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Hello. Greetings and salutations, everyone. This is Volts for September 11, 2026. Building a big, abundant, clean grid. I'm your host, David Roberts. Why do green groups seem to have no plan for data centers or for accelerating the build-out of a low-carbon grid? Why aren't governors using hyperscaler money to grow and strengthen state grids? Why are Democratic members of Congress faffing about on permitting and transmission reform? These questions and many others like it haunt Jane Flagle, one of the most interesting, prolific, and peripatetic figures in the clean energy world today. Jane has deep breath, everyone, worked at the Bipartisan Policy Center, been a program officer at the Spitzer Charitable Trust and the Hewlett Foundation, led work on industrial emissions in Biden's White House Climate Policy Office, led market development for Frontier's Carbon Removal Initiative, and worked as the founding executive director of Blue Horizons, a charitable foundation focused on climate. She is now a senior fellow at the Blue Horizons Research Institute and the State's Forum, a fellow at both the Energy for Growth Hub and the University of Chicago's Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and the principal at Flagle Energy Advisors. That is, if you were following along at home, an inside perspective on philanthropy, private sector climate finance, government, and non-profit policy development. On the bright side, she has gotten a uniquely wide-angle view of the world. She has been involved in the field of renewable energy, but she has also been a part of the global economy. On the darker side, she has also been forced to become intimately familiar with the various ways that lots of people in all of those worlds are, and these are my words, not Jane's, dumb and wrong about stuff. It is a lot to carry. Nonetheless, Jane spends her time thinking about how the U.S. can rapidly build out a low-carbon grid, which is more or less the founding vision of this podcast. I always find her work fascinating. She has been involved in a number of things. She has been involved just a market failure that you are going to correct by turning a few knobs on your market approach, on your economic approach. It's going to take industrial policy. Just say a little bit about what motivates that, what you mean by that. Yeah. Unlike the way you framed the degrowth question, David, there are like two things going on here. One is that what you will find in most of the kind of academic or theoretical literature around the rationale for just like pricing the externality of climate change assumes that you can actually do that effectively in the real world, which of course confronts all sorts of real challenges that I know you've talked to Danny Cullenward and David Victor, who've done a great job sort of describing all of the ways in which that fails when it hits reality. So there is just kind of like a practical argument about this. But I also just think like one of the original sins in my view about the way that we came to understand climate change as a problem was that, you know, we had all this great success with the Montreal Protocol and HFCs where, which was a certain kind of problem, you know, a relatively well-bounded one in a couple of discrete geographies with a handful of producers where we had cheap substitutes or at least rapidly becoming cheap substitutes. And so like the mechanism for managing that was like kind of a conventional pollution control program, right? Including at the international scale. And it worked and it's awesome. And it's like, I actually worked on HFCs in the White House for Biden. There was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of, you know, there was a bipartisan ratification of a treaty on HFCs during that period, which everyone seems to forget. So that worked. That is not, though, the same shape of problem as climate change. Carbon, unlike these other pollutants, is embedded deeply kind of everywhere in the economy. And so the expectation that price signals alone are going to move it is, I think, just like basically incorrect. And you talk about trying to generate a green spiral. What does that mean? You know, I think this is really misunderstood. Useful question. I was really compelled, when I was in grad school, by the work of Nina Kelsey. And she's a political scientist. And her sort of framing of green spiral is a positive feedback loop where investment, often government investment, but not only, makes clean technologies cheap enough to deploy at scale. That deployment then creates industries and jobs. And those industries become a powerful political constituency with real power to demand more climate action. So you need a couple of things right now, right? You need like falling costs, which, you know, we have 90% cost declines for solar and batteries and incredible, same for batteries, 70% for wind, like crazy, crazy. So that was true. I think the other two pieces kind of were closer to failures, in my view. I still think it worked in the IRA, which we can talk more about. But like, one part of the hypothesis is that you deliver tangible near-term benefits in communities. That one we should really unpack, because I think my view is that too many in the climate, advocacy community thought it was mostly that and not the industry power that was going to move things. And I think that was wrong. And for me, I've always been a little bit more focused on like, even if your hypothesis, which is not mine, but some people's hypothesis is that like the single barrier to climate progress is the evil of the fossil fuel industry. And they have done very bad things. So I'm not minimizing it. I wish it were that easy, frankly. But if you believed that, you are not going to roll them with like a coalition of the marginalized. It's the same way that the New Deal worked. You got to have some part of capital on your side. Tell me if you think this is right. Like, we have had these incredible cost declines and incredible growth in these industries. But I at least have been frustrated, as you probably know, if you ever listened to the pod, that it doesn't seem like the industry is using even the muscle it has. I mean, it's still obviously not anywhere as big as the fossil fuel industry, but it doesn't that side of the equation has worked. And I don't totally understand why. Why the industry is not acting on its own behalf more concertedly. It's totally fair. And I totally agree. To the extent there was a failure mode on IRA defense, it was like largely this. And interesting. I think there are a couple of possible explanations. One, to your point, like it is just a more nascent industry and they're like trying to grow up very fast. And so like that is somewhat understandable. I think there's also just these issues of like. How do you exercise political power effectively in our trade associations? The best way to do that, which you've also opined on. And I think like another piece of this, and this is not to like blame the green groups, but I think for a long time, while these industries were quite nascent and it was very expensive, they relied on environmental nonprofits to be their advocacy muscle. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So we kind of had these like training. We had this like support structure. But over time, that resulted in, I think, the industry is not building enough cross-partisan audience, which is like whether you want that to be true or not. Like we obviously live in a country where Republicans are going to control parts of government and any mature industry is like engaging on both sides of the aisle. And I think that, you know, Republicans won the election and many of these industries did not have strong relationships with those offices. Yeah. So what you're. Describing basically is, I mean, sort of the contrast to the market correction, tweak the externality approach. The more active approach is generally known as industrial policy. And I will just say I'm older than you. I've somehow come to a place in my life where I'm older than everybody. Like for the first 15 years, probably I followed U.S. politics. Industrial policy was just verboten. It wasn't just sort of like neglected. It was the bad guy. Democrats strove to distance themselves from it. We're not about command and control anymore. Now we're all neoliberals. We're all about the market. We all respect markets. That's what the whole Waxman-Markey sort of carbon pricing push was about. And just it seemed like things flipped on that question on a dime. So I'm not even sure to this day. I totally understand it. All of a sudden, from one day to the next, everyone across the political spectrum was like, yeah, we do industrial policy now. Like, this is the thing. It's wild. Yeah. I have a couple of hypotheses here. One is like, it's interesting. I've talked to some people who are like, well, the U.S. was doing industrial policy during the peak of neoliberalism. It was just for financial markets. In reality, it was always doing it right. I mean, it never really went away. Yeah, exactly. But the willing embrace of it on like explicit terms, I think, is like, yeah, a relatively new phenomenon. And I think for me, like I thought about this a lot. I of things that came together at once. You know, I worked at the Hewlett Foundation at the same time as Jennifer Harris, who was leading this kind of beyond neoliberalism program. And I was like this nerdy climate person. But I immediately was like, aha, this is the answer to our problems. Because for those folks, for the kind of economic policy, you know, economic thinking, geopolitical scholars and activists, there were a set of rationales for embracing industrial policy that had more to do with like competition with trade. And I think that's a really good point. And I think that's a Yeah, yeah. Among other things. That's obviously, I think, if you're listing causal factors, China, not just using industrial policy, but very effectively and successfully using it, I think, shook things up. And then like so much of this is just like luck. Then this is horrible. I do not feel lucky that COVID happened, let me just say. But then COVID happened. And so like as the window for federal action on climate specifically was opening, you had both stark competition with China, philanthropy's role, frankly, in like seeding a bunch of ideas on that front in a bipartisan way, including a lot of the work that Jen did, frankly, and then the Sunrise Movement kind of shaking things up on climate and leading with a more investment led strategy. And then like the piece that often doesn't get attention, and I'll just give these guys a shadow because I think they don't often get credit is like, there had been a set of things that were focused on turning up the salience of climate politically for better or worse, but much more focused on just moving the needle on things like innovation investment, including in the industrial sector. You know, it's like Clean Air Task Force and the energy team at Third Way and like the Great Plains Institute and ITIF and like these smaller NGOs. And like, that's not going to solve the climate problem. But there were groups who had been working on just defending and reforming DOE's energy programs, while most of the climate community was much more focused on EPA as the locus of climate action. Those guys also deserve some credit, I think, for at least having some stuff to bring to bear on, like, what would big demonstration projects look like, blah, blah, blah. Well, I say this with some chagrin, but it does kind of look like, in retrospect, the green spiral theory of the case, which is let's do things, change facts on the ground, and then that will change politics and will turn this ratchet, does seem in practice to have produced a lot of good things. And I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. And more fruits than the let's create a civil rights style movement. Yeah. Browbeat politicians into caring a lot about climate. Maybe you could say it was a pincer movement and there was both and it's hard to disentangle them in retrospect. But I do think you're right that the industrial policy side of things was a little neglected. It's also definitely true that I mean, I was in the Biden White House. The Democrats in control really care about climate change. They like they really cared about climate change. And I think there's two things. One, like I think there was a belief, which I think proved to be false. unfortunately, that there were a bunch of climate voters, you know, who were going to change electoral outcomes. I think that that post most recent election has probably been deflated. But the belief that they were there definitely impacted the fact that we prioritized climate as much as we did in that White House, I think. And then also, like, this is kind of crude, but there's a lot of political money in the climate space that flows to Democrats. Democrats feel accountable to those constituencies. And like, it's not particularly Democratic, but like, it is what it is. And in truth, like, I don't know, we did spend the vast majority of our funding opportunities on climate for a reason. So yeah, maybe we did need both. I don't know. Yeah, we'll return to some of that a little bit later. But on the industrial policy tips, so let's talk about IRA. This is one of the big hot topics. Was IRA the right approach that the Inflation Reduction Act? Sorry for everybody who does not get that by now. IRA, was that the right approach? You know, is it explicitly an industrial policy approach, I think? And originally, I think, was a much broader, more comprehensive industrial policy approach. Of course, it got whittled down and whittled down and whittled down. But still, you, I think, have defended the basic approach. Everybody wants to discuss, like, what was wrong with IRA? Should we deem it a failure because it didn't stick as much as we thought it would, right? The theory of the case, like you shovel these benefits to red districts, opposition to the whole thing, that maybe didn't turn out to play out the way we might have liked. So what's your sort of retrospective case on IRA? The IRA was a historic law with much more durability than it should have had, having been passed by Democrats only in a reconciliation. It was, as a durable climate intervention, I think it did very well. And it was the right thing to do at the time. I would love someone to articulate an alternative to the IRA that would have met the mark on climate ambition, and much of which would still exist today. Like, it certainly wouldn't have been a regulatory agenda. An alternative that, you know, Manchin would have signed off on is the relevant. Well, yeah, yeah, well, that for sure. But it wouldn't have been a regulatory agenda. Carbon pricing, let's just not even discuss really at the moment. Like, these things were not options then. Like, you just have to be kind of realistic. And I do think my view, and Jesse and I went on a long time ago now, just to sort of say, like, look, here's what the one big beautiful bill act did and what it did not do. And that's not to be poly, whatever. I can't even get into, like, the modeling wars about whether the glass is, like, half full or half empty or a quarter, like, whatever. But that was my next question. I want you to get into those words. There's a fight, or not a fight, but there's a question about, Lily Burmel had this paper where she's, like, glass half full, more of it survived than we thought. And I don't know if you saw, but the with a piece and heat map is, like, no, no, the glass is way less than half full. It destroyed a lot more than you thought. I'm sort of curious, like, where you see industrial policy now post OBBBA, stupid big beautiful bill act, like, post Trump's ravaging. What's your assessment of how healthy the green industrial policy is today? Look, I mean, the vast majority of that law is, like, I think all of the modeling, like, okay, part of the problems with these models is that, A, they're fake, and B, they're, like, they are all asking different questions, right? And, like, I know Lily well. I think she was very clear about the question she was asking, and I believe she was correct on the answer to the question. I think part of the reason it was so triggering for everyone, because one of her kind of normative takeaways was, we probably shouldn't throw down to reinstate the solar and wind tax credits. And, like, that's why everyone was like, I don't know why everyone got obsessed with the fullness of the class. Leaving that aside, I think that that is true. Other things have happened in the world. Demand growth has gone through the roof as a consequence of the data center build out, among some other things. We interest rates are extremely high. We are in multiple wars. Things are different. And so, like, if you try to account for everything, there are certainly all sorts of headwinds that, you know, there were not in four years ago. But I don't think any of that detracts from the fact that the IRA was a quite durable and important intervention that put the U.S. even today on a much better trajectory than it would have otherwise been on. I believe that is true. I also think one thing that models are terrible at capturing, so as a consequence, we just, like, are never allowed to talk about, is that there were a lot of investments in both the infrastructure law and the IRA in more innovative clean energy and industrial technologies that are going to be absolutely crucial for global development. And so, I think that's a really important thing to think about. Yeah. Well, okay. One thing is just, like, there's the law and there's the implementation of the law and, like, much has been made about how slow we were to implement the law. So, like, across the board, I would try to do better on that. And I'm sure we'll talk about this later, too, but I think there are implications for our current permitting regime that are related to that. I think that in the design of the IRA, many of us were overly focused on satisfying every member of the Democratic Party, rather than thinking about, like, the actual theory behind the green spiral. So, there was, you know, a lot of pressure to do, and this is, like, gets a little bit into, like, the everything bagelism, although I like the everything bagel, and I, like, think that if we're spending public money, we should try to make sure it's going to good things, and that's legitimate. But, you know, I do think there was a lot of funnel, a lot of money into disadvantaged communities and make sure the EJ groups are never mad at us and make sure labor is never mad at us and make sure the enviros are, and, like, you know, there's a lot of pressure to do that. It was just a lot of co-optimization and, like, kind of unwillingness to just say no and, like, make some tough trade-offs. That was kind of a problem. And then the other thing I'll say is, like, I was in charge of industry, and I think, in part, because the IRA, it's sort of remarkably, the IRA, you know, we kind of created this nationally determined contribution for the there are a bunch of nerds with spreadsheets on the Hill and in the White House trying to, like, quote, find the tons. And this is a bigger anxiety I have around, like, that is a, like, a not a very global way to think about a global problem, particularly in light of the fact that we no longer live in a world where every country has, like, a binding emissions target. So I think calling the question of how does everything we're doing in this bill relate to global decarbonization and maybe your theory is the U.S. just needs to meet its NDC because it needs to be a leader, blah, blah, blah. I'm not sure that holds anymore, frankly, but I think we should have had a clearer theory of the case of how what we were doing here related to accelerating global decarb. And also these find the tons exercises bias you toward near-term large tons. In that framework, like, incremental subsidization of commercial solar is really good because it delivers a bunch of tons. But investing in clean steel or clean chemicals or a clean cement is, like, the immediate impact of those more innovation-oriented investments don't show up in the models. But, like, industry is supposed to overtake electricity as a source of emissions. And it's very difficult to model the effects of U.S. innovation on developing world. The causal chains are so long, it's very difficult to quantify that stuff. I mean, there were political reasons they were counting tons. You know what I mean? They were trying to satisfy. They were trying to impress upon a lot of dim-witted legislators. You can't kill this. You can't kill this. You know, you're going to kill a bunch of tons if you kill this. Like, I understand why they were doing it, but. I get it. But, like, in this moment, isn't it kind of crazy? Well, I am sort of saying parts of it. It's not that it was bad, but there were things that got left off the table, at least until the very last minute in our search for near-term tons. And I think that bias is not always useful. And I wonder also, like, how politically potent if you're in D.C. and you're trying to persuade a to go along with you, how politically potent is it saying, look, if we invest a bunch in this innovation, it's going to have enormously positive consequences in the developing world? You know, is that compelling to people? Well, you know, we don't have USAID. How compelling is it to be like we made up a spreadsheet and this is how many tons we have to reduce, like, and then for climate in the name of climate? You know, it's weird. I think all of it is a little. I just think, like, on the substance, there are a bunch of things that we need to do outside of the power sector that are really important for us. And I think that's a really important thing. Global decarbonization that kind of got left on the cutting room floor because it wasn't legible in the same way other things were. There was a big obsession in the industrial sector with, like, demand side tools by clean, you know, these ideas that we were going to basically subsidize the purchase of cleaner goods to buy down the green premium, so to speak. And I kept arguing, like, we don't have cleaner goods to buy. Like, I feel like we should have spent probably more time on the supply side because other people are going to be like, oh, we don't have cleaner goods. Otherwise, these demand-side incentives don't end up pulling truly novel, clean technologies into the market, they just basically turned into a version of Buy American. Interesting. Okay. So like that's the other thing. It was like so much Buy American. Yeah. Anyway, the Buy Clean, I think I wish we'd have done more on the supply side on industry. Okay. Well, Jane, I have like 10 clusters of questions and we've made it through one of them. Okay. Okay. Okay. Not your fault. I'll be faster. I could talk about any of these for an hour. Let's talk a little bit about philanthropy in a couple of different ways. One of the sort of interventions you've made, I forget if you wrote a paper on it or if this was just stuff on Twitter, but I think there's an enthusiasm for private philanthropy in Silicon Valley these days and almost a sense among that crowd that like government is dumb and slow and incompetent and run by nannies who won't let you take risks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so private philanthropy is going to step in and do things government can't. You have sort of pushed back against that a little bit. I want to come at this philanthropy question from two different directions. That's the first, like, why is it that you still think that government has a central role? And do you agree with that assessment of sort of the Silicon Valley mindset? Yeah. I mean, I think it's fair and it's gotten even worse actually now because now we're in this beard moment. And even if you think that government should have a more robust role, Trump is now in office and so he can't be trusted. And I actually think you see this a lot with the AI conversations where it's like, I can't have state ownership of these companies because like then Trump is in charge. And it's like, well, wait, didn't you guys like help elect? You know, it's just kind of like what's happening. So I do think that some of this is true. That's sort of like more kind of libertarian skepticism of government impulse. And I think it's really unhealthy. I think we need government. We need a functioning government that can do lots of good things. It's actually like the most beautiful thing about being human in my view, that society has like come together to acknowledge that we have shared interests that can only be achieved through government. And I think that's a really good thing. in partnership with one another. So like I'm quite enamored with the notion of a government that does good things. And specifically, if you want to do industrial policy, you need a big, active, competent, well-staffed government. Totally. There's like a really instrumental argument for this, which is like, you know, I remember even getting in some debates with folks about philanthropy funding things like methane satellites directly, where it's sort of like, that's a really expensive. Yes. Surely you could do an advocacy campaign. I always found myself kind of calling, I'm not making a judgment on methane satellites. I'm just saying like, there was an example of like, and that didn't even come from Silicon Valley, but the sort of like, are we being thoughtful about what are the functions that we want an effective government to have? Where is philanthropy crowding in the public sector rather than crowding it out? And to me, that's a really important question that's always informed the way I've thought about grant making. But I think it's a real challenge right now, with this influx of kind of AI and Silicon Valley money. Well, the other way I wanted to approach this, you know, you worked inside philanthropy for a while making grants. And so you had a lot of intimate behind the scenes interactions with green groups, with big green groups, small green groups, the environmental community, let's say. And my impression is that you came away from that rather, rather disillusioned. Careful, David. I know, I know. I don't know. I don't know how much you want to get into this, but I think a lot of this, I think it's helpful, I think, to air a lot of this out. So I'm curious, you know, you've said on Twitter or anything, maybe elsewhere, that you think there's something like an epistemic crisis going on in that world, inability to distinguish expertise from advocacy. However much you feel like getting into it, I would love to hear your critique of the environmental NGO complex. God, okay. First of all, let me say, I have long funded when I have been in philanthropy and the environmental groups, and I adore many of them. And there are great people working at those organizations. Let me just say that. Also, you know, they are all different. They are not all the same. Let me also say that. Got to use the monolith, the monolith line. One way to frame this, I think, David, is like, okay, I've been thinking a lot about our current political moment and like, what's going on? What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? What's next on the federal agenda for climate? And we can get into that later. But I remember being at the Hewlett Foundation before the 2020 election and having a similar feeling of like, what the hell is the plan? What are we going to do? We're obviously not going to do cap and trade again. Like, are we really going to do the Clean Power Plan 7.5? Like, what are we doing? And thank God, honestly, for the Sunrise Movement, because I think we needed some insurgent energy. And I think that is kind of a symptom of one of the problems I see, which is just that in any domain, if you have a bunch of really big organizations who share kind of the same large funders and have kind of like a shared way of viewing the world and kind of coordinate and have really big staff and have all sorts of interests they have to manage institutionally, it can just be hard, A, to like generate novel ideas and like generate alignment across a large organization about what should be done. And so I think that's kind of a symptom of one of the big problems that we're seeing. So and so's organization's posture actually be on federal permitting reform, for instance. Like, it's just really hard. And many of these organizations, like, grew up in a different time where, as everyone has pointed out multiple times, the cheap objective was to like stop bad things, the sort of pollution paradigm that I pointed to as problematic in international climate governance also, I think, applies here, where it's just maybe, as Steve Rayner would say, kind of a wrong trousers situation. And like, you know, a lot of litigators and blah, blah, blah. That's just like kind of core to their institutional DNA. And then I think maybe the last thing I'll say is just, we're in a kind of a new era. Like a lot of the work those organizations did to advance clean energy standards in states, for instance, I think was incredibly valuable. And now we're in a phase where like, turns out you got to actually meet those targets somehow. The world evolves, things change, it's really hard. And like, you can't simply enacting positive targets of like expressive climate ambition is not enough. We got to like actually build this stuff. And that is just kind of like a different moment. And then there's the broader political anxiety I have about someone who is climate obsessed. I'm also concerned about the rise of fascism, not just here, but everywhere around the world. And like, as much as I would like my party to prioritize climate change, I also think it's very important that they get elected and need that autonomy. And so like, anything that I think, and I don't think climate always is intention with electability, but there are some cases where like running on climate is not a, we're talking about climate hushing, I have to stop. But like, you told me not to bring it up. I didn't bring it up. Here you are bringing it up. I know. I guess I think like so much of the posture has been pressure for more ambition at every moment. And on the epistemic issue, this is where this has really shown up for me is just for a while things were really wacky. And you couldn't even say like climate change is a risk management challenge without being told you were a climate denier. And so like, this notion that they're like, are in fact real trade offs on the path to net zero. We need people in the world who are able to like, inform policymakers and decision makers about those trade offs so that those people can use their judgment to make the right choices. That capacity, academia, I've also worked in and it's kind of broken, obviously, maybe I should blame you for this, David, because you've done a great job. You know, you've done a great job. You've done a great job. You were always like, this is a political problem. You got to like elect Democrats. That's the way to do it. And so like, everyone kind of did that. But I do think we kind of lost this functionality of actually just doing really balanced, careful analysis to like help people make decisions in a credible way. Part of me returns to the thought that like, you want a group defending old school environmental stuff, air and water. You want a group pushing for clean energy industrial policy. You want a group doing sort of disinterested careful empirical policy analysis. It's just a little crazy that we're looking to these groups to do all these things. Yeah, you want industries who can get Republicans to say yes. Like they're not all the same thing. And this is why I get so frustrated when people say that I'm like punching the enviros or whatever. The only argument I have ever tried to make is that is a necessary but insufficient part of the overall funding strategy that a philanthropy should take. We don't have enough state capacity. All these things that you've described, like we are going to have to build some new institutions now that we're like in this era of climate policy making. And I just feel there is a real reluctance to do that because it's viewed as like a threat to the status quo. Well, speaking of punching left, I think there has been some concern in some circles that you're over there on Twitter. You're over there hanging out with the abundance people and the centrist bros. And over time, that just pulls you into this world where the left irritates you and you become consumed with your irritation by the left. And I certainly like I don't think that's actually true of you, but it is definitely true of some of the people with whom you are in proximity who have let that vibe, that dynamic just consume them to the point that like fascism is raging around our ears and we're still scolding the left about language questions and stuff like this. you know, I won't get into that whole thing, but I'll give you a chance. There are other factions involved here. And, you know, as we have discussed. Yes, I hate them all, Dave. As we have discussed in private many times, everybody is dumb and wrong. So I'll give you a chance to say this new abundance movement. I like a lot of it. I'm irritated by some of it. I'm irritated by some of the people involved more than I'm irritated by the ideas. I'll give you a chance to just say on some of the other factions, what do you think they miss? What do you think that crew, that crowd misses? What do you think their weaknesses are? Maybe because I'm a nice way to talk about myself would be that I really value epistemic humility. Like the truth is probably that I'm like deeply insecure and believe that I don't know anything. And so I'm like, I really have a hard time subscribing to like any one ideological worldview. And like, I really think pluralism is good. Like I genuinely think that. And when it comes to the sort of I don't self-identify as like an abundance person. I identify as someone who has like a bunch of problems they're interested in helping to solve. And like, I try not to become like reverse polarized by the stuff I'm overexposed to. But I have spent like more than a decade in climate nonprofit world. So like there is something kind of refreshing about someone having the courage, in my view, to like have my back a little bit and be like, no, she's not crazy. Like this isn't to say that like all of these other tools, aren't important, but we have to pay attention to this stuff over here too. Or like, we're not going to achieve the goals that we all claim to share. Like we all just have to be more open minded. A good example of this is like, I know you had Todd Tucker on recently, who I have a ton of respect for. And you know, I've written for Roosevelt. I think they're great. But you know, they put out this thing all about like more state capacity and what to do next and blah, blah, blah. And there's a lot in there that I really agree with and like. And just to like as one example of the other. Yeah, I'm also really good friends with Grayson Flood. We like joke that we're kind of frenemies. And he's been writing about like a public grid and a public financing authority and whatever. I think those are great ideas the left should be pushing forward. And if you bring together the kind of abundance people and pro growth left that cares about public power and these kinds of things, there's a bunch of shared stuff. Part of the abundance agenda, as you have pointed out, is like increasing and enhancing state capacity. And how do we do things more effectively? And what are all that? How do you rebuild all of these capacities and build them better? That's a huge part of the agenda that I think the abundance movement sometimes leaves out. Although there are people like Jen Palka, who do a lot of work on this. On the other side, I think it's kind of nuts, frankly, to put out a bunch of proposals about the public sector doing very large, big investments in things directly and also claiming we don't need to reform NEPA. Like, do you know what I mean? It actually is the case that if you want to have very large public infrastructure projects, you need to grapple in a serious way. And I think that's really important. But anyway, the point is just like, why can't we be more normal about this? That's well said. This is also my frustration. Like people put your eyes on the target. It's so much of the fighting seems personalist, personality based and like tribal and like team sports. And people are just like mean. Like I'm like very sensitive when people are mean to me on the internet. I get really upset and I want and my, you know, your inclination is to like curl up and go back to a tribe. And I think you know, we'll defend you. But half the time I'm like, well, I don't want you to defend me. I think you're wrong about a lot of stuff, too. Like it just seems that everyone hates me. So I do understand the impulse around this stuff. And I do think it probably is fair that, again, you know, where we stand depends upon where we sit. And I spent a lot of my life in climate philanthropy and nonprofit land. I developed a long list of annoyance. I think we share this quality in that we get irritated by and want to argue with whoever we happen to be around. But the one thing that I is like because I get annoyed with all the infighting, too, and like keep the eye on the prize. But I do think we're having some pretty important intraparty fights about we do have to actually defeat fascism. So like we need to kind of air out and like experiment. Like what are the best ways to do it? Is it running Democratic Socialist? Like I don't know, but I'd rather have that fight than like not have a primary or whatever. Yeah. While we're taking on various factions, what about just establishment Democrats? They're not really the same as green groups. They're kind of different groups. But like what do you think the sort of modal Democratic Congress person is missing? On climate? Yeah. Specifically on this stuff, on industrial policy and climate, clean energy. What are the Dems getting wrong? You know, right now they're not in control at the federal level. So like hard to blame them for very much. I would like them to do, especially after the midterms, ideally do like much more kind of oversight on the corruption. I mean, there's a lot of really bad stuff that's happening. And I think there are a bunch of things Democrats could be doing there. I think, I think the actual tension is not that they don't, the modal Dem doesn't understand industrial policy. It's more like, where are we going to land on this sort of fight between populism and industrial policy? Industrial policy does require a certain amount of technocratic skill and expertise and state capacity. Technocracy is out of fashion, but if you're going to do industrial policy, you need competent, informed technocrats at some level to make sure you do it right. And they're going to have to sometimes say no to things that pollsters tell them are popular because they're bad policy. And so, you know, I've been in a bunch of conversations lately about rate freezes, like in the electric power sector. And I think like, okay, sure. I also have this, I mean, I hate polling also and issue polling. And I'm like, everyone is like, oh, but freezing rates poll so well. And it's a little bit like, okay. Yeah. If you asked me if I wanted to not pay my bill, I would say yes. This is not revealing of any like interesting truth about the electorate. It's just like issue polling so much. I hate it so much. It's one thing to use it as a piece of propaganda to try to get what you want that I kind of understand. But when you start like smoking your own supply, when you start believing your own issue polling, I think it's bad. I mean, this is, I've been following issue polling for 20 years now. You can get people to want more good stuff and less bad stuff. And so you just tweak the question. Do you want more of this thing? That sounds good. You're going to get them to say yes. The public just doesn't know much. This is another thing you're not really supposed to say out loud, but like they hardly know anything. So like they don't have deep fixed opinions on flavors of industrial policy. They're just going to like say, yeah, that sounds good. If you phrase a question to make it sound good. Same with like climate and all this stuff. Like, should we do something about this big, bad problem? Well, like, yeah, they'll say yes to that. And then do you want me to take $5 out of your wallet to solve this big problem? Of course, they're going to say no to that, but none of that tells you anything about how they're going to behave in the wild in actual plug it anyway. Okay. So finally, let's talk about Republicans briefly. I mean, fascism is bad. I think we agree on that. Another big fight is like, are there promising green shoots somewhere in that machine that are worth expending a lot of resources? Obviously, like if there are Republicans who are to the stuff you want to cultivate them. I think that's coming to the issue polling. If I just ask people that, well, like, yeah, that sounds good. But the question is like how to prioritize and should you tamp down or moderate your own message to your own people in the name of not irritating these possible Republican allies? There are trade-offs. So I wonder like, what's your take on whether or how much sympathy there is somewhere in that machine for what we want to do? Sympathy, wrong word for me and my feelings about this. On the other hand, like, look, I try to start with what are we trying to achieve on climate? Like this is going to be a multi-decadal problem we have to manage. It's also just the case that the Democrats winning elections into perpetuity feels unlikely given all the structural disadvantages among other things. So like, I care about this problem. I don't think you can solve it by like never having Republicans do the right thing on it. That seems really hard to me. So. But on the other hand, look at the Republicans, right? This is like. Right. Like it's, yeah. This is the rock and the hard place here. And like, look, I've been in philanthropy. Like, I think two things can be true. One, I think efforts to cultivate Republican champions on this set of issues have been woefully underfunded, but also like some of it's been crap. Multiple things can be true. I think part of the frustration I have is that it's never been clear to me. I actually think the way in here is to be much clearer about what the actual policy agenda needs to be as a first step. Like having this vague goal of like getting Republicans to care about climate change is just, it really depends what you think they need to do. If what they have to do, for instance, is like defend tax credits for nuclear power, I think there's a way to get them to do that. If what they need to do is vote for embedding, CO2 emissions and trade policy, I think there's a way to get them to go there. You know, I think there are ways to move them on certain issues. But if you're trying to get them to endorse grandiose targets, I think that's probably fruitless. Well, that's the thing. Like, what are you asking them to do? And I think like we're often unclear about that. And I think step one for me is like, what is an actual agenda that is like authentically Republican, you know? And I think there is space there in part because of competition with China, but also because of broader geopolitical stuff. And I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish here, but I think if you're clear-eyed about what you're trying to get them to yes on, I see more space for progress. On the other hand, I will say I was incredibly surprised of the many things that I've been wrong about in my life, the degree to which there has been such cultural backlash to solar and wind power specifically. Because one hypothesis I had back in the day was like, I don't know, man, maybe like this climate could be like other public policy problems where there's like a Dem answer and a Republican answer. And like, we kind of agree there's a problem, but like we have different solution sets. But like the way the technology polarization has played out has freaked me out a bunch. So I don't really know totally what to do with that. Well, just like the epistemic environment over on that side is such a smoldering wreckage. One sort of analogy I've been playing around with and see if this rings true at all is I often think about the Cold War. And I often think about the fact that Republicans, at least in the post-war era, kind of. went along with democracy reforms and clean air and a social safety net kind of things, in part because we're trying to compete with communism in Russia. And we're trying to say, look, we do better by our citizens than they do. This was a big undercurrent in the Cold War. Capitalism produces better results for ordinary citizens than communism does. And so that is where lead, I think, softened at least Republican opposition to sort of public provision and stuff like that. And I have been wondering if a Cold War with China could have a similar dynamic on the clean energy thing, particularly. Like, could we try to get that dynamic going where we're like, no, we, capitalism and free enterprise is better for clean energy and good technology and advanced this and that than communism is? It kind of seems to be going the other way, but. I know. Yeah. I mean, I also think that the thing has changed. One of the things that has changed is like demand growth. It's kind of a different problem is structured slightly differently when we're all fighting over a small pie and like a pie in decline. But like when there's a growing pie, I think it feels a little less zero sum. I don't know. I think that there is some room for maneuvering there. Okay. Let's pivot. Let's take a big pivot. But I really just one last thing. I really think the industry needs to like give Republicans money to advocate for their stuff. Yeah. That's also just true. What do you think also about the solar pack that is just going out and shooting intransigent Republicans in the head, taking them out in primaries? Like, I think that's extremely promising. Great. I think it's awesome. Also, the more uncomfortable piece of that is like, we can't only do the accountability stuff. We also have to cultivate champions. So I think that piece of it is still a little under attended to. Okay. Let's pivot and talk about data centers. Everybody wants to talk about data centers. There's a lot of aspects. There's a lot of aspects of this. But let's start with your proposal, which you wrote up in a paper for something called an American Grid Infrastructure Fund. The idea, I think, here is just let's get these hyperscalers who have all this money, who desperately want to build these things to pay into a fund in exchange for the social license to build them. And the fund, well, you describe it. I'll let you describe it. What is the idea there? Hey there, everybody. Don't worry. I'm not going to tell you about a new mattress or push a credit card on you. This isn't an ad. There are no ads on Volts. It is supported entirely by listeners like you. If you'll indulge me for a second, I'd like to ask for your support. I started Volts because we're all surrounded by depressing news about climate change and misinformation about clean energy. And it's never been more important to share the stories of the real people on the ground doing the real work of transition and all the ingenuity and courage, the public spirit they are bringing to it. People are hungry to hear these stories to learn from and find inspiration in them. I've heard from people who change majors or careers after hearing episodes of Volts, people using it in classrooms and community groups, even state legislators who have passed bills inspired by specific episodes. Sharing these stories matters. It makes a difference. If you have found value in it and want to help me continue doing it, I hope you will join the community of paid subscribers at Volts. Volts.wtf. It's about the cost of a cup of coffee a month. If you don't like subscriptions, you can make a one-time contribution, leave a review on Apple or Spotify, or just tell a friend about Volts. I am grateful for any and all support. If you're already a paid subscriber, thank you. And now, back to the show. You describe it. Yeah, I have been kind of thinking about this in two pieces. When it comes to data center anxiety about electricity and energy, right, there's like a couple of things going on. One is just basic good governance. How do we make sure that data centers are not screwing other rate payers on cost, right? And like, we're seeing a lot of innovation at the state level around like large load tariffs and other kinds of rulemakings around trying to ensure that that is not happening, right? And we can talk more about that. My view is that is like a necessary but insufficient condition. Because these tariffs were not designed to handle all of the issues associated with the scale of the data center build out. Leaving aside like managing the downside risk, like there's a ton of upside opportunity here, I think, in terms of having new revenue to invest in a grid. And that is sort of what I'm trying to capture here on the like, what doesn't get captured in the tariff thing. I think a really good example of this is like, it's relatively straightforward to be like, okay, this one gigawatt data center has these direct associated costs, this substation, this distribution line, blah, blah, blah. But the further you go upstream to like, regional and interregional transmission cost allocation, it's just kind of a nightmare. Yeah, one of the premise of this whole discussion is that we can actually measure and quantify those things. I always bump up against that. I was like, that's a lot of fuzziness and uncertainty. There about what exactly is causing what? I think we cannot. And in fact, I actually think it would be potentially bad precedent to do that. I mean, one good example of this is that these ways of managing these cost allocation fights for regional and interregional transmission are brutal, as everyone I think knows. And so like, you know, when Maryland was doing a bunch of clean energy laws, Virginia was really pissed at them because they claimed they were paying for transmission upgrades caused by Maryland's clean energy laws. Now, Maryland's really pissed at Virginia for their data center policy for causing them to, you know, like, this is just not a way through building out shared infrastructure that benefits the entire economy and climate. Yeah, I've been worried about these about the hyperscares playing the states off one another, too. This is happening to some extent already, I think. And they're already like, even the ones who say like, we'll pay our fair share. Like, if you look at the rate cases, they'll often be like, we don't want to pay for that transmission upgrade. So anyway, this fund idea, the premise is just that there's like a bunch of potential upside here that's not going to be captured through these like quite opaque regulatory proceedings. And there's an opportunity and I think an imperative to like capture some amount of the generational wealth these companies are going to acquire and use it for something good. So it's a federal program that you have in mind? Yeah, well, the initial idea I proposed is a federal program. Sam Ricketts actually put out today, a kind of version of this at the state level. And I have been talking to some state offices about this. And I've been talking to some state offices about this. And I've been talking about a version of like a state level fund, New York, you know, and Hochul announced the pause, sort of so that they were looking at launching a fund. I think other states as they grapple with some of these questions about cost allocation are also like, huh, maybe a fund could be helpful. So I think, you know, and Virginia has passed a charge on electricity consumption by data centers that's just going into like the general fund, which I think there are problems with that approach. But in any case, yeah, I just think there's a lot of potential. here. But it's funny, the politics have gotten have shifted. Like, I think when I initially wrote that, which was in like March or something, I was sort of like, even if the companies did this voluntarily, like now it's like, no, no, you must contribute to a fund or like you're banned forever. Yeah, well, let's talk about the politics a little bit. You have sort of criticized, I think, green groups and others for Stop telling me I criticize the green groups, David, you're gonna get me in trouble. For approaching this with a kind of scarcity mindset. Talk about what you mean by that. Here's where it gets a little complicated. And like, this is probably why I get like abundance coded. I think in my view, we are in a very unique historical moment where we have significant demand growth, the kind demand growth that we could only imagine in our decarbonization models, but could never grapple with seriously. We have the richest actors in the economy with apparently a willingness to pay quite a bit. Of money to power compute. And so like, I think there's a lot of opportunity here. The question is, what are the most catalytic things that we can and should be doing in this moment? And the truth is, there are kind of two imperatives that are sometimes kind of intention, but both really important. One is affordability politics, right? And that's where all of the stuff on like, get more out of the existing grid, peak shaving, VPPs and DERs. All of that stuff is really important. I have, in fact, a lot of money to power compute. And so like, I think there's a lot of opportunity written about policy ideas that states should use to like do better on that front. So I am not at all dismissive those things. But it is also the case that, as you know better than everyone, we are not going to rooftop solar our way to a decarbonized economy. It is an important part of it, but it is not actually the bulk of it, even, even under the most optimistic scenarios. Like, we need interregional transmission. We need a lot more utility-scale clean power. These things are just true. Batteries are great, but they're not going to solve this problem on their own. And so my big issue is, are we kind of penny-pinching? Are we overly focused on penny-pinching at the expense of generational big thinking on, like, rebuilding our grid for climate? Well, I'm glad you're raising this about the affordability politics, because I feel like everyone in the democratic world and associated groups is just herding in this direction. But we need growth of the grid in the long term. We need a lot of investment, and that's going to cost money. So, like, there's a lot of things you could do to save money in the short term that would forestall or delay or cut off that investment that you need in the long term. I think that's basically the dilemma you're raising. And, of course, this is where, you know, the voice of Jigger comes in saying, like, the stuff you're talking about, the grid utilization and stuff like that, is how you navigate that dilemma. That is how you navigate that dilemma. That is how you get short-term affordability while still allowing for long-term investment. And I kind of feel like nobody really disagrees, or, like, informed people don't really disagree. This is another one of these sort of fake fights between, do you want grid utilization or do you want investment in new generation and transmission? Obviously, you want both, right? Both is the obvious answer, is it not? Yeah, I think that's totally right. The one other thing that the, like, layer that I would add here is, like, that kind of assumes that you have two options, which is reduce or increase the amount that we're spending on things. A third option is, like, change who's paying for stuff. Yeah. And, like, that's where some of Grayson's ideas about the fund is one version of this, but I think in general, like, you know, if you look at the LBNL report on actual drivers of electricity affordability, in many states, the sort of grid hardening costs and wildfire mitigation and that kind of stuff is not a, not an insignificant part of the bill. We're going to get to this later. Let's bracket that for the moment. Final question about data centers, though, is, you know, the politics have shifted dramatically, I think, even since you wrote this proposal, even since, like, months ago, in not necessarily a great way. So even the governor of Texas now is putting a moratorium on new data centers. Do you, what do you make of the fact that, like, the LBNL report has become something that is beyond individual, specific, answerable objections and has become kind of a synecdoche for just, like, people's dissatisfaction with the state of the world and the state of income equality? And, like, it's just something that everybody can sort of read their own dissatisfaction into and thus, like, is no longer something that can be brought under control. By these sort of concrete technocratic answers to the specific objections. Yeah, yeah. There is a part of it that, like, feels a little, like, mass hysteria-driven. The funniest thing about this, by the way, is that I have been wondering, like, to what extent this is, how real this phenomenon, like, it obviously is real, but, like, to what extent is it fed and perpetuated by our broken information environment that is created by the same companies trying to build the data center? You know, like, there's something funny happening there. But I think, like, I hear you. And this is why I've been pushing back on, like, oh, we'll do a large load tariff and, like, that will resolve the politics of electricity. It's like, no, it won't. No one understands that. And, like, it's not responsive to the political moment. I think one thing that we could do much more effectively is, I think we've done a bad, like, whatever, there was the ratepayer protection pledge and then, like, all these individual states doing weird stuff. But, like, Democrats or Republicans, for their part, or the data center companies, they're not going to be able to do that. have not put out a clear, like, four clicks of more granularity beyond the ratepayer pledge that's, like, here is what good grid citizenship is. And, like, this is what we are doing. We're all aligned on, like, this is the thing. And I think in the absence of, like, a clear set of asks that we are making of these companies and securing, it's kind of like, yeah, this feels like a mess. Yeah. What's maddening to me is these companies have so much money. I listened to a lot of these companies, and I think they're doing a great job. And I think they're doing a great job. They're doing a great job. kind of coterminous with a giant build out of fossil fuel generation. It's a legitimate thing to be freaked out about, I think. Totally. I totally agree. I mean, the two on emissions, I think there's like two reasons I'm freaked out. One is a kind of like dilution of the resource mix. So if you have a grid connected data center, you're drawing on a shared pool of generation. That importantly includes whatever like zero marginal cost renewable energy, nuclear or hydro happens to be running. Plus efficient combined cycle gas, right? So like the effective emissions rate of that facility is the blended rate, right? Whereas an off-grid facility's emissions rate is 100% gas because gas is the only thing powering it in most cases. So like that's bad. And I have high confidence in our ability to continue to put a bunch of low cost, zero marginal cost resources on the grid. And the more that we can keep things on the grid, the more we can out-compete them. So like that I think is really important. The second thing that I think is really bad is that like a lot of these off-grid projects are optimized for speed, not thermal efficiency. So you end up with these crazy inefficient, like arguably worse than coal gas plants, like these simple cycle or like aeroderivative turbine stuff running at like 100% capacity factor. And a lot of diesel and kerosene backup. It's a nightmare. It's so bad. And like some of the modeling I've seen, like you know me, I love modeling, only when it confirms my priors, that like the net effect of those two things means that grid-connected data center load, you know, without making assumptions about new stuff, new generation, produces like a much, much, much lower cumulative emissions by 2040 than behind the meter gas. So like that is really, I think, quite important. I also think this notion that like, oh, they'll connect eventually because it's like they all want to be connected is like, I don't know, man. If you build. If you build a 400-megawatt gas plant to power your data center facility, and then like in seven years you get interconnection, why wouldn't you just like double the size of your data center? Well, some states, some countries, like I think Spain is it. I should have made a note of this before I launched into it. But I think it's Spain who's basically saying if you want to build a data center, it's got to be 80% clean energy fueled, which would basically statutorily ban. You know, I don't know that there is the political will to do that in the U.S. Because that would basically just like jam to a halt an enormous amount of data center building. But like, what should governors do behind the meter gas plants specifically? Is there a public policy tool here that you would recommend? Okay, there's two ways to answer this question. One is like, what do we do today, given this is where we are? The other, which I would like to talk about at some point, is what do we do today, given this is where we are? Why are we in this position? And what would have had to have been different for this demand growth to not be met this way? Which I think is actually a really useful exercise. But on the like near term, what do we do? I mean, there are a couple of things. One, I think Tyler Norris has been aggressively advocating for a willingness to, you know, like non-firm interconnection, basically. Like if you have a data center accepts some willingness to like accept that they're going to partially reduce their load at given times, can they get connected far faster? Yeah, and I've done a couple of pods about flexible data centers that are capable of doing that, capable of accepting that sort of variable hookup, capable of reducing their demand on, you know, at a moment's notice kind of thing. Yeah, totally. So I think like non-firm capacity and like FERC has been pushing this and, you know, some RTOs are sort of trying to figure this out. I think that that is probably useful and important way to get these things connected to the grid faster if they're willing to accept like non-firm interconnection. That seems good. The other thing is like Travis Kavula has been proposing this idea about like having kind of an open season where you have an RTO or a utility sort of say like at this specific node, here's this bare capacity, come get it, which is a way of pre-screening planned interconnection locations and cutting the timelines to get connected. So like that seems like a basically good idea to me. But what do I know? I think SPP might be doing something like that. And then I. I think like at some level, to the extent that a lot of this is symptomatic of how hard it is to interconnect, right, and how slow, you know, there are people who are focused on interconnection queue reform and connect and manage and that kind of thing. And like that's useful, I think, on the margins and like worth exploring. And a lot of this is downstream of the fact that we just don't have enough capacity and transmission. And like for me, that means that we ought to take the permitting reform conversations a lot more seriously. And that's not a fix overnight. But I do think it really matters. OK, we're going to get back to permitting reform in a minute. But let's talk then about what kind of grid would we need to have where a data center could just come hook up and be fueled by clean energy? Why are they reverting to behind the meter gas plants? What is missing from the grid? And I'm guessing your answer is some clean firm and some transmission. Is that right? I think that's probably. Probably right. But here's what I'll say. Like, I think the piece that is missing is like not a particularly sexy one. But again, this is where I'm not an abundance person just exclusively is like we have lost our ability to do meaningful planning in this country on these issues. So like, you know, in regulated states, you have IRPs and whatever, but that's not great always. And in deregulated states, we're basically like the market will decide where you should build whatever. And like what this has meant in practice. Among other things, I think, is that it has been very hard to plan a grid for growth. And so I think if you look at the states where data center development has happened and put downward pressure on rates, it has mostly been in states that had like a lot of spare capacity. In other words, there was stuff that was built in advance of demand. And this is where I think I have some issues with a paradigm the affordability politics is pushing us toward, which is like invest less, build less. I think the risks. The risks of underbuilding are way bigger than the risks of overbuilding, as long as you're careful about who's bearing those risks, right? As long as it's not all on rate payers, which I think there are tools to manage that, including taxpayer funding and, you know, all sorts of things that states are already experimenting with. But like what you want to do is have a thoughtful electricity system that is built in advance of demand, I think, like anticipating demand. And that's like an unthinkable proposition in much of the world. Notably, Texas. Texas did this with their transmission when they did CREZ, right? Like they built out a bunch of transmission lines in a state that enabled both a lot of low-cost clean energy to connect to the grid very quickly and a bunch of demand to grow, including oil and gas stuff. Anyway, I think that is a piece of this, in addition to just like having more transmission and having more clean firm, would have gotten us in a slightly different position. But I don't know. I would like like a real analyst to like do that exercise. I have a question. It's about all pieces of that. But let's talk about clean firm. This is a vexed debate for me, but it seems like the conventional wisdom at this point is that we need an immense amount of clean firm. And that's why we need to be investing in nuclear and geothermal. And people are still even talking about gas plants with CCS attached and all this. And I guess I just wonder, you know, I talked about this a little bit with Lily. If you have a bunch of new transmission. Right. If you get serious about transmission and maybe even like, say, link up America's three big grids and like, et cetera. And then you have batteries, which are getting cheaper and cheaper. And then you have longer duration storage, which is also getting cheaper and also starting to come online. You got your flow batteries. You got your iron air batteries. You got smaller and more nimble. Pumped hydro. People are proposing and starting to build. Why do you need so much clean? Why won't more transmission plus more storage satisfy a lot of what people think you need clean firm to do? This idea that like storage is like not firm enough or not firm in the right way or not manly firm. I guess I just don't get it. Like what's wrong with storage plus transmission as an answer to the problems? That clean firm is supposed to solve. This is where maybe this is a cop out, but I'll go back to like the very beginning of this conversation where I asserted that I take kind of a risk management frame to this. In the real world, doing any of this is basically impossibly difficult. So being able to like plan, permit, pay for and build the transmission system you would need to do what you're describing would be very difficult. Yeah. Innovation in battery technology. I'm very bullish on, but that's a real challenge. Like there's a bunch of stuff there. But siting and permitting all of these renewables, very hard, very hard, actually. So like that path, it has its own set of potential failure modes and frictions, as does the clean firm path. You know, maybe advanced geothermal doesn't work everywhere. We think it will be, you know, like whatever, like maybe the costs don't come down. Maybe advanced nuclear never amounts to anything. Like there are real questions about all of this. I mean, the whole history of the nuclear industry seems to point at a very large risk to relying too much on that for clean firms. Yeah, but I mean, on the other side, in the history of the world, the handful of economies we have that have actually decarbonized tend to rely lie pretty significantly on nuclear power you know so like that's not to say we should go full nuke here but like when i hear skepticism about this i do feel like compelled to kind of point out like i don't know look around the globe at the places that have actually decarbonized and it's usually on clean firm yeah but come on i mean all that was before solar fell 90 all of that was before cheap batteries all of that was before we were even really trying in earnest to decarbonize yeah but maybe that's the point dave like they did it like it still is a fact in the world again i'm not advocating for like a nuclear maximalist path here but like i do think it's relevant so for me it is just like i don't know what path is going to be most plausible and i think we need to try a bunch of different things and i do think that it just like actually is true that like while clean firm the term is like kind of a modeling convention and you can like discount capacity credit and try to like you know use elcc and capacity accreditation accreditation to like figure out how to make all these things equal different resources just do different things in different ways and like that's good it's actually good that they have different failure modes and like a good system is diversified and then imagine a world where we don't solve all the transmission stuff this is why i want someone to actually study this like say we didn't solve all the transmission stuff and you still have this demand growth and we were still able to meet it with clean power it would probably have to be what we call clean firm behind the meter because like the physical footprint of powering these data centers with like solar and batteries alone is just like very difficult to imagine and like the amount of redundancy you have to have which is why it's not really happening well you know i think one of the critiques people have of the sort of electricity market is that having that firm capacity if you have privately owned utilities and you have these markets you have these energy markets it's kind of hard to price it such that you don't have the capacity to do that so i think it's kind of hard to price it such that you don't have the capacity to do that so i think it's kind of hard to price it such that the system produces enough of it you know there's sort of the two options here are like you have pjm which has a capacity market which tries to sort of do this and it has many flaws that we don't have time to get into but then on the other hand you have ercot which is just pure energy market which is whereas the sort of scarcity is supposed to drive investment in spare capacity also doesn't seem to be doing a great job you have sort of floated this federal strategic reliability reserve i realize this is like a quarter baked idea but what do you mean by that and what is the need for it again like this is where like maybe i'm the socialist you know who's to say but i guess most of my like real electricity market nerd friends think that texas is a better model than but these again like none of these are perfect it's almost analogous to the issue with climate pricing which is like in order to have a price signal in any of these versions of the world that actually does what we want to do so i think it's kind of hard to do people are going to probably be kind of pissed off yeah to me this is the flaw of ercot like it would work if you really allowed electricity to get as expensive as it needed to be to do the pricing but like the minute it gets that expensive politicians intervene like no one has the guts to let that work totally and it's the same at pjm right now you know like this is like people want to cap the price and like i understand this so the strategic reliability reserve is basically just like a very not even quarter baked idea around could you imagine a world where the federal government like procures on behalf of rtos and states enough kind of dispatchable capacity that and pays for it to be available that we're not asking every state and market to figure out a way to like have kind of backstop capacity and i have no idea this could be like a totally insane idea but i'm just kind of like surely someone should think about it let's surface this because you sort of gestured in this direction several times which is we need more planning we need more central planning we need arguably more central control of things and i guess there's a faction of people out there who will just say well look you're just working your way around privately owned utilities and trying to compensate for the many many failure modes and things that they don't do well why don't you just embrace public ownership you know why don't you just turn around and really like full-throatedly embrace we need public like it seems like there are a lot of reasons and justifications for private ownership of this stuff that i understand fully in history but a national decarbonization imperative and imperative for massive massive demand growth which is a macroeconomic phenomenon not a state phenomenon just all points toward lots more public ownership of the grid of utilities and public planning are you willing to just to throw your hat in that i don't know what the metaphor i'm groping for is but like are you willing to embrace that idea yeah i mean i think it is precisely the kind of thinking that folks should be offering right now like look at the moment nobody is structurally in most of this country in charge of planning anything on the grid you have for order 1920 that's trying to get rtos to plan transmission at least like 20 years in advance and that's great but it's like barely taking effect and blah blah blah and there's nothing really on the generation side so like this is the result though of choices we made decades ago so we either need to like figure out in my view how to rebuild planning capacity inside the system we have and there are like some ways to do that but i agree with you it's like is the more ambitious the better and the more ambitious the better and the more ambitious correct thing to do just change who owns and directs the assets you wrote a piece about grid enhancing technologies for instance and these are all ways that we could make the existing grid work better and cheaper but you know i'm not telling you anything like if you implement a bunch of technologies that moot the need to spend more utilities who have a very basic incentive to spend more are not going to embrace that and they're not going to embrace that and they're not going to embrace them it's hard for me i've come back to this virtually every pod i do but like it's hard for me to envision a long-term sufficient solution to these problems that doesn't address the basic utility incentive mal-incentive problem squarely do you agree with that yeah okay well let's talk about the utility incentive problems but like i do think on this point you either need some kind of better planning processes layered onto the stuff that you're doing or if we have massachusetts actually has this kind of interesting like grid modernization advisory council process that i only recently learned about that is their attempt to kind of like bring these things back together i have no idea if it's working or not but like whatever at least they're trying you either need that some like dedicated funding mechanisms like the grid fund or whatever or public power we may need a combination of all of those things depending on where you are but like that i think is the issue on the utility incentive problem okay this one really fully frustrates me i've got to say because i think the way that this gets talked about is not clear about the goal we're trying to achieve and often like bundles together a bunch of different problems the goal that i am trying to achieve is like building out a grid capable of enabling decarbonization and economic growth right so like i again like i've been very clear i have a kind of pro overbuilding bias here so long as we can mitigate who's on the hook for any risk of overbuilding so for me at a paradigm level i am just not as worried about overbuilding as everyone else seems to be right now so like let me just put that on the table and if it were the case that i thought this is where the like on the one hand i totally agree we should be doing all of like the efficiency and demand response and ders and gets as possible and i've written about that and we should build a bunch of stuff the difference between those two things is that you could if affordability were not an or not an issue build a bunch of stuff and solve climate change you can't efficiency your way to solving climate change and so like for me that's sort of where i come that from this stuff but like if affordability weren't a problem it's a pretty big caveat i mean this is whole jiggers point like if you just do this inefficiently if you do this without doing it in a at least somewhat optimized way you're just going to drive rates through the roof and get political blowback and you can't do it that way i totally understand this and i think that that's totally fair but that is a different kind of then like we can get there with just this set of things and i agree like i am in favor of doing all of these things now i do think it raises the question of like okay what are the problems here there's the problem of utility political influence there's the problem of the incentive to overbuild there's the problem of the incentive to build the wrong stuff and then there's the issue of just the cost of capital right that is how i think about utility incentives and these sorts of issues and my frustration is that the popular fix here seems to be like suppressing return on equity or performance-based rate making and i don't know that that solves these problems so for one i think there's a category of stuff that's like good governance reforms which is just like of course we should ban ratepayer funded utility lobbying and trade association dues from the rate base right like of course and we should try to address like all of the weird political economy dysfunction around the ways that utilities influence regulators who their returns like that's real it's worth doing we should like say that it's bad bad and like fight that fight with the utilities. And it does kind of seem like public power just moots all those issues in a much more, much more direct and efficient way. Yeah, totally. But to me, that's like populist and correct. And we should just like do those things. Then there's like the incentive to overbuild thing where everyone's like utilities earn a return on the rate base. So they're biased toward cap intensive solutions. And that like theoretically is real, but I just am not yet convinced based on the evidence that it's doing as much damage as people claim. And in this moment, I think the bigger risk, again, is underbuilding. So like I'm really amenable to like, you know, I know you had Pete on to talk about like more transparency into how local transmission and distribution spending is being done. Like I think all of that stuff is good and important to do. But like treating utility overbuild as the central problem to solve right now is just I don't think that's the fight that matters as much right now. And like people are going to disagree with that. And if I believed that having that fight would lead to outcomes that would solve climate change or meaningfully help us solve climate change, I would be more open to that. But I have skepticism there, which you may or may not share. Well, it's all just like if people could just be normal again and not play team sports with this, like obviously if you want to overbuild, if you want to build big and fast just on a political economy level, you need to use capital the most efficiently as you can while you're doing that. So you don't create political backlash. Like there's an obvious synthesis of these perspectives. And it is really frustrating in part because of the opacity around how they're actually spending the money in parts of this to your earlier pod. It's hard to eat for me to even like get the evidence of like how much gold plating is actually happening. It's just like really hard to know, I think. But that is a thing that I think matters. And I do think I buy the version that like given a choice, they're going to gravitate toward utilities are going to gravitate toward the stuff that's easiest to get into the rate base, which means local transmission and distribution. And like that stuff is often also not that risky. Yeah. To the extent they build transmission at all, it's within their territories. So they totally, you know. So there I'm like, yeah, more transparency and governance over those decisions. But like this slam down ROE, it just feels to me like a pretty blunt instrument that discourages CapEx more generally, not just the CapEx you don't want. And so like, I just think there's downside risk and it's like not even solving the right problem. Two more things. The one other thing is like, in theory, I'm really supportive of the cap. The move to performance based rate making or like toe tax or whatever, where you're decoupling utility profit from CapEx and trying to reward outcomes. But genuinely, I have now talked to people in Massachusetts and Hawaii and the UK where they've tried this and it is like not been clearly vindicated by the results. And I don't know exactly why that is. I think what I've heard is that it's just really hard to define the outcomes that matter. But like it has a real mixed empirical track record. So like I'm not opposed to it, but I'm just like, I don't think it's a panacea, which I don't think anyone argues it is. But like I am a little confused about why it's not working where we're trying it. So I would love to know more about that. And then the last idea that I hear less of that I do think is important is that to me, if we're worried about affordability, the issue is the cost of capital, which is about capital structure, not return on equity. And so if it's like utility investment costs rate payers too much, I think another way to do this is to try to push utilities to finance more of their CapEx with debt rather than equity. What's interesting here, the Trump administration is doing a bunch of like, you know, they basically gave a giant grant to Southern Company to like pay for their stuff. And like, I do think this question of whether it's securitization or LPO funding or whatever it is like trying to get utilities to use more debt is another way to bring down costs. Anyway, this makes me sound like a utility stooge, but I'm genuinely just trying to like understand what we're trying to solve and what's going on here. And I do get a little eye rolly at like, and I love Jigger, but this kind of like utilities are evil profit seekers, but all third party VPP developers are like aligned with the public interest. It's just like bullshit, you know, like these are all corporations with incentive problems. And like, I'm not saying utilities don't have their own unique challenges, but they all need to be governed appropriately. Yeah. Everything we've talked about for the last 10 minutes, I just keep coming back. It all sounds like kludges and band-aids over the fact that we have granted to private companies. Yeah. Like just do the national highway. Yeah, I agree. Before we leave this topic, the one other thing about affordability that you have promoted that we should at least discuss briefly here is getting BS off bills, I believe is the slogan, which is we have larded up electricity rates with a lot of goals and programs of general public benefit. And I think the basic idea here is if something is of general public benefit, it should come out of the general tax base. And is there a more concrete, like, are there people trying to do this? Are there actual bills involved? Like how far along is this idea? I think there's like some really smart people where this is really playing out is in California, which I haven't followed closely enough, but the wildfire stuff is a really big thing. And I think it's going to be big across the country. So Melissa Roberts at the American Flood Coalition has been doing some thinking about like how to grapple with multi hazard mitigation and grid hardening in a less regressive way. Yeah. I mean, we should just say just in case any listeners don't know this already, but just like one of the things motivating this is that paying for things out of the rate base, making electricity rate payers pay for things is the single most regressive way to pay for anything. Whereas the tax base, because you have a progressive income tax involved, puts much more of the burden on people who can afford it. That's part of what's driving all this. Yeah, totally. Like the standard energy burden literature says that I think low income households spend eight to 17% of their income on energy where it's like two to 3% for higher income households. Like this is my view. I mean, look, the reason people hate it, advocates of many of the programs that are covered in these sorts of programs is that like it's a more opaque way to fund stuff, not just more opaque, but like you're not subject to the whims of like fights over the general fund. So I understand. And like many of these programs are very good and very worth doing. So I'm not making a judgment about that. It's just that I don't think they should be financed on bills. And in some cases, they're not a huge part of bills, but in some states they really are. And especially this grid hardening stuff. And I guess maybe this goes without saying too, but I'll just say it like if your goal is to electrify everything and if all your decarbonization hopes come down the end to having cheap, abundant, available, clean electricity, the last thing you want to do is make electricity more expensive. Like you should be trying to make electricity as cheap as possible to encourage its spread. And so paying for wildfire mitigation costs on electricity bills is squarely in contrast to that. It's squarely against that goal. Yeah, this is why you're pointing out some hypocrisy I have in my desire for my gilded grid. That is like, yeah, like I do think we have to pay attention to affordability for sure. And this is a big part of that. All right. So only two clusters left. We've blown through our time limit a long time ago. Let's talk about, yeah, I should have done this earlier since I know it's a big thing for you. Let's talk about permitting reform. I think your thesis and I think the thesis of a lot of people, and this was, of course, Lily Burmel's whole conclusion from her paper, is that the real binding constraints on the bill, pulled out of a clean grid today, is not cost. It is these regulatory barriers. What are people getting wrong about permitting reform and what ought they to be doing? Like what is frustrating you about that whole discussion right now? Yeah, I mean, A, everyone's really vague about it in a way that it was probably enraging for everyone. So like, let me just say, I think the deal that people are likely contemplating at the federal, so there's a federal conversation in their state and local stuff. And I think that's a big deal. I think that's a big deal. And we got to do both. And the federal stuff is there are some reforms to NEPA and the Clean Water Act and now the National Historic Preservation Act that are being contemplated alongside very important reforms to interregional transmission siting. And then permitting certainty. So it's like permitting certainty, NEPA, Clean Water Act, NHPA, and then transmission. Those are like the three big moving pieces, I think, of the federal deal. So like one, everyone should just be more specific about what they're talking about. I think the thing that I will say is like a couple of reasons why I think permitting reform really matters for clean energy. One is the land footprint asymmetry. So solar and wind require roughly 20 and 200 times respectively the permitted land area of gas per unit of energy delivered. And that includes drilling. And transmission rights run two to three times wider than a comparable gas pipeline. So like more linear, more dispersed historically, more permitting exposure. That is like just true. So from that one would take the permitting reform that makes it easier and faster to build stuff is likely to asymmetrically advantage clean. I also think there's like a lot of fights about like whether NEPA actually matters for clean energy. All of the data I have seen suggests that like one of the dynamics that people often miss is federal land avoidance, despite the fact that there are often better resources on federal lands. So federal lands are 21% of the lower 48, but they host only 3% of U.S. onshore wind, solar, and geothermal capacity. even though the desert southwest disproportionately federal land has like the best solar and geothermal resources in the country so like there's something going on there third we've surveyed a bunch of developers about like what the deal is and over 85 percent of transmission developers and over 65 percent of solar developers rate federal permitting more onerous than state or local and 82 percent of developers surveyed this year said they'd intentionally cited a project to avoid triggering federal permitting so like that's they this is what the developers are saying yeah i was going to ask you to sort of try to rank federal permitting versus interconnection versus our state and local permitting as kind of like in their degree of severity their degree of difficulty so you think federal permitting is the top of that list i think federal permitting is like really the top followed by state and local followed by interconnection just because like i really think some of the interconnection stuff is downstream of like a lack of capacity to do that so i think federal permitting is like really the top followed by state and local capacity which isn't to say that like you don't need process fixes to the interconnection process but like fundamentally that is largely a consequence of the fact that we don't have enough transmission capacity where it needs to be the other thing is like on transmission exposure to these permitting challenges is going to get much bigger so only you know it is true that only three and a half percent of new transmission lines required a full environmental impact statement in the last decade it was 26 percent of new line my miles in 2024 and of the 26,000 plus miles of transmission now planned an estimated half of it are likely to trigger nepa and that has to do with like a lot of the transmission had been built in the east we are likely to build a lot more transmission in the west it's going to implicate federal lands well and a lot more regional and interstate i mean that's kind of the whole point right is to bigger longer line exactly that is the point so you can't just look at historic nepa implications for transmission and project forward and then the last thing the state level stuff is really important because it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to be a lot of work and it's really a problem which again like may push people toward wanting to build on federal land and they can't so like 17 percent of the continental u.s county landmass now heavily restricts wind and or solar which is double the share only a few years ago so like that's bad really bad so that's why like it all has to happen i think the permitting certainty thing is like candidly i think my view is like lawless presidents are going to lawless president and so like that just is what it is but if you're not going to be able to do that that's table stakes that's table stakes and there are things we can do in law to try to constrain them let me articulate some of the pushback some of the questions people have about this first i'd say there's nepa reform and nepa reform a lot of different kinds of things can sneak in under that banner and i think one of the things one of the i think fair criticisms is the concrete proposals you tend to hear for nepa reform is just put arbitrary limits on the amount of time it can take and i think a lot of people will just say if you don't as opposed to let's better fund and better staff the agencies that are assigned to do these things right let's do it more competently and quickly by having more staff and more funding of the people doing it that asymmetry i think makes people suspicious they're like it just sounds like you're trying to cut short the process rather than make the process work better or more rationally how do you feel about that one you got to do both and you know i was in the white house when this bill passed that gave epa a bunch more staff capacity and money and republicans championed it actually to do permitting for co2 injection and one of the things i found was that like i think that stuff is totally necessary but if you don't have the kind of if you don't have the political and or policy change to enable it to move more quickly it just won't even if you have more state capacity so like it's a necessary but insufficient and i guess on nepa i think the thing that is probably most likely to happen and is important in my view is that you got to have some litigation reforms especially to kind of judicial remedies because right now basically the default resolution for litigation under that law it means that courts can just like hold up a project indefinitely and like we should just have time limited review like i think we should just have time limited review and i think that's like not a threat to outcomes a more fundamental argument about nepa that i'm not sure i totally am convinced of but i jim conaton often makes is like nepa was one of the first environmental law and we now have a lot of other environmental laws and any project has to comply with the clean water act and the clean air act and esa and whatever it used to be the case that nepa was necessarily the workhorse of all of our environmental planning and compliance and now it's kind of like i don't know man like with the role that it plays is kind of interesting to contemplate in a world where we have a lot of other environmental regulations i would say i take it to be your position that democratic politicians should get engaged in this and try to pass it now try to pass it in this session one of the other things people push back about which you waved away a second ago but i think deserves at least a little discussion is you have trump now forcing his agencies to very selectively intervene and shut down clean energy projects specifically they're doing all this nonsense and they're doing all this nonsense with offshore wind they're doing nonsense with onshore wind about supposed dangers with national security drones some bs they dreamed up they're denying solar permits on public land where as you say that's most of the solar resource it's the idea that you're going to create a fair playing field and that clean energy will win on a fair playing field which is kind of the whole pitch for permitting reform doesn't really seem to apply if you're going to create a fair playing field you do not in fact end up with a fair playing field if in fact you end up with a playing field where you've made it easier for oil and gas but then it's still hard for clean energy because you have this rogue administration shutting everything down like you could imagine people making the argument this is not a political environment in which it's fair to ask people so like at the very least we should wait until we don't have a crazy fascist trying to shut down clean energy or we can only pass this in this exact political moment is the counter argument and like i totally hear this and i understand the frustration and a i think that's why the ongoing federal conversation as far as i am aware can includes quite significant permitting certainty provisions that are reforms that can close off like many accessible avenues to willy-nilly do what this administration is doing and empower developers in courts to respond more quickly and reduce investment uncertainty like those are all good things worth doing which you can only do if you're not doing it right and you're not doing it right you can only do it in a permitting bill and the status quo is the status quo so like i just am a little the other thing is that barring things i'm not in the mind to discuss right now like he's not going to be president forever and in fact if you imagine a world where there's a democratic administration in 2029 a lesson i have learned is that you know these reforms are going to take years to work through the system we're going to have to build state capacity they're going to have to trickle down to the courts and to judicial justice and they're going to have to trickle down to the courts and to judicial decision making and all of these things and i really think democrats are going to want to be in a position to hit the ground running on their governing agenda and i also for more like arcane reasons i'm highly suspicious that after the election it will be easier to pass this bill right now you have a very rare moment of both republicans and democrats being highly motivated to get this done the one other political wrinkle that i think is actually important is that you know the transmission provision which we haven't talked about which is actually you know one of the things that's most exciting is historically has been blocked by states and utilities right and like right now both parties utilities have much less power with both parties right now than they have historically had yeah they kind of are on the back foot a little bit because of the data center stuff affordability so yeah and so like this is one of very few moments where you might be able to roll them on federal transmission planning and permitting and like that feels really important to me and i will say like if there's a democratic administration republicans are going to try to block everything they're not going to help them do anything they're going to block everything period full stop that's just what they do that's just their mode and they will absolutely shoot themselves in the foot to prevent democrats from accomplishing anything whereas there are some sane democrats the final question about the politics of this is and this is something that's mystified me the reason as you say hyperscalers are resorting to behind the meter gas and all these workarounds is that they can't get enough clean energy they can't get enough clean capacity on the grid and if you agree as i think a lot of people do now that permitting is one of the primary if not the primary barrier to building more clean grid why on earth aren't hyperscalers beating on doors in washington dc supporting this why aren't they using their political heft sensibly why are they not in the front of the line pushing for permitting reform look i think many of them are it's just been a very quiet negotiation is the honest answer like i don't think that republicans certainly would be at the table in this way frankly if that constituency weren't meaningfully pushing for this yeah i'm not so sure they're not interesting we've talked two hours i have one final question or at least final topic which is you and i've talked before and are frustrated by everything group and faction kind of being dumb and wrong about various different things and refusing to kind of look past their institutional imperatives to see the bigger picture it just seems like there's no like everybody's groping at the elephant and like just doesn't seem to be like a coalition sensible people you know what i mean who are like pursuing the big picture in a way i think you and i agree would be sensible which is like a lot of these disputes we've discussed as we've discussed the answer is both and the answer is to do all of it there's just a lot of silly fights and silly parochialism everybody's got their blind spots it just doesn't seem like if you're a person who wants rapid build out of a clean grid there just is no clear answer to like what group or what faction you should join and throw your efforts behind it just doesn't seem like there's anybody that's quite aligned on doing the sensible things in a sensible way you know what i mean i and i talk to people a lot of people in my audience who like want to get involved and like i don't always know where to tell them to go there's not a clear group or faction that i think i really like can endorse with a clear conscience who seems to be and we've discussed like you i think are out kind of trying to assemble something like this coalition but i guess my question is like why isn't there such a coalition and is there something about coalitional politics as such that prevents people from taking this broader longer-term view you know what i mean in some sense is it only possible for sort of independent individual to be good on this stuff it's almost impossible to be good on this stuff it's almost impossible to create a group that's good on this stuff like how do you think about that like how do you think about coalitional politics and assembling a coalition behind what we're trying to do here man this is such a good question and it's something that i've really been grappling with lately because i've been working a lot on like what does a federal agenda over the next few years need to look like if you care about climate in this new moment and my response to answering that question has basically been to like identify the 30 smartest people i know on like the topics i think matter and been like tell me what you think we should do and that is because i think i share your frustration or skepticism about the ability of like i think a i'm sort of the sort of like obsession with consensus-based coalitional politics within the democratic party i think does us no favors because it elides the trade-offs and it like just makes it really hard to like say true things honestly sometimes and it can like be constraining on creativity because like if the answer is public power like what 70 year old organization is going to like go on the record and say you know like people are risk averse and they depend on you know a certain set of funders and they have their own institutional constraints it's just really hard so i think like on the question of like what is like maybe there's two pieces it's like where does the fresh creative policy thinking going to come from and i wish i had an answer like oh there's this five amazing groups and they're just going to figure it all out but i don't think that's the truth um and i think some of it should come from academics too you know like some of it should come from workers so i think i don't have an answer to that but then there's a question of like how do you actually implement the policies that you think and the actions that you think are high priority and then i wanted to emphasize this too like in terms of that consensus that sort of obsession with broad coalitional consensus that is sort of everything bagel critique and everything specifically in 2029 assuming things go well and there's a democratic president and maybe even democrats have congress there is so much to do there's so much that has been broken there's like accountability for the scumbags who have done all these horrible things there's like dismantling ice there's like building back up institutions that have been broken and destroyed there's the federal scientific apparatus that's been pulled apart all the agencies are now underfunded and you know they don't have enough people there's just like the list of things that need to be done is almost infinite and so that means one outcome of that is prioritization is going to be everything because as we know like you got to get a few key things done and generally that's all you can get done with a new administration like for whatever reason however much you might lament that it's generally a few big things and so like we've got to uh specifically on this clean grid question need to prioritize a few key things and like how does that work who does that work who decides those priorities and who pulls every buddy along well this is political leadership this is actually like one of my biggest critiques of democratic politics right now is like the standout electeds i think have this quality of not listening to polling on everything not being like true dsa member or true moderates like there is this quality of just like judgment and taste and leadership and like willingness to say true things that i do think people value and people are going to have to do that because we can't say yes to everything and just on the fiscal question in 2029 like brendan duke at cppp has just been tracking you know how much undoing snap and medicaid alone is going to be and it's crazy like we are in a real bind so anyway i mean i think the phase of policy development we are in right now is in some ways my favorite and i think it's going to be a really important phase i think which is like we are and should be in a battle place of ideas and we should like that right now we should just be like everyone say your best idea maybe it's public power maybe it's limit roe maybe it's vpps maybe it's state-owned nuclear i don't really even care i just want people to stay with their whole chests what they think the correct answers on the merits are to a bunch of different problems so that we can have like an informed smart discussion about what the right answers are on the merits and then the question of like selling it that is the fun part that's the fun part and like that's where we are so like my anxiety right now is that i'm not seeing enough of that and including from some of the like big groups i'm kind of like get out there like what do you got let's just not be afraid of fighting and like eventually we will come together as democrats around a show like that and i think it's going to be a really important phase in the shared agenda but right now this is the time to like have robust debate that's democracy yeah i mean i really like your idea because like there are good people in the green groups they're good people in the abundance world there's good people in establishment democratic circles there are good people in academia it just seems like a lot of them get muted or distorted by these coalitional dynamics or by the dynamics of sort of group factional warfare and i like the idea of just plucking the things that are going on in the green groups and i think that's a really good idea i think that's a really good idea and i think that's a really good idea and i think that's a really good idea and i think that's a really good idea and i think that's a really good idea and i think best people out of all those worlds and making like a super team but when i think about doing that in practice then you're a group you know what i mean like then you're a group and the other groups are yelling at you because they want their territory you know what i mean like they want to be the top group and like i'm so frustrated by those dynamics and i just really have no idea how to get out of it and maybe you're right like maybe the only way out is through and we all just have big fights and come to some sort of consensus not to be like conspirators about this but i think that's right and i think like the one dimension of this that doesn't get enough attention that i have witnessed is like there's a sort of intergroup warfare that is like itself like frustrating and hard but the real issue is that you have a very large donor class that is itself putting pressure on electeds with and through and informed by the groups and like that is another constraint if the electeds don't have courage that's another constraint on their ability to just like use their judgment and like hone their skills around judgment and like just make decisions that they think are right because you have all these weird accountability structures some of which are like not actually aligned with the electorate so it's like that's weird yeah it's like the donor class is almost the most influential group in practice and the least transparent the least involved in these public fights because they don't speak up for themselves and they just work there so people end up fighting and they're not allowed to speak up for themselves and they just fighting over the downstream consequences of donor decisions without seeing why they're made why they ended up that way because it's like traces back to the donor class you know who's very opaque yep and have concerns that are sometimes out of touch with the electorate in all kinds of ways well i think we've officially talked about everything okay great done and done unless there's anything else no god you think we missed um all right this has been uh lovely and fun as i knew it would be congratulations to any stalwart listeners who have made it here with us the true hardcore people you're the best Yeah. Thanks, Jane. Good luck with all your work. Thanks so much for having me, Dave. And hopefully I'll be back again at some point. We'll talk for a shorter period of time about more fun things. All right. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks, everybody. You've been listening to Volts, founded and hosted by me, David Roberts, produced by Nate Peavy, and supported entirely through the generosity of listeners like you. If you have 10 seconds to spare, please leave a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. It really helps other people find the show. See you next time.