For over 20 years, David Roberts has reported on climate change and energy systems launching him to his current status as one of the most influential climate journalists, podcasters, and bloggers in the United States. Beginning his career as a journalist for Vox and Grist, David now owns and reports for Volts, a newsletter and biweekly podcast about clean energy and politics.
Charlie Adams: Over your 15 years reporting on energy and climate, what was your lowest and most pessimistic point? What was your highest, most optimistic point? And what do you think you’ve learned about American energy politics in the space between them?
David Roberts: Well, it’s funny. I would say my lowest point and my highest point were very close to one another. The lowest point generally was when Trump got elected, but the lowest point in terms of climate and energy policy was a couple of years ago when Build Back Better was being fought over in Congress. It felt like six months where it was nothing but Manchin whacking chunks off of it. And then one morning, I got up to the headline that Manchin had said, “I can’t do it. I can’t find my way to this bill.” When I saw that headline, I was like, “After all this, we’re going to end up with nothing.”
It was one thing for Waxman-Markey to blow up in 2010. Now we’re in the late stages of things. We have zero time left to mess around. We’re probably already behind too far to catch up. The United States electing a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress and then proceeding to accomplish literally nothing on climate change would have been just an absolute worst case scenario. That really looked like the end of everything. I mean, it was really fucking dark. I knew congressional aides and analysts who had been brought in to work on this thing, who had just been pouring their hearts and souls into this process for years—people of good faith with young children that they were neglecting. To have it all sort of just nuked by this ignorant, corrupt scumbag was just very bitter.
So my depression about all that was just sort of getting rolling when, only a couple of weeks after that, somebody said the right flattering thing to Manchin on his yacht, and voila, he’s like, “Alright, I’ll pass this bill.” It was amazing. That was probably the high point. By the end, Schumer was basically saying to Manchin, “Just write a bill with literally whatever you want. We’ve got to pass something.” And then there was all this Hamlet-like will-he-won’t-he hand-wringing. But, in the end, lots of the original substance of the climate and energy parts that were in Build Back Better made it intact through the process and were passed as law. We went from basically nothing to the biggest climate bill that has ever been passed in the world.
In the space of a couple of weeks, those were both my low and my high points. As to what I’ve learned about US politics? I could go on and on about that forever. The one thing I would stress to people is that in US politics, partially through design and partially just due to a bunch of different things, it’s just very, very, very difficult to do anything, to accomplish anything, to pass anything, to do anything coherent or good. It’s very, very, very, very difficult. Lots of young people storm into politics with, you know, high hopes and big dreams, and so there’s a lot of anger at Democrats for not doing more. All I’ll say is that I’ve been in it long enough and been beat down enough times to just view it as a miracle when literally anything happens. People say, “I’m tired of voting for the lesser evil.” At this point, I’m like, “Less evil sounds great to me,” because the alternative is more evil.
CA: You’ve described the clean energy transition as an enormous, sprawling, meta story. Amidst this chaos, how do you choose what stories are important and relevant to report on?
DR: I started at Grist in 2004—Jesus, 20 years ago—discovering green stuff, and I found climate pretty quick because it’s the big story. As I’ve said before, it’s big and sprawling and complicated. I studied philosophy, so I like big, sprawling, complicated systems. I like figuring out how things work together, and I like figuring out how to think. But what you rapidly realize when you cover climate change is a couple of things: One is it just doesn’t change that much day to day. It’s a tiny increment hotter, so you write the story about the dangers of climate change, and then what do you do the next day? You write it again, again, and again. You cover a new report from the IPCC and another report and another white paper and another report—shoot me, that just gets boring for the journalist, and for better or worse, it’s just not that interesting to audiences. I do a lot of criticizing of journalists, but people are people, and they don’t want to know that some grinding, steadily rising problem in the background that they don’t fully understand and don’t know how to solve is going to threaten everything. It’s just terror with nothing to do about it, which is the recipe for what humans ignore.
Over time at Vox, I started pivoting to solutions specifically for the energy system because, like climate, it’s big and sprawling. It touches everything. There are political questions, philosophical questions, and technical questions. Unlike climate change, it is rapidly changing. The solution space is exploding right now, just blossoming day to day, such that even people who read the news every day are way behind on this.
This is what I found that cured my own climate anxiety: talking to people who are doing cool shit. If you follow politics, it’s just jerks and ignorant dimwits and selfish people on parade day after day after day. But if you dig down a couple of levels to the deputy assistant secretary or the VP at the company, you find people of incredible good faith and good will who are working really hard and doing really clever, interesting stuff to solve their little corner of this problem. The climate space is still climate doom, doom, doom most of the time. People who find my work are like, “Oh, finally. A breath of fresh air. There are things to do. You don’t just have to pick up a placard and march.”
The way I pick my stories is to try to convey the breadth of ways of getting involved here. This is a sprawling problem that touches almost every corner of everything, so no matter what your proclivities are, no matter what your talents are, you have a way in. You can help too. I weirdly have ended up being like a guy trying to make other people optimistic, which is not my natural mode.
CA: As a listener, that’s exactly what I appreciate about your work as well. Some of my favorite Volts episodes have been about seemingly obscure but actually really important clean energy technologies or electrified versions of something. So, I’m curious, what oddball technology most excites you right now?
DR: Well, there’s my judgment about what’s going to be objectively important, and then there’s just what personally geeks me out, which are not necessarily the same.
CA: Personally geeks you out, please.
DR: In the personally geeks me out category, I’m really fascinated by wireless charging. Everybody’s familiar with the little pad you put your phone on so you don’t have to plug the phone in. But what people don’t know is that, in the lab, they’re working on all sorts of wacky charging at a distance. Technologies using microwaves, sonar, lasers, and all kinds of wacky stuff. So, EV charging is a big issue, but when I look to the future, I think if we could get wireless charging really dialed in and standardized, just imagine. An urban fabric where there’s charging embedded everywhere and your car is just charging all the time. Same with your phone and your watch or whatever. That’s wild to me in a sci-fi future way.
Basically, two things are going to happen. Solar is getting cheaper, and it’s also getting smaller and more ubiquitous. The cheaper it gets, the more you’re just going to start putting it on everything like concrete and windows. I heard the other day that PV panels are getting so cheap now that they are the most cost-effective cladding you can use separate from the energy generation. These two things together are what geek me out.
I imagine a future urban fabric where almost everything is harvesting solar energy and charging all the time—every building, every structure, every car park, whatever. Then you have, at least within the confines of that city, a situation that human beings have never had before in their entire history as a species, which is abundant, ubiquitous energy. Energy abundance—this notion that humans could enter a phase of their development where energy is no longer a constraint or a rare commodity. What could we do with that? We don’t even really know. Me, personally, I think we’re probably a long way from that, but all the pieces are in place. That’s absolutely something that could happen.
CA: Shifting gears to a recent episode you did and a topic that’s become very en vogue in environmental policy circles: green industrial policy. Why do you think that green industrial policy is happening in the United States, a place most people associate with neoliberalism, the free market, and no state at all?
DR: Real good question. There are books to be written on that. The 2010 Waxman-Markey fiasco was the sort of big attempt to pass a neoliberal climate policy based fundamentally around pricing. Pricing carbon emissions is sort of the dream of people who want minimal government interference in the economy. That was always the neoliberal dream. It failed because lots of people are “neoliberal” in that they don’t want you to get the government thing you want, but nobody’s neoliberal in the way that they don’t want to get the government thing they want. So it’s not as popular as you might think it is. It’s always austerity for somebody else, so that failed.
The decade in between was like, “What do we do?” Opinion in activist and policy circles started turning toward this idea that we’ve got to be active, we’ve got to pass policies, we need industrial policy. That had been building up behind the scenes more and more, and all of a sudden, the Democratic establishment abandoned neoliberalism explicitly and pivoted. I don’t even fully know how to explain that. Still, it was the right thing to do, and circumstances pointed in that direction, but I guess neoliberalism wasn’t as deeply rooted in the party as people thought it was.
There’s also the question of how durable this shift is. Is neoliberalism really dead, or is it just waiting for industrial policy to fuck up somehow? Then it will come in with all the same arguments. That’s the thing about industrial policy: It’s great, and it works, but you need a government that is willing and able to do things, see if they work, analyze that information, and then change. A government that is alive, awake, and responsive. Can a government as big, sclerotic, and bound by structural chains like ours do industrial policy? You need some agility to do industrial policy. Can states provide that agility in a way the federal government can’t? That’s another interesting question. All of that is a juicy topic.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
2024-12-13 21:21:08
