Me, on an Australian pod

08/21/23 • 31 min

1 Listener

Volts

In this episode, Australian comedian Dan Ilic hosts me on The Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

While I was down under in Australia, I appeared on a show called A Rational Fear, a pod about climate change which is, I’m told, the winner of Australia’s Best Comedy Podcast.

More specifically, I appeared on a spinoff show they’re doing called [ahem] The Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation, a series of interviews with climate types hosted by comedian and journalist Dan Ilic.

It was short, and fun, so I figured, why not share it with the Volts audience? Enjoy, and do check out A Rational Fear some time — it’s quite delightful.

Dan Ilic

I'm recording this on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, and I encourage you all to think about whose land you're on and the wealth of the life that you enjoy on that land and why you enjoy it. As we head into this referendum month, I think it's all upon us all to kind of think about listening more. And if you don't know what the Voice Referendum is all about, go and find out. Let's try listening.

David Roberts

Despite global warming, A Rational Fear is adding a little more hot air with long form discussions with climate leaders, good and bad.

Intro

This is coal, don't be afraid. The — heat waves and drought — Greatest — mass extinction — Moral — we're facing a manmade disaster — Podcast — they're the climate criminals — of Our Generation. All of this with the global warming and that a lot of it's a hoax. The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation. GMPOOG for short.

Dan Ilic

Every now and then, the A Rational Fear podcast turns green. We talk to someone who is super interested and who lives and breathes climate on a podcast I like to call The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation, or GMPOOG for short. And I'm excited for you all to meet our next GMPOOG guest. Since about 2015, I have been following his writing on Vox.com and the Grist, but in more recent years, I've been listening to his podcast and reading along with his newsletter. It is Volts, or rather the presenter and the writer of Volts podcast, David Roberts. Welcome to A Rational Fear.

David Roberts

So glad to be here.

Dan Ilic

Or welcome to The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation.

David Roberts

Yeah, I'm not sure I can keep that acronym in my head.

Dan Ilic

Well, the first guest on The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation was former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who coined the phrase that climate change was the greatest moral problem of our generation. So that's why we called GMPOOG, GMPOOG. You are one of the foremost experts when it comes to climate and energy. I love Volts. I devour it, I listen as often as I can. And for such a complex and often combative topic, quite frankly, your voice is so calming and reassuring.

David Roberts

Thank you.

Dan Ilic

I mean, you could sell anything, which is why you're here today. To sell us on small modular nuclear reactors.

David Roberts

Exactly. And carbon capture and sequestration. That's my thing.

Dan Ilic

Well, it's such a sprawling conversation I'd love to have with you. Let's start there. We do hear a lot from a very small subsection of our politics all about small modular nuclear reactors. In fact, Barnaby Joyce, who at one time was a leader of a party in this country, said, "People aren't talking about the cost of living down at the supermarket. They're talking about small modular nuclear reactors."

David Roberts

Are they?

Dan Ilic

So I want to ask you, David Roberts, is anybody talking about small modular nuclear reactors?

David Roberts

I mean, yes, people are talking and talking and talking about them. The more relevant question is anyone building small modular nuclear reactors? And the answer to that is a big no. So I think they play more of a rhetorical role than an actual physical role in the energy system.

Dan Ilic

Why is there this energy, for better, no pun intended there, around small modular nuclear reac...

In this episode, Australian comedian Dan Ilic hosts me on The Greatest Moral Podcast Of Our Generation.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

While I was down under in Australia, I appeared on a show called A Rational Fear, a pod about climate change which is, I’m told, the winner of Australia’s Best Comedy Podcast.

It was short, and fun, so I figured, why not share it with the Volts audience? Enjoy, and do check out A Rational Fear some time — it’s quite delightful.

Dan Ilic

David Roberts

Despite global warming, A Rational Fear is adding a little more hot air with long form discussions with climate leaders, good and bad.

Intro

Dan Ilic

David Roberts

So glad to be here.

Dan Ilic

Or welcome to The Greatest Moral Podcast of Our Generation.

David Roberts

Yeah, I'm not sure I can keep that acronym in my head.

Dan Ilic

David Roberts

Thank you.

Dan Ilic

I mean, you could sell anything, which is why you're here today. To sell us on small modular nuclear reactors.

David Roberts

Exactly. And carbon capture and sequestration. That's my thing.

Dan Ilic

David Roberts

Are they?

Dan Ilic

So I want to ask you, David Roberts, is anybody talking about small modular nuclear reactors?

David Roberts

Dan Ilic

Why is there this energy, for better, no pun intended there, around small modular nuclear reac...

Previous Episode

A conversation with Saul Griffith

In this episode, Saul Griffith — co-founder of Rewiring America and, more recently, Rewiring Australia — chats about all the things that energy nerds love to chat about.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

If you are a Volts subscriber, you are almost certainly familiar with Saul Griffith. I've been following him and his work for years, and I think I can say without hyperbole that he is the smartest person I have ever met.

An Australian by birth and an MIT PhD by training, he got his start as a tinkerer, inventor, and entrepreneur, responsible for, among other things, the kite-based wind power company Makani and the innovation incubator Otherlab.

A few years ago, alarmed by the lack of progress on climate change, he turned his attention to public advocacy, authoring the book Electrify and co-founding Rewiring America. That organization has, in relatively little time, become incredibly influential among US thought leaders and policy makers. It played a key role in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

In 2021, Griffith and his family moved back to Australia, where he helped found Rewiring Australia, and sure enough, it has already become as or more influential than its American counterpart. As Volties know, I am currently down in Australia. I was scheduled to do a public event with Griffith, so I thought it would be fun to meet up a little beforehand to record a pod.

Neither of us had particularly prepared for said pod, but it will not surprise you to hear that Griffith was nonetheless as fascinating and articulate as always, on subjects ranging from IRA to Australian rooftop solar to green steel. Enjoy.

I won't belabor any further introductions. Saul, thanks for coming.

Saul Griffith

Thanks for joining me in a strange little kissing booth in Sydney's central business district.

David Roberts

Yes, we are. This is the second ever Volts recorded in person. And just so the audience knows, this came together at the last minute and neither of us have prepared at all. So we're all just freestyling here and we're just going to have a conversation. So, Saul, let's start with you were intimately involved in the sausage making of IRA. Why don't you just start with telling us a little bit about how on earth someone like you ended up in the halls of DC with the ear of lawmakers. What's the origin story of this?

Saul Griffith

The romantic origin story is just before I married my wife and I think it was 2007, I said, if the world hasn't made sufficient progress on climate change by 2020, can I become an ecoterrorist? To which, it was so far in the future, she said yes.

David Roberts

Surely, well, by then, surely.

Saul Griffith

And then 2019 came around and I said, remember that you made that promise to me. And she said, yes, but we didn't have two children, so you're not allowed to do that. And she sort of actually first planted the idea in my head. You're always complaining that the hardest thing to do in energy technology is the regulatory stack. So why don't you focus on regulatory and policy for a while? I give you leave. We can afford it. See what you can do. Right about then, I was having another conversation with a guy called Alex Laskey. He was a founder of Opower.

He wanted to talk to me about heat pumps. We were working on some new heat pump technologies and the conversation spiraled out of control and we said, well, working on heat pumps is good, but these Democrats keep saying climate change. So this is in the primaries. Every time any of them say climate change, they wince a little bit and try to shy away from what you would do. So we started Rewiring America. We booked a few tickets to DC, we took a few trips to DC and we thought that we were going to be an advocacy organization, trying to help Democrats talk positively about what the energy transition could be, how we could save money, how our health outcomes could improve, how we could change local community economics.

So we were tru...

Next Episode

The progressive take on the permitting debate

In this episode, Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Project shares a progressive vision for permitting reform and the factors that could speed up the US clean-energy buildout.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

To achieve its Paris climate targets, the US is going to have to build out an enormous amount of clean energy and clean-energy infrastructure in coming years. But that buildout is going slowly — painfully, excruciatingly slowly — relative to the pace that is necessary.

This has given rise to considerable debate on the left over what, exactly, is slowing things down. Much of that debate has come to focus on permitting, and more specifically, on permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.

A deal that would have put some restrictions on NEPA in exchange for reforms to transmission planning was effectively killed by progressives toward the end of the last congressional session, leading many people inside and outside the climate movement to accuse progressives of being The Problem. They are so attached to slowing down fossil fuel development with NEPA, the accusation goes, that they are willing to live with it slowing clean energy. And that’s a bad trade.

Progressives, not surprisingly, disagree! Their take on the whole permitting debate is summarized in a new paper from the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate and Community Project: “A Progressive Vision for Permitting Reform.”

The title is slightly misleading, since one of the central points of the paper is that permitting under NEPA is only a small piece of the puzzle — there are many other factors that play a role in slowing clean energy, and many other reforms that could do more to speed it up. I called up one of the paper’s co-authors, Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Project, to ask her about those other reforms, the larger political debate, and the progressive community’s take on speed.

All right, then. With no further ado, Johanna Bozuwa from the Climate and Community Project. Welcome to Volts, and thank you so much for coming.

Johanna Bozuwa

Thank you so much for having me, David.

David Roberts

This is a hot topic, as you're well aware, permitting and the larger issues around it. And so, before we jump into specifics, I wanted to start with a few sort of broad, call them philosophical, questions.

Johanna Bozuwa

Perfect.

David Roberts

As you know, progressives have been under quite a bit of fire lately, not only from their typical opponents on the right and in the fossil fuel industry, but from a lot of sort of centrists and even a lot of sort of allies in the climate movement. For — I think the general idea is they are too attached to stopping fossil fuels and not yet supportive enough of building out renewable energy. And the mechanisms that they rely on to slow and stop fossil fuels are also slowing and stopping renewable energy. And so I think the general critique is that they ought to swing around and be more pro-building and loosen these requirements, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure you've heard all this.

Johanna Bozuwa

Yes.

David Roberts

So I guess I'd just start with this question. Is, do you think the progressive — and by the way, I meant to say this by way of a caveat, I'm going to be sort of using you as a spokesperson for progressivism, which I think we both realize is ridiculous.

Johanna Bozuwa

Right, exactly.

David Roberts

Progressives are heterogeneous just like anybody else. There's no official progressive position. But as a crude, let's just say as a crude instrument here, we're going to ask you to speak for that perspective as you see it.

Johanna Bozuwa

Perfect.

David Roberts

So in your opinion, do you think progressives have taken it into their heart that things are moving too slowly and they desperately need to move faster?

Johanna Bozuwa

My answer to that question is that I think speed is progressive. You know, David, I don't need to tell this to you or any of the people that listen to this podcast or even progressives. We're dealing with ...