs alone, like the electrification of transportation alone is going to take a huge chunk out of oil demand, and ask anybody who's studied the rise and fall of businesses over time, like these businesses depend on rising demand.
David Roberts (00:32:25):
That's what all their business plans are built around. And when demand starts plateauing, not even declining, just plateauing, business models start falling apart, financing gets harder to get, and you get into a cycle of inevitable destruction. I mean, yes, oil companies are going to trumpet these things, and yes, we need to use some discernment in trying to figure out which of these are legitimate advances or victories and which are just distractions. That's just part of life. But the idea that we should be dour and never optimistic and never talking about victories and never celebrating moves forward because that's what oil companies do, well, that's just dumb. Then you're giving them the best psychological and social tool. Like there's a reason they do it. It works. People like it. People like victories. People like good things.
David Roberts (00:33:16):
So we're like, "Oh, good things? Those are for oil companies. We are only going to raise red flags and pound the table about despair and threat." That's just like leaving the best weapons to your opponents, you know? Like the thing to do is to draw attention insofar as you can to genuine positive solutions, and sometimes those might even be things that oil companies are working on. Like it's probably true that oil companies because of their expertise in drilling are going to move into advanced geothermal, and advanced geothermal is great, even if it's Exxon doing it. So, I don't know. I guess I just don't worry about that. Like, yes. Yes, they're going to do that. Yes, they have done that. And yes, people who know better need to push back and draw attention to better things, but that's just like the cycle of life.
Jason Jacobs (00:34:08):
Now, wait. I mean, you sound pretty optimistic here and almost laid back about it, and I have to ask, do you feel like the transition is inevitable?
David Roberts (00:34:21):
Well, if I can take a step back a little bit. Part of this is I'll just say I've been immersed in thinking about climate change for a long, long time now.
Jason Jacobs (00:34:33):
A lot longer than me. A lot longer than me. Way lot. Like orders of magnitude longer.
David Roberts (00:34:37):
And I've seen people over and over again throughout my career approach climate change and go through several sort of stages, you know, and they've just become very familiar to me. The arguments have become very familiar to me. For instance, the abstract argument of how optimistic versus pessimistic should we be. Like that seems to really grip people early on when they're grappling with climate change. But like what really rides on the answer to that question? Like what difference does it really make other than to your personal psychological health? Like it's just an abstraction. It's not that I'm, you know, I'm 8 out of 10 optimistic, and if you're 6 out of 10 optimistic, let's argue. You know, maybe we can compromise on 7. Like what does that mean, this sort of optimism scale? Like who cares? Do the work. I don't care what your sort of abstract level of optimism is or isn't as long as you're just out there doing the work, taking steps forward, making things happen insofar as you can.
David Roberts (00:35:44):
It's just like, what is the point of optimism or pessimism? Like if you feel pessimistic about solving climate change, is that going to make you quit and stop working? I don't think so. You know? Or if you're super optimistic, is that going to make you quit and stop working? I don't think so. It just seems like a sort of idle thing for people who are too wealthy and have too much time on their hands and have too much time to contemplate their naval argue about. Just go do the work. That's my thing. Yeah, I mean, in terms of optimism or pessimism, I don't know. It's almost inevitable to me that we're going to stumble through and land somewhere in the middle. Like we've already done enough now to shave off a lot of the truly, truly apocalyptic scenarios.
David Roberts (00:36:38):
You know, so the current models have us coming in somewhere between two and three, and that's still going to be horrible for a lot of people, but it's not going to be species ending, and I think we're going to keep making progress, and I have great faith that the clean energy technology are going to continue to come down in price, and they're going to continue to spread faster than people expect, which is what they've done for decades now. And we're probably going to come in somewhere around two or a little above two. Like, so is that optimism or pessimism? I don't know. Like a little bit above two is going to be bad for a lot of people. It's going to be a lot better than a lot of alternatives. But just like these abstract questions of your attitude about it just to me is like the least important thing in the world, what attitude you take for it. Like if you're out there doing the work and making something happen insofar as you can, even if it's a small thing, that to me matters a thousand times more than your sort of psychic posture while you do it.
Jason Jacobs (00:37:40):
We're going to take a short break so our partner Yin can talk about the MCJ membership option.
Yin Lu (00:37:46):
Hey, folks. Yin here, our partner at MCJ Collective. Want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019, and have since then grown to 2000 members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with differing backgrounds and perspectives, and while those perspectives are different, what we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change. Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, nonprofits have been established, a bunch of hiring has been done, many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. So whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and then click on the members tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Jason Jacobs (00:38:48):
Back to the show. Okay, so let me play, get in character for a minute. Okay, just psyching myself up. But David, if we don't decouple GDP growth from emission, they say it's decoupled but it's not really decoupled, and until we stop growing with this Ponzi scheme of growth, there's no way we're ever going to hit any of these targets and we'll hit catastrophic tipping points and we're all doomed. What say you?
David Roberts (00:39:23):
You know, I'm going to be saying the same thing over and over again, which is I used to encounter people that would say, or I still. You know, there are still people who say like, "Climate change cannot be solved with the tools we have available. We need a spiritual revolution in humankind so that we're view nature in a fundamentally different way." And you know, I've seen those arguments go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and I've come down again to just not caring. Like if it's true, then we're screwed, because I don't know how to do a revolution in human consciousness and neither do you, and neither does anybody who's talking about it. It's not going to happen. Humans are probably going to be the way humans are for the next, certainly for the relevant time period, right, which is the next several decades.
David Roberts (00:40:13):
So if it's true or if it's not true, it can't really make a difference since we're stuck with what we've got, and it's not like I'm sitting here with my hand on a lever that says revolution in human consciousness or not, deciding whether to pull it. There is no such lever. There is no such way to make it happen, so like what's the point in arguing about it? And I sort of feel the same way about de-growth. Like maybe in theory we should as a species come to an agreement that instead of growing the total pie, we're just going to divide the extent pie more fairly and try to shrink the pie. Like in theory, I see the appeal of arguments like that, but I don't know how to do that. You don't know how to do that. Nobody knows how to do that. It's wildly, wildly unlikely. Not just that any given policy is going to agree to it, but that everyone's going to agree to it, which is what would have to happen.
David Roberts (00:41:12):
So in the end, you want to yell at me that we need to stop growth and we need to change the way we view economies? Like, fine, I'll just concede all the points. Sure, okay, but it's not going to happen, and we don't know how to make it happen. All we know how to do is what we know how to do with the tools at hand, with the people and institutions that exist here and now, and we've got to work through them. So again, these giant abstractions. I just, as you can tell, like the longer I've been in this game, the longer I've been involved in this, the less I care about these sort of what feel like identity issues to me. Just sort of like, "What kind of identity do I want?" That's what a lot of these sound like to me is people trying to figure out what sort of identity they want to project to other people.
David Roberts (00:42:05):
It's all these abstractions about optimism versus pessimism or, you know, human consciousness in our... All this stuff is just, I value practical change, even in tiny increments, more than all the rest of that. Like that's all just talk. It's all epiphenomenal. It's all steam out of the steam engine. Just like, what's the fuel? What's making things change? Like if you want to change, and I'll just, the final thing I'll say is if you want to change the way people think in human consciousness, the best way we know how to do that is to change material circumstances. Right? And the changes in thinking will follow that. So again, get your hands on the world and change something real, something tangible. Even if you think we need a revolution in consciousness, the best way we know how to get one of those is to start changing real tangible things. So again, just go start doing the work.
Jason Jacobs (00:43:05):
Well, I find this conversation shocking so far because at least thus far we mostly agree, and in my mind, you are like a surgical wonk and I am a black lab like slobbering all over himself and running in 10,000 different directions. But we seem to agree that momentum begets momentum and progress gets progress, and you start somewhere and you pull on a thread and then you just keep going and try to get more people doing their thing and just do whatever you feel most equipped to do, and then the flywheel picks up steam. Like that's how I think about it too. I think what some people may be on the other side of the spectrum might say is, they might say it's like the other extreme to that is, "Well, but these should be stack ranked because we only have so much resource and the government should be picking winners and we need to narrow it down to the few that are most promising and then pour everything into those, and then the other stuff is noise. So, you know, here's solution number 1,984, and then this one is 1,983," and it's like Casey Kasem, which is another reference that most people will have no idea about that you probably know.
David Roberts (00:44:16):
Totally. Old person reference. Well, this is the thing. I mean, obviously we're back to another abstraction. Like obviously, on some level, yes, we need to prioritize. Like who could argue with that? Of course we need to prioritize. But I think the reason people grope for a theory of everything, or a master list or a simple ranking tool is that people have a very natural need to feel a sense of control. Right? That's just a very, very basic human psychological need, and climate change is so big and so sprawling, and on a time scale that breaks our brains and on a spatial scale that breaks our brains, it feels... You feel like you're a tiny little mote out there floating on an ocean full of giant waves, and you feel like you have no control over the situation at all, and that's very distressing to people on a subconscious level.
David Roberts (00:45:14):
It's one of the reasons it's taken a long time to get people to even think about this, because once you start thinking about it, it's unpleasant. It's unpleasant to feel like you're a tiny mote subject to these giant forces over which you have only the tiniest scrap of control. So the idea of like wrapping it up in a theory or wrapping it up in a kind of ordered list gives you some sense of control over it. And I understand. I understand that need. I have that need myself. Everybody has that need. That's a human need. But, you know, I go back to the flip side, which is even if a conference room full of super brains could come up with an ordered list of priorities, in the end, once they leave that conference room, they're back out in the world of people and institutions, the kind of people we have and the kind of institutions we have, and you know, you just can't impose a master plan on actually existing human societies, much less the species as a whole. It's just not a thing you can do.
David Roberts (00:46:16):
So, yes, obviously there's work to be done sort of trying to draw attention to the biggest solutions and most impactful solutions and trying to occasionally cut off inquiries or pursuits that don't seem to be leading anywhere, or are not paying off. But really, what's going to happen, whether we like it or not, is a bunch of semi coordinated, semi rational, semi prioritized, flailing about that will have emergent effects that, like all emergent effects, are unpredictable in advance. I guess what's just being involved in this for so long has led me to a little bit of zen. Like I have no control over something this big. I can only do what I can do in my tiny little piece of it, and all these big grandiose theories of everything are just attempts to impose some control, and I just don't feel like I need that anymore.
David Roberts (00:47:21):
So, yes, do big solutions that work. But, you know, the other thing is have some faith that there's like thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are very, very smart working on this all the time, and so the aggregate of their labor, they're probably going to move towards the things that pay off and the things that work. You know, with some local exceptions, but on the whole, this is sort of how we arrived at electrification. Yu know, it's like when I first started writing about climate change. It was just like everything's got to change in every way, but we don't exactly know how, and over time we've sort of, through trial and error, through technological innovation, through policy, we've sort of moved in the direction of, "Okay, we get it now. We know how to clean up electricity and we know how to electrify other sectors, and those two things together can get us a big chunk, 80% of the emissions in the U.S. economy. Let's start focusing there," And that's what's happening now.
David Roberts (00:48:19):
So, you don't always need or have to have a master plan, which is a good thing because a problem this big involving this many people in this many institutions and this many countries, you're not going to get a master plan. I mean, they've been meeting at the UN for a thousand years now, banging their heads off one another, trying to come up with a master plan, and in the end they just came up with Paris, which is just like, "Fine. Just tell us what you can do." Like, "We give up on a master plan. We give up on imposing change. Just come to the table and write down what you think you can manage." And that's basically how it's going to work, whether we like it or not.
Jason Jacobs (00:49:00):
Okay. Well, this is all nice-y nice with all the positivity, and don't get me wrong, I think people want that, so I think they're going to like hearing it. But I want to come back to where we started the discussion, which we talked about how climate change is going to exacerbate pretty much every bad thing. Everything it's going to point in the wrong direction. Authoritarianism, nationalism, inequality, scarcity mindset, forced migration. You didn't say that one, but that's probably another one, right? And since so much of that is baked in and since in the aggregate as a world, our emissions are still rising, I mean, do you worry about those things over the next decade or two, no matter what we do on the solution front?
David Roberts (00:49:36):
Hell yes. I mean, [inaudible 00:49:39]-
Jason Jacobs (00:49:39):
Did you finally touch on something that you're not like-
David Roberts (00:49:41):
I don't want to give the impression that... The fact that I'm not tearing my hair out and making grandiose public displays of angst, which is what seems to be sort of like the coin of the realm and the climate area, is sort of elaborate public displays of angst. Just because I'm not doing that doesn't mean I'm optimistic. Like, I think that the U.S., just to focus in a bit, is headed for a period of real shit. Like I think we're headed for a crisis of democracy, and if not a civil war, obviously something like dissolution and crisis, which could go a number of very bad ways and is currently on track to go on a number of very bad ways, and I see that same reactionary backlash happening all over the world. You see it in Europe. You see it in India. You see it everywhere. And my thought is, if we're getting this much reactionary backlash based on the social progress we've had so far, imagine the reactionary backlash when all of a sudden there are millions and millions of refugees floating around the world and there are large swaths of the earth that become basically uninhabitable during daytime hours. Like imagine the reactionary backlash then. So, it could go very badly.
Jason Jacobs (00:51:07):
See, this is the type of discourse that I'm used to. Now you're bringing it home. Like now we're back to center.
David Roberts (00:51:12):
Yeah, so I think... I mean, if you ask me, I'm not particularly optimistic about the U.S.'s Near term future or the world's near term future. Like the best, you know, when I try to construct happy scenarios about the future, I basically do what Kim Stanley Robinson did, which is assume 50 years of horrible shit followed by something something hand wavy, and then we figure it out and then it gets better. Like that's the best I can do, but like the near term future looks like disruption and ugliness to me. I'm not particularly optimistic about it at all. The one thing, I mean, the one thing I am optimistic about is I've got a real split brain, and I think a lot of people do these days. Like on the one hand, everything political looks bad to me, real bad. But on the other hand, technological progress in clean energy is thundering along so quickly that it's just going to carry a lot of stuff in its wake. It's going to be unstoppable. It's going to create a lot of [inaudible 00:52:17]-
Jason Jacobs (00:52:17):
That's going to make so many environmentalists angry, which you just said. I totally agree with it, by the way, but holy shit, that is going to make people foaming at the mouth furious.
David Roberts (00:52:24):
Well, you know, people seem to love being furious around this topic, so go ahead and be furious. Write angry tweet threads. But I feel great optimism about what clever people are doing now in figuring out solutions to these problems. Like, there's a lot of, once you can look past politics to just like women and men in labs and out in the field building stuff, there's just a huge amount of really fascinating, interesting, positive stuff happening. So, how those two interact in the long term? I have no idea. I mean, this is the thing I come back to again and again and again, and maybe you'll see it's a theme and everything I say now is just you have no control. You have no intellectual control, and the idea that you have some grand theory of how things are going to go is just you deluding yourself to gain some sense of control. The real fact is none of us know at all what's going to happen in the future, and I don't know either. Like I see a lot of negative trends, I see some positive trends, and what I don't see are all sorts of exogenous events that could come along and shake things up in various different ways that could spin off in various different directions. I just don't know, and this is my point. Like, you don't know either. No one knows. Just do the work.
Jason Jacobs (00:53:48):
Now, I'm going to get really deep here for a minute, but what I can surmise from the time we spent together and some prep that I did before is that you write generally for a living, although certainly you speak as well. But I sense maybe some disdain for traditional journalism. Am I wrong on that or can I keep going with this analogy?
David Roberts (00:54:07):
Well, I don't know if the word disdain is the one I would use. I would say that U.S. journalism was shaped by a set of conditions in the post-war period of America that no longer obtain, and a lot of those habits are no longer useful, and it's just no one quite knows what to do next, so there's a lot of journalism and journalism outlets sort of clinging to those old habits for lack of anything better to do. So, I have enormous respect for journalists. I have enormous... I'm not, like I said before, I'm not a go out and like pound the pavement and call people and try to, and do FOIA requests, and I'm not a journalist in that sense, an investigative journalist, and I have enormous respect for those kind of journalists.
David Roberts (00:54:58):
In fact, what I do would be utterly impossible without those kind of journalists, because they are the ones who uncover the facts that I then go on to rearrange and explain, right? And if they weren't doing what they do, I couldn't do what I do. I depend on them entirely. So, I have enormous respect for the craft of journalism. I just think a lot of journalistic institutions and habits have gotten long in the tooth and in particular where I do think maybe disdain is the right word is in U.S. political journalism, which I think is just an absolute fucking train wreck now and has been since I started.
David Roberts (00:55:35):
You know, like the critiques people are making today are critiques I was making back in the early 2000s, and at this point, the political journalists of the nation have heard those critiques and they're just doing the shit they do anyway. So, yeah, I have some disdain for that, but that's just a tiny sliver of journalism. The world's full of great journalists.
Jason Jacobs (00:55:53):
Okay, well, you work in climate. Now talk about how you feel about environmentalism.
David Roberts (00:55:58):
Well.
Jason Jacobs (00:56:01):
I set you up. You see what I did there?
David Roberts (00:56:04):
I've become so not fun to talk to, because I'm so resistant to making sweeping generalizations about things. I mean, what is-
Jason Jacobs (00:56:10):
Well, it's the words, right? But the words are what gets everybody into a tizzy, and the labels, and, you know, are you a Democrat? Are a Republican? Are you a Progressive?
David Roberts (00:56:17):
But like what is environmentalism now? Like what does it refer to in particular? You could answer that question in a thousand different ways. There are lots of different strains of environmentalism, lots of different impulses, lots of different narratives. And if you want to go pick out a few that you don't like and say, "That's environmentalism, so environmentalism is bad," you can do that. Lots of people do that. Or you can go find a lot of good things and good work and good trends and good people having good thoughts and say, "That's environmentalism," and defend it, and I could do that, too.
David Roberts (00:56:49):
But the fact is environmentalism is very broad, very varied category, contains a lot of different people who are saying a lot of different things, trying a lot of different things, and so it's very hard to make sweeping generalizations about it. I will say, and I have said before, that environmentalism in the post-war American period, much like journalism, like environmentalism was shaped in that period and has some habits and ways of thinking that I think no longer work well in the modern period, but it's just arrogant for me to think like, "I figured that out," but like none of the tens of thousands of people involved have figured that out? Of course they have. Change is underway. Young people are trying out new things and trying out new narratives and trying out new activism. It's not like me as the sort of white bearded pundit guy floating above it all has a better view than the people down on the ground. Like, I hate that attitude. Like people down on the ground are very smart. Whenever I go talk to them, they're super smart. They know all the same things I know.
David Roberts (00:57:54):
Environmentalism is, like what is it anymore? The interaction of environmentalism and climate in particular is interesting to me, like has always been interesting to me. I think that the habits and sort of mental categories that environmentalism developed over the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s and 2000s do not necessarily fit well with climate change, and so there's been a lot of disruption and a lot of sort of angst around that. But that's okay, because now what I have been trying to make happen for years is happening, which is climate is stepping out of that. I think most people, at least most engaged and knowledgeable people, no longer think of it as a quote unquote "environmental problem", right? It's much, much bigger and more sprawling than that, and the tools we have traditionally used to solve environmental problems are probably not adequate to solving climate change. And now we got people thinking about climate change in the corporate world, in politics, in, you know, sports, like everybody's thinking about it now. It's broken the bounds of environmentalism, and that to me is a good thing.
David Roberts (00:59:00):
But one thing I've noticed is people love to create a caricature of people to their left and then crap on that caricature, and environmentalism has been a target of that from a lot of people for a long time to the point that it's made me sort of like defensive about it. Even though I don't consider myself an environmentalist. I've never been part of one of those groups. I'm by no means a card carrying. You know, I don't particularly love nature. You know, I love cities. I love cities and art and human stuff. Like I don't consider myself a part of that demographic, but there's a lot of very smart people involved who have done a lot of very great things and saved a lot of lives and changed a lot of stuff, and they, I think, just feel like deserve some respect and some credit and not to be sort of caricatured, so I try not to of join in that game.
Jason Jacobs (00:59:56):
And now the flip side. I feel like we've been putting tech with some halo or something. Like are there no charlatans there? Are there no just really crappy technologies? Is there no bad behavior? Are there no things that they're doing that are just detrimental to the whole cause?
David Roberts (01:00:08):
Well, the tech sector is composed of human beings, so of course it contains all those things because human beings are all those things. Of course, there's a lot of bullshit. You know, not like crypto levels of bullshit, but there's lots of bullshit around, and lots of people hyping their thing, trying to get funding, and there's lots of sort of little bubbles of hype around this or that technology that end up sort of dispersing. And of course there's all that stuff, but underneath that, like this is how I describe it. Just like at Microsoft. When Microsoft, like a lot of businesses, when Microsoft first engaged with the climate stuff, it was on the level of basically ESG stuff, marketing stuff, like, "This is how we show we also do some good stuff." You know? Sort of checking that box.
David Roberts (01:01:03):
But what's happened over time is the concern about climate change has filtered down from, so the C-suite and the marketers and the PR department, down onto the shop floor where the engineers live, where the people who are doing the work live and they've got their hands on it now, and that is what interests me, is like that's the level that interests me, is they are gripped by the problem now. A bunch of very smart nerds in the lower levels of these companies are gripped by the problem now and that's where the work is coming from. So, sort of like they are doing the work and then the work filters up and then of course gets subject to humans being humans, hyping dumb stuff, focusing on the wrong stuff. You know, dumping too much money into early this and ignoring that. Like all that stuff happens, but there's this huge and growing level of engineers and scientists and inventors and just clever people thinking about, how do we use energy better? How do we generate it better, store it better, move it around better? That's where I get excited. That's where my optimism is. All the layers above that are just the usual human foibles and institutions.
David Roberts (01:02:28):
But in terms of the people in labs, yes, I have. That's like one of the few areas where I have just sort of unqualified enthusiasm and optimism. It's very happy making to me that this many nerds are engaged in this finally. Like this is what I wanted to happen. Just get them fixated on it because it's a really interesting problem. You know, it's a really intellectually, and just from an engineering perspective, super fascinating problem, and because we've lived in this era of fossil fuel abundance for so long, energy has been cheap for so long, we're just sloppy in a lot of ways in how we use energy. There's just a lot of areas we've just never really had the impetus to sort of stop and examine and think, how can we do this in a smarter way?
David Roberts (01:03:18):
Which means you don't have to be like a super PhD to have a clever good idea in energy these days. There's lots of just low hanging fruit. Like one of the areas I'm most interested right now in right now is thermal storage, which is just storing heat, and a lot of the biggest emerging companies in that space are just like, "Here, we made a big rock, and what you do is you heat it up and then when you want the heat back, you let the heat out of the rock." And I'm like, well, I don't have to be a PhD to get that, but it's just nobody thought about it before. So, there's just lots of good ideas to be had. There are lots of relatively simple engineering advances and technical advances to be had and people are starting to go out and grab them, so there's just a lot going on that level that's interesting.
David Roberts (01:04:09):
You know, you'll write about climate. It's just like you wake up and you write, "Oh, the world got 0.001 degrees hotter today and all the same things are still happening and glaciers are still melting, and blah, blah, blah." There's just not a lot of advance. There's not a lot of new material to write about. But on this level of entrepreneurship and in inventiveness and innovation and engineering, there's tons of stuff going on and nothing, like I said before, nothing can cheer you up like seeing clever people doing clever things, and that's happening all over the place.
Jason Jacobs (01:04:44):
Well, we're running out of time. If it's okay, I have a quick punch list of stuff we just didn't get to that's an abbreviated list, but maybe just a few things that it'd be great to just get a few sentences on it. Is that cool?
David Roberts (01:04:54):
Sure, yeah. I just, you know, I got a hard out at my noon here in [inaudible 01:04:58].
Jason Jacobs (01:04:58):
Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, we'll be out plenty of time before that. Solar geoengineering.
David Roberts (01:05:02):
Oh, jeez. Vigorous ambivalence. I mean, I don't think it will end up happening. I'll say that. I don't think it will end up happening on any sort of systematic wide scale. I think it's very dangerous, a very dangerous thought. I think we're wildly underinformed about what could happen and probably underinformed in a way that's not solvable. Like I know you could learn a lot more through doing research, but the level of systems and the complexity you're talking about, you're just not going to eliminate unexpected, unanticipated changes. And when you have unanticipated changes that affect the entire globe, you know, you need to be really careful. So I'm just, I'm leery of it. It's fine with me if scientists in labs want to research it, but I'm leery of it playing a big role in the dialogue or discourse about this.
Jason Jacobs (01:05:54):
Nuclear.
David Roberts (01:05:55):
There's no need in the world to be pro or anti-nuclear, to join a team regarding nuclear. I wish people would quit doing that. There's three separate issues with nuclear. There's the existing plants that are up and running. Makes all the sense in the world to me to keep those open as long as we safely can because they're carbon free generation, a foundation we're building on, and if we close them down, we just have to fill that gap. It would be running in place for a while. So, keep the existing plants open as long as we can. The existing generation of nuclear plants and the existing nuclear industry is an absolute dumpster fire, absolutely unaffordable. Giant increments of capital that private investors want nothing to do with. A long, rich record of going over budget, over time, over everything. Corruption, et cetera, et cetera. No future that I see, especially in the U.S., in existing generations of nuclear plants. What about next generation? Yes. Study, research, build prototypes, build first of a kind demonstration plants of advanced, smaller, safer, more modular nuclear plants. Yes. Research the shit out of that. So that's three separate things, right? Not pro or anti-nuclear. It's three separate questions that you can theoretically have three separate opinions on. People need to disaggregate this and quit playing team sports around nuclear.
Jason Jacobs (01:07:22):
Offsets.
David Roberts (01:07:23):
Mostly bullshit, and I think I have been convinced by Danny Cullenward and David Victor that the problems with offsets are inherent to offsets and probably not solvable on a grand scale, so I'm very bullish on offsets.
Jason Jacobs (01:07:43):
No, you're bearish on offsets.
David Roberts (01:07:44):
Wait, bearish. Yeah, sorry. I'm a newbie on the financial terms. Whatever the pessimistic one is.
Jason Jacobs (01:07:52):
Gosh, we could spend a whole episode just on that. But in the essence of time, we'll have to punch on that for now because there's just a couple others I want to hit, and one is carbon capture.
David Roberts (01:08:01):
You know, again, it is not an easy thumbs up or thumbs down. We need it. All the models to date seem to indicate that we're going to need it. I mean, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is already above safe levels, right? So even if you cut off all emissions tomorrow, we're already past the threshold we need to be, so ergo, we've got to pull some out of the atmosphere, so ergo, we've got to figure out capturing and safely storing carbon. Now of course, yes, oil companies are going to try to use that to dig up more oil to keep, or they might try to keep a few coal plants open with CCS on them. Ultimately, I don't think CCS attached to coal is going to work. I think it's going to become very clear, very quickly that that's never going to work. Maybe it will work on some natural gas plants. Like I can imagine keeping a bunch of natural gas plants with CCS around and running them fairly rarely. It's just hard to predict.
David Roberts (01:09:03):
But I'm persuaded by the portfolio argument. I'm persuaded by, given our current position of near total ignorance about what the final solution's going to be, we need to make as many bets as possible, so we need to be building those and trying to drive down the cost of carbon capture, especially direct air capture. And if you think as I do that CCS on fossil fuel power plants is probably never going to work, that CCS will probably be confined to industry and industrial applications, then it shouldn't bother you to have CCS incentives and CCS used as a way of getting people like Joe Manchin to sign bills. Like if you think it's not going to work, then what's your problem letting them try, right? They're going to try and fail. So, I think people need to, this sort of hard line opposition to CCS or to carbon capture in the environmental justice community I think is misguided. I think it's going to die of it. The bad kind that we don't want is going to die of its own weight and we do need the good kind, so I think we should push ahead researching and building.
Jason Jacobs (01:10:15):
And the last two, which I'm going to lump it to one although they're different, is flight shaming and laying down in front of cars at rush hour.
David Roberts (01:10:25):
Flight shaming. I think it was always a mistake to conflate personal environmental virtue with environmental policy, with personal climate virtue, with climate policy. I know a lot of people disagree with me passionately on that issue and that they think that I'm somehow signaling something useful by sort of theatrically denying myself things in a way that other people see me doing. I just have zero faith in that catching on in any scale. Like ultimately, it's about infrastructure. Ultimately if you want people to drive less, build infrastructure that doesn't require them to drive. If you want people to fly less, build a network of trains or switch long flights to a series of short flight hops that can be electrified. You know, it's all in the end to me, like 99% of it, is infrastructure. Change the infrastructure, you change the world, and in the meantime, sort of theatrical behavioral restrictions as a signal of virtue, it's just like a game affluent people play with each other. I don't think it has much effect beyond that.
Jason Jacobs (01:11:40):
Last question. If you could change one thing that is outside of your control that would most accelerate our progress in the transition, what would you change and how would you change it?
David Roberts (01:11:48):
I would change the U.S. Constitution. I would get rid of the U.S. Senate. I would vastly grow the House of Representatives. I would pass several voting reforms to get rid of first post voting. I would have all gerrymandering or all districting done by third party, nonpartisan commissions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I would reform U.S. democracy because right now it's built to suck. It's built to block things. It's built to move slowly, and the U.S. still has a lot of soft power, still has a lot of influence in the world, and could do a lot of good by making progress in a way that other people see, and our constitutional system is preventing us from doing that in a myriad of ways. Oh, and kill the electoral college. I could go on this subject for many hours, but all [inaudible 01:12:37]-
Jason Jacobs (01:12:36):
Any ideas on how any of that stuff might come about?
David Roberts (01:12:42):
I mean, I don't know. Like filibuster reform seems to be gaining some momentum. It is becoming clearer and clearer that a lot of things that the majority of Americans want are impossible because of these structures. So it's like I said about the near term in the U.S., like I see some sort of fracture dissolution crisis coming because that can't go on forever. Changing it seems super difficult, but going on the way we are going seems super unlikely, so if you can't continue doing what you're doing, it'll change. So, I don't know how that would play out, but it does seem like at the very least the discussion is underway.
Jason Jacobs (01:13:19):
Parting words. What message do you want to leave listeners with?
David Roberts (01:13:22):
I guess I would just reiterate something I've said a couple times now, which is if you want to get engaged in climate, don't get engaged in the sort of discourse based measurement of who feels what way and who's doomy and who's not doomy and who's pessimistic and who's not pessimistic and who thinks it's capitalism and who thinks it's not capitalism. These are all airy fairy abstractions that just occupy people and are a substitute for action. If you want to get engaged in climate, go do something, even if it is small. Like change the college you're in, like change the company you're in. Talk to your neighborhood board about community solar. Like there are lots of things within your reach. Any tangible action you take is worth a thousand twitter burns.
Jason Jacobs (01:14:15):
And Dr. Volts, D-R-V-O-L-T-S on Twitter. Where can we find you?
David Roberts (01:14:21):
Volts.wtf.
Jason Jacobs (01:14:24):
Okay. Well, hey, thanks again. This was awesome. And man, I can't wait for this to ship.
David Roberts (01:14:30):
All right. Thanks, man. It was fun.
Jason Jacobs (01:14:32):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey podcast.
Cody Simms (01:14:36):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. To do this, we focus on three main pillars. Content like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change and our member community to bring people together as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (01:14:58):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ collective, visit us at www.mcjcollective.com. And if you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter at MCJ Pod.
Cody Simms (01:15:13):
Thanks, and see you next episode.
