David Roberts is a staff writer for Vox, and his work focuses on energy, politics and climate change. On this episode of the podcast, David joins Ross and Aldyen to share his take on the disappearance of the center-right as a faction of the Republican Party and discuss the role social trust plays in the health of a society. Aldyen introduces the idea of a common goal as key to the survival of an empire, and David explains why climate change is unlikely to serve as our national purpose here in the US.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club? Get special access to nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see, but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori.com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter, which you can find at nori.com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today we have, well, an unusual Nori co-host, Aldyen Donnelly, Nori’s Director of Carbon Economics.
Thanks for being here, Aldyen.
Aldyen Donnelly: I’m glad to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Because we are going to nerd out on some wonkish topics today because we have David Roberts, staff writer at Vox here. Thank you, David.
David Roberts: Glad to be here.
Ross Kenyon: We’re happy to have you. You are local and very local. You used to live in our neighborhood, it sounds like.
David Roberts: Extremely, and I miss it dearly.
Ross Kenyon: Great. And we’ve been trying to schedule this forever. We follow your work. We read it. We argue about it. No, we like it. We find it to be a really great source of climate journalism. If you’re not following David, please do. Dr. Vox on Twitter.
David Roberts: It’s just DR. It’s just my initials, but it’s easy to remember. I can’t fight it. Everybody says Dr. Vaughn.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, man. Yeah, I did not know that. That is good to know. Well, we felt inspired to do this after we listened to your recent appearance on Political Climate, which is an outstanding podcast about climate change, environmentalism, etc. If you’re not listening to it, you totally should. There’s so much in there that we wanted to go into, chief of which is you just have so little hope for the right of center on climate change. And Nori, we try really hard to find people who are conservative or libertarian or leaning those directions and find ways that we can all sort of come together and agree on the facts and create this information universe that we share and do things that are not alienating.
And some of your comments, I wonder if we’re wasting our time. And maybe you can clarify, are we idiots? Yeah.
David Roberts: Well, it’s, I don’t think, no, I don’t think it’s a waste of time to, let’s say, I guess what I’d say is there is what used to be, it seemed like a relatively robust center-right presence in American politics seems to have almost entirely vanished. It seems like The right has kind of herded together way down the spectrum and sort of everybody who didn’t want to ride that train into kind of crazy town jumped off and is now considers himself a center leftist or I don’t know what the never Trumpers are kind of calling themselves.
Ross Kenyon: Like what is this canon?
David Roberts: What is their orbit even called? I don’t even know. But there is a, let’s say there is a coherent space on the spectrum for the center right. And presumably, if there’s ever a healthy... American politics, again, it will involve a center right. And so I think it’s worth kind of, what’s the right metaphor? Building a house that they could feel comfortable in should they ever return, right? Keep the fire, keep the fire lit in case they ever find their way home. And I think there are people, you know, there are still people out there in that space.
They sort of have no political home now, but it’s, I would say at the very least, it’s worth reaching beyond the climate left bubble. That’s, it’s absolutely worth trying to broaden that coalition in whatever direction you can reach out from that coalition in, it’s People who – that few small band of people that still actually holds to conservative economic principles as opposed to just sort of unbridled kind of demographic, you know, factionalism.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. In your mind then, is there some sort of partition between – like I know – and I’ve rolled in these circles. I know a lot of these people who are smart conservatives who are often very literary. They’ll be like, well, Virgil says. And you’re like, oh – You are erudite. I like hanging out with conservatives who are not just the, what’s the old onion joke about the white hot ball of rage in the Republican primaries. So is that who we should be trying to reach or is it just all of the above?
David Roberts: Well, I don’t, I mean, I don’t know how many other I mean, to me, I think in a lot of critics going back years, it’s been clear that this direction people are moving, but... Trump made it very, very clear that there used to be a lot of people like that who primarily put economic conservatism in front, sort of fiscal conservatism, you know, this sort of educated erudite kind of on the old school William F. Buckley mold. A lot of those people used to be in front and used to be the face of the Republican Party.
And it just became very clear after Trump won and in the wake of Trump winning that almost all of that was BS. Almost all of that was a cover. There were very few people that seriously held on to those values. And when they were given social and political permission to abandon them and just indulge in their worst instincts, almost all of them did. It’s genuinely shocking. I mean, I didn’t even have a very high opinion of this party beforehand. But I thought that there would at least be a faction that would be like, no, we’re not going to toss all our economic and moral principles overboard in the pursuit of raw power.
But it turns out there were like you can count them on your two hands. There was no substantial political faction. There was a handful of people who protested. So I guess they’re worth nurturing. And I guess, again, it’s like worth creating that space on the spectrum for people to return to if it comes to that. And it’s fine talking to those people. I think the mistake is, which people used to do very often before Trump, is just mistaking that for a substantial power block on the right, a substantial voting block.
It was almost entirely...
Ross Kenyon: I think William F. Buckley would be deemed a cuck these days.
David Roberts: A total cuck. And his reputation has been burnished since he died. He was a racist too. I mean, it’s not like he was like... You know, smoking pipes and quoting the classics. But it had like a nice tentorian kind of quality to it.
Ross Kenyon: And that covered it nicely or what?
David Roberts: He too had a cover story, even internally for himself. And like even inside his head probably believed his own BS about himself. But like when it came down to it, he protected the power and privileges of the white ruling class. Like when it came down to it, that’s what he was about. And so, you know, the spectrum has to be Rejiggered somehow. Clearly, we can’t continue down this current path that we’re on. Something’s got to break. And so how things will shake out ideologically after that break or whether we’ll even have a functioning democracy after that break is, to me, very much open the air.
Aldyen Donnelly: I totally share your concerns, but I think it’s more extreme than that. And I say this as an outsider. I’m not an American, but – You know, except for a couple of exceptions, every major, at least on the air, not so much on the water side, every major environmental law or regulation that’s been introduced in the United States since 1965 was signed by a Republican president or governor. You know, Nixon created the EPA and signed the first Clean Air Act into law. Reagan approved the amendments in 1984 to the Clean Air Act that made it possible to contemplate cap and trade and lead allowance trading.
David Roberts: I think that was Elder Bush who did that.
Aldyen Donnelly: Elder Bush did the 1990 amendments, which furthered it. And if you look back, I can only find two Northeast U. S. Reggie Market, that was Pataki who shepherded that whole thing through Schwarzenegger.
Ross Kenyon: Those acid rain markets, yes?
Aldyen Donnelly: Acid rain was George Bush Sr. and some of the most interesting and first ever emission performance standards in the United States, Bill Weldon and John Cellucci in Massachusetts. So strangely enough and counterintuitively enough from the outside, at the end of the day, it’s that center right side that has actually delivered on some major moves. And if they’re not there anymore, that’s a really huge vacuum.
David Roberts: That’s a common sentiment and I push back on it. I think people take the lesson from that, that Republicans used to be genuinely motivated and I just don’t think that’s true. Nixon didn’t give a damn about EPA or the Clean Air Act or any of it. He was trying to get foreign policy concessions out of a Democratic-controlled Congress. It goes down the same if you look at the details of Reagan and the details of The elder George Bush maybe was squishier than the others, which is why he’s basically subsequently been banished from the party as a heretic.
But like for the most part, these were concessions Republican administrations made to Democrats who wanted them. Like Democrats wanted these things and Republicans conceded as part of a deal. So I think the lesson to learn from that is not that Republicans used to be Passionate environmentalists are used to genuinely care about this stuff. I really don’t think they ever did. It’s just that compromise and dealmaking used to be possible. And that was often the shape it took. And that was often an area where dealmaking was possible because it hadn’t been quite as polarized as everything else.
And so it still had a little bit of a sheen of like, This kind of bipartisan Washington-y kind of thing. And what’s happened is just everything’s gotten polarized. And as the country has sorted into these two armed camps, the cost of cooperation has risen and risen and you just can’t do it anymore. And that’s become polarized like everything else. I really don’t like that narrative.
Ross Kenyon: Do you buy that, Aldyen? I’m sure there are cases where it was just log rolling and that’s what happened.
Aldyen Donnelly: I don’t think we’re in disagreement. I don’t think I was saying the Republicans lost the love of the environment. I’m just saying there was a rational center right. And you’ve got one explanation, I might have another, but there was an ability to compromise. And I’m just saying the track record shows that. And yeah, I’m terrified that seems to have been lost for whatever reason.
David Roberts: It’s structural reasons though. That’s just the thing I emphasize over and over again. It wasn’t that like we’re better people back then. It was just structurally things have changed. And the main thing that has changed is this A is demographic sorting of people into these two camps and B the shrinking of when the sort of white suburban and rural men started. And their nuclear family wives in their Christian churches were comfortably in charge, clearly and comfortably in charge. They were more inclined to make concessions, right? It’s easier to be magnanimous when you’re clearly in charge.
But the more it shrinks and the more it becomes in charge. Threatened with actually becoming horrors just another demographic among other demographics with no more power or privilege than any other demographic. Horrors of horrors. They freaked out. And that’s what we’re watching now is it turns out that power and privilege and hegemony was always the white hot core generation. And as they are threatened, you see more and more clearly that’s what they will take to the walls to defend. Everything else they’ll throw overboard.
Ross Kenyon: I’m going to say a tricky sentence, but I was reading Mein Kampf.
David Roberts: Wait a minute.
Ross Kenyon: Quoted out of context against me forever, which everyone likes to point to that book by saying like, oh, economic difficulties leads to... And then the Austrian Empire is looking around saying like, all these nationalisms are becoming more and more powerful. So how do you make this jump from one cultural group dominating a multi-ethnic or multinational state to one? How do you stick that landing? I don’t know. They did not do it in Central Europe.
David Roberts: Ask me a harder question.
Ross Kenyon: You made this point on political climate, though, and I really like that, too. I think that is a very good model for what is happening now.
David Roberts: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m not the first person to say this, but what we’re trying to do and have been... Right. Right. Right. In which the privileges of democracy were extended to white people and everybody else was other, was extra, was marginal, was thrown overboard in times of stress. So now demographics are pushing us to the point where we really need to create a genuine multi-ethnic democracy with no particular subculture on top. And as far as I can tell, there There has never been such a thing in the world and it’s honestly an open question whether it’s possible, like whether human beings are capable of genuinely living together with no relationship of cultural dominance between them.
I mean, I don’t know and look at how we’re flailing around. It’s clearly not easy.
Ross Kenyon: Is there any I can maybe roam by some metrics?
Aldyen Donnelly: You know, you’re making me, and I’m feeling bad here because I can’t remember the author, but you’ve made me flash in my head a book called, I remember it was called something like The Economics of Empire. And whoever this brilliant economist was, whose name I can’t remember, analyzed the life of empires and formed some conclusions about Signals about when an empire is coming to an end. And Rome was one of the case studies. The interesting thing, he said many things, but I’ll never forget. One of the interesting things he more or less said, this is me paraphrasing, was that when the ultra rich is 2% of the population, they don’t forget the other 98% has to be Eating and sleeping well for them to stay rich.
But again, my version of what he said is, but when 30% of the population can afford to not go to work every day and live behind gates, that’s when you get a revolution. Because they forget how dependent they are on everybody else. And it wasn’t about color or race. It was about that disconnect.
David Roberts: Also, they’re not necessarily stuck in the same country anymore, right? I mean, the modern rich have become this sort of rootless, you know, they live in a kind of a global country of richness almost like that most of us never glimpse.
Ross Kenyon: Is it like that 30 Rock joke of being like, I’ll tell you that secret country that only other rich people know?
Aldyen Donnelly: This wonderful book, the author of which I can’t remember, just really hits home. The memory of it hits home for me today. He was right on, I thought.
David Roberts: It all comes down to – I mean, to me, if there’s a skeleton key to all this, the health of a culture and a society and an economy all comes down to – Social trust, what political scientists call social trust. You need some baseline level of trust that the institutions and people that are running society are meaningfully part of something that you are also part of, right? That you’re part of a meaningful... And that they are working on your behalf. And what’s happened is, as this sorting has happened in the US, you know, I’ve written about this a million times, but the conservative movement stopped trusting those institutions and people.
And moreover, mounted a massive multi-decade sort of propaganda effort to destroy trust in those institutions, to convince their entire, you know, whatever, 30% of the country it is, that you cannot trust journalism. It’s not... It’s unbiased information that’s meant to apply to everyone equally. It’s just the other side that’s against you posing as an unbiased institution. And that’s true of science and it’s true of government and it’s true of academia. You can’t trust any of these things. Institutions. The only people you can trust are us, your fellow conservatives who are inside the bubble with you.
And if you just have 30% to 40% of the country that fundamentally doesn’t trust institutions, and this is in the context of a broader loss of trust in institutions that Gallup and Pew and everybody’s measuring for years, trust in all sorts of institutions is declining and declining. And it’s just... That hampers your ability to do anything or even to solve the problem it’s creating, right? Because the tools you have are institutions and rules and laws. And if people, you know, we’re getting really dangerously close, like... Days away close to Donald Trump’s executive branch saying to Congress, yeah, you appropriated this money, but we don’t care.
Screw you. We’re not going to spend it on what you said to spend it on. We’re going to defy what army do you have? You can’t make us. And the only thing that’s making the executive branch do what the legislative branch says is a bunch of They’ve written laws and norms and understandings and they don’t have, there’s no army to enforce them. You either trust them and live by them or you don’t. And if you don’t, then it’s just like all against all, which is kind of, it seems like what they want.
Aldyen Donnelly: It’s interesting. Oh, this is horrible because this same economist that I can’t remember.
Ross Kenyon: She’s got to look this guy up for me.
Aldyen Donnelly: Also said that If you look at sort of the standard idea of demand supply and rational allocation of resources, that there is not one empire in history that actually the actual economy matched that model. But he said that if you understood society bound around one driving goal, it doesn’t have to be a good goal or a bad goal, just one driving goal, and you assume that resources would be over-allocated to achieving that goal, whether that’s conquering all the other nations around you or... That you could understand the economy and the social interaction.
And the same guy in the 70s said that his take was that if that goal disappeared, either because they achieved it or they abandoned it, societies had 20 to 30 years to bound around a new common goal. And if they didn’t, the empire is going to die. And I wonder if that’s part of what we’re seeing right now.
David Roberts: Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power that the Cold War had to bind us And wanting to defeat communism. Yeah. I mean, it was a spine along which all of domestic and foreign policy was organized. It was a shared imperative. And looking back on it, I think the material circumstances did not justify the sort of hysteria that the U. S. felt about communism. But it did – I mean, conservatives – People particularly have just been bereft since it was over. They’ve just been flailing around. This is what it makes you realize.
People are just not suited to like, oh, we conquered the dragon. We’re just going to go home and garden and live peacefully. People are not built to do that, particularly, I think, people of a conservative. We tried drug dealers for a while. I remember we were going to behead drug dealers. And then 9-11 came and it was like saving conservative. They’re like, oh yes, finally like another giant global mega bad guy to orient around. But it didn’t really work. It wasn’t suited to the job and it kind of fell apart because they were so crude and crass in their attempts to do it.
But now, and this is my greatest fear, is like now what they’ve found as the big bad to orient around is libs, is the other half of their own country. Like that’s what they’ve finally identified as the true enemy. And if you look at like Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard, you know, where he does the thing where he connects everyone. He shows you like all these bad guys are just one bad guy. It’s a global liberal movement. They’re connected with Islamists and communists and atheists. Atheists and like pedophiles, like you name it.
It’s all the bad guys are one big lump of bad guy. And the heart of it all is this other party in your own country. Like you just can’t, if you believe that truly in your heart as, and if you watch Fox eight hours a day, year after year, you will eventually believe it through the sheer power of repetition. You like, you’re not going to, You’re not going to accept that a Democrat could be elected president. It’s not just like, oh, you’ll lose the reins of policymaking for a few years.
It’s like, oh my God, the country you love and the cultural tradition of modernity and Western civilization is going to crumble. With stakes that high, you can’t worry about the niceties of democracy and fairness and all this. That’s what right-wing media has done is work that entire process. Faction of the country into this state of like heightened existential terror such that normal politics, I mean, if you accept the factual premises, normal politics are horrendously immoral. Like if you really think the country is going to on the verge of destruction, it really is immoral to reach out a hand of cooperation to these sort of godless heathens that are trying to kill you.
Like, of course you wouldn’t, you know, like so you just can’t. With that as your enemy. So a lot of people, to pull this to my familiar ground, a lot of people in the climate world have, I think, idly hoped or speculated or wondered whether the fight against climate change could serve that purpose. I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: This is what I was going to ask about too. And it’s one of the things that I most like about the Green New Deal is that it has this potential just sort of built into it.
David Roberts: Purposefully designed to be this giant national purpose that we’re missing.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, sure. In terms of an imaginary, it’s perfect, right? It goes back to the New Deal. It’s sort of set up for this national mission. Of course, the New Deal is anathema to half the country. But the Marshall Plan is a better one. The Apollo program, even better. But the New Deal is what we’ve settled on for reasons. There’s some strategists out there who landed on this. It’s like, this is the thing.
David Roberts: It’s pretty popular. It’s a small, I mean, these people who hate everything that happened post like 1912 or whatever, relatively small.
Ross Kenyon: Like the Lochner era. Yes.
David Roberts: Although I used to think all these things were sort of like obscure fringe doctrines, but geez, if they’re not like... Bumping right up into the mainstream now. We’ve got all these judges on the federal bench now who very much believe that nonsense. So I don’t want to rule anything out. But this is like the most horrible, cynical thing I could say. But I just don’t think that, especially if you’re of a certain kind of psychology, I just don’t think an impersonal, global, incremental problem that everyone is implicated in creating and responsible for and bear some moral culpability for is a suitable candidate.
Like ultimately, people need people to hate. And climate change doesn’t really provide the villains that would really stir the gut.
Ross Kenyon: It’s hard to tell a story that’s – is this Platoon? It’s like we have seen the enemy and he is us.
David Roberts: No, that was the little Abner or whatever that stupid cartoon was. I don’t know. I think it’s Platoon. We’ll have to Google that too.
Aldyen Donnelly: But I wonder – and I’ve been working on the Climate Change File for 30 years, so I’m talking about me, not other people. I wonder if we’ve maybe – Put too much emphasis on personal culpability. I’m old, and there used to be a story that we always heard, which is there was a little lady who lived in a shoe, had too many children, didn’t know what to do. We didn’t all step back and say, you know, the shoe, like the earth, is a fixed size. We didn’t in those days say, well, what an idiot.
She had too many kids. It was her, you know, it was how do you fit in the shoe? And how do we get stuck on, you’re an idiot. You know, it’s not your fault the shoe’s a fixed size. How do we fit in the shoe?
David Roberts: I mean, I think this goes beyond climate. I mean, one of the things, a discussion that the left is trying to have is sort of, let’s develop a more sophisticated discussion about, say, for instance, misogyny, right? Like, let’s not reduce it to a person consciously thinking, golly, I hate women, ergo, I’m going to do X. Let’s think of it instead as sort of A structural – a structure that you’re operating in that you can perpetuate without ever consciously thinking a negative thing about women. Just by going along and living in the system, you’re perpetuating a misogynist system and you are – and you – Bear some responsibility for that, even if you never had a negative conscious thought in your head about women.
And that notion that we are implicated in systems and in a sense bear some collective responsibility for them, even if we did not have a personal conscious hand in creating them, and that we’re morally obliged to act to dislodge those systems, even if we’re not guilty of any particular... Crime within that system, that almost more than anything else is what the current hardcore right rejects. They hate that idea above all else. The idea that just by being white people, they have blood on their hands. Even if they’ve never done anything bad to a person of another color, that is a horrific thought to them.
And they’ll never accept it. And for the very same reason, I think, like, I just don’t know that we can address climate change without growing up and internalizing this notion that sort of like we’re acting to perpetuate and encourage a system that is destroying the future for future generations and are morally culpable for doing so even if we like – Have, you know, hemp tote bags in a Prius. No one really likes that. But why else are you going to act? Like, why else would you sacrifice? Why else would you get worked up and go out and do stuff if you’re not responsible?
Like, let somebody else solve it. You know what I mean? So I just feel like that’s part of like humanity. Growing up is getting a more sophisticated sense of what our collective actions are doing, because it’s only recently that there’s even enough of us that we have these massive, massive collective effects that are way beyond what we can even barely understand, much less feel a sense of ownership of.
Ross Kenyon: Well, we’re not really taught to think that way. I just read that book, White Fragility, which is the same thing too, where it’s like, I’ve never done anything, races I don’t use these words. I don’t do these things, but it’s bigger than that. And if that’s your only lens for understanding how race operates, you’re probably missing a fair chunk. So you think this applies to climate change too?
David Roberts: Yes. And it’s like, if my racism is all unconscious, right? I can’t be held responsible for it. Gotcha, libs. What are you going to do? That can’t be the end of it, right? As long as I am not self-reflective and do not come to own my own psychic landscape, then I can remain morally untouched and unculpable. That just can’t be where things end. And yes, climate is very much like that. We’re all struggling to come to terms with this notion that the way we’ve been living is, in fact, this giant gathering moral crime that we’re all implicated in, even though...
No one individual of us is particularly responsible for creating it. We’re all, in a sense, just operating in what we’re born in. Everybody, through all of time, is just operating what they’re born in. But collectively, we’ve done this. So, like, I really view climate change as like... This sort of ultimate lesson that we have to make. We have to come to terms with being able to think like this. Because if we keep thinking the old way, like I’m only responsible for what I did, like we’re just never going to solve collective problems.
And as population grows and we become... More giant, like there’s more and more of these collective problems, these sort of, you know, tragedy of the commons kind of problems. Like most of the big problems now facing humanity take that shape, like climate and the spread of disease and like economic, like everything’s global now. No one’s particularly at fault, but we’ve nonetheless all got to take some responsibility and act together or they’ll just get worse and worse. Like we’ve got to figure out how to do that on climate and a bunch of other stuff.
Ross Kenyon: At the start of this, before we started recording, I told David our outline for this show, and he says, there’s no way this is going to fit in an hour, and your prediction is proving true. So I’m going to move us along, because there’s still a lot we want to cover. Carbon removal, you’ve been writing a lot about, in particular, carbon cap Capturing utilization, but broadly carbon removal, capturing CO2 or other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, storing them or using them in some way. You had interesting takes on this.
Aldyen, you are an expert on this too. I sort of want to, I’m going to lightly steer this, but why don’t we let David want to introduce what you’ve been writing about on the topic and I’ll let you guys dive in from there.
David Roberts: Sure. Well, what initially pulled me into it is just finding out about this kind of growing notion of carbon utilization. So I was, you know, obviously, I think everybody’s familiar at this point with capturing it out of the air and burying it in the ground. Carbon capture and sequestration is a big deal. It’s in all the reports, etc. But this notion of capturing carbon and then using it in industrial processes is It was intriguing to me for a number of reasons because for one thing, if you capture it and bury it, that is all cost.
Top to bottom, it’s all cost. You’re not getting any benefit out of that except... This sort of tiny micro adjustment in the amount of carbon in the air, which will have effects, whatever, 50 years down the line. So to stand up an industry that does that is going to be almost all brute force. I can see Aldyen just growling over there, just ready to pounce. A market for using the CO2, this was my thinking going in, like if you create a viable market for the CO2, a use for it, that gives some financial incentive to capture it and thus might stimulate carbon capture, help stand it up, scale it up, bring costs down, et cetera, et cetera.
And so if I sort of got pulled into this, I sort of realized, as I’m sure you all are painfully aware, like once you pull a carbon string out, You find it attached to everything. So like the whole... I just ended up sort of thinking and writing about the entire kind of... Just thinking about the carbon... And just now we’re in a position where we can sort of purposefully intervene in the carbon cycle and manipulate it, not only in the digging up and burning, but also in the capturing and reusing or burying.
So the whole carbon cycle now, we more kind of have our hands on. So what do we do with it? And so there’s two things. The technical potential to me is one thing. The economics of it. Or a different thing. And then the political economy of it is, I think, an under-discussed third area.
Aldyen Donnelly: I want to hear your opinions, David. I’ve listened to a lot of your interviews over the years. And even the most recent one, you frequently bring up emission performance standard type ways of thinking. And I’ve been on the emission, the performance standard approach for 20 years too. And the interviewer never lets you actually say what you mean by that term. So I’d love this podcast to be the one- Weirdly, it doesn’t spark a lot of interest. Yeah, well, I want you to explain to our audience what you’re thinking of when you say those words, because I think that’s important.
David Roberts: Well, do you mean applied to carbon capture particularly or just in general?
Aldyen Donnelly: In general, in past podcasts, I’ve heard you comfortable putting it in on a utility market context, whatever way you want to do it.
David Roberts: I mean, sure, you can imagine. It’s just a sort of conceptual model that you can imagine applied to almost anything. It’s just sort of like, I think the ideal, if you ask like a wonks wonk, like what is the ideal mechanism policy? You want to... Fix the goal, right? Try to figure out what is your goal. And usually it’s not more or less of a particular technology or one or another business profiting. Usually your goal is just like, you know. Reduction in carbon or an increase for refrigerators. What do you want refrigerators to do?
You want them to provide the same amount of cooling with less energy. Make that your goal. Do not prescribe the means to get to the goal. Just make that the goal that everyone has to meet over time and then industries and people can compete with And find clever new ways of reaching that goal. But it only works if you reward companies based on their progress against that metric and not based on sort of like busy work. Like we have so many regulations in the US that just specify like X number of this technology and X number of that technology.
We want to double this technology or that technology. And all of it is like The third, fourth, fifth best, like it’s better than nothing. But like what you’d really want to do is just like fix the goal and then let people meet the goal however they want and reward them against the metric that you care about, not against these sort of other irrelevant metrics. That’s like the basic idea of performance standards. And they Have been like, talk to Hal Harvey, you know, who wrote a book on this recently. I interviewed him and they’ve worked incredibly, incredibly well.
And one variant of it, I like it, which is called the Home Runner program in Japan. I think it’s been slightly mythologized, but conceptually the idea is you set a, take whatever metric, right? Efficiency. Set a goal and then everyone who falls short of that goal pays a fine and the fines go as rewards to everyone who exceeds that goal, right? So you’re not taking any money out of the industry economically, you’re just circulating. And then in three years or five years or whatever, you take the new average that everyone has reached and make that the baseline and start the progress.
So what you have is this sort of perpetual improvement in performance with none of the sort of economic costs that people are constantly worrying about, like you’re pulling money out of this sector and giving it to other sectors, you’re distorting the market, whatever. You’re just creating a permanent performance incentive within that industry. And so you can sort of imagine like whatever your social goal is, whatever your metric is, whether it’s less carbon or less carbon per mile traveled in transportation or less energy consumed per square foot in buildings or whatever, pick your metric, like define your metric and then let And then let businesses compete to meet it.
That way you get the advantages of regulation, which are a fixed goal that you know you’ll hit, right? Also the advantages of, you know, sort of, quote unquote, market-based policies in that it’s not prescriptive. It allows experimentation. It allows people to try... It allows the cleverness of entrepreneurs. So to me, that’s always the policy sweet spot. The problem is that like for the very same reasons that performance standards are excellent policy, they’re not consistent. They’re very difficult to get by on a political economy basis, right? Because you’re very explicitly not rewarding any particular set of actors.
So you’re not going to have any particular set of actors supporting your policy, right? So it’s just very hard to politically organize around a policy that – Fairly and dispassionately imposes discipline on the whole industry. The whole industry is going to be at best ambivalent about it. So in political economy terms, all the incentives are for past policies that benefit particular industries or businesses and then they will support you. Right? I mean, that’s sort of like the transaction. So performance standards are difficult, but where they can be put in place, like, for instance, how Harvey is constantly citing California, you know, building codes.
Like, California now has the most efficient buildings in the state. And as he makes a point, he’s like, Jerry Brown passed that when he was the youngest governor in California history. And he never had to touch it again because it was set to just... Continually rise. It was set to rise automatically. And so he just set it and forget it. And it became this engine working in the background of the California economy, improving it sufficiently, cranking it, cranking it, cranking it. And you didn’t have to have a political fight every few years.
Right. You didn’t have to like relitigate it over and over again. The standard is just in the background set to auto kind of auto update. And it just it works its magic. And like as many of those things you can get running in the background of your economy, the better. That’s my performance standard shtick.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve talked about this quite a lot because Aldyen is a fan of that. We’ve actually, I mean, it’s come up on the podcast so many times. We talked to Joseph Mikit about it at Niscanon for, I think, like most of that episode that we ended up doing about whether performance standards or carbon taxes or carbon fees are the better way to go. How exactly would you employ something like a performance standard to decarbonize or even practice carbon removal broadly?
David Roberts: Well, they are sector specific and exactly how sector specific is in a sense a matter of judgment. So like building standards work, we could very much use better and tighter building standards, auto efficiency standards. I mean, this is a classic example. We have the weirdest like cafe standards are such a weird Rube Goldberg mechanism, but you could just as easily say like, This year, X amount of energy per mile traveled steadily rising into the future. And you guys do that however you want, right? You could even broaden it to be like, do it however you want.
You can do it through making vehicles or you can do it through designing. Transit systems or whatever, like how open to leave it is a matter of policy judgment. But there’s a million ways you could incentivize that. It’s an interesting question when applied to this whole carbon cycle of like, Capture and Reuse and Burial. Because doing performance standards well, the first thing they make you do is think, what is your goal? What is the metric? What is the proper goal here? Do we just, so for instance, like it would be easy to say for the carbon capture and reuse sector, we just want more carbon captured and reused.
Right. But that’s not necessarily true. There are, you know, it may be that it’s much cheaper to substitute away from steel than it is to decarbonize steel. Right. So maybe you don’t. Maybe you don’t just want more carbon captured and utilized in steelmaking. Maybe what you want is low carbon steel. Right. Which is a different performance standard, which says nothing about carbon capture. And carbon capture and reuse could just compete among other ways of reducing steel intensity, right? So it really makes you focus on what are you trying to achieve?
And I don’t think it’s right to conclude that what we want to achieve is just more capture and reuse of carbon. What we want is ultimately is lower carbon. Carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, right? Like that’s the ur goal here. That’s the goal at the end of this. So like work back from that and think about what you want out of carbon capture and reuse. I will say though that I don’t think performance standards, I think they’re great in many, many contexts, but I do think there are sometimes for political economy reasons and sometimes for technical reasons where just a big problem.
Like caveman club regulation is better than trying to get fancy. So for instance, what I would like to see happen and people have started talking about this and I might do a post on it. Just imagine telling oil and gas companies, for every ton of oil or gas you dig up, you bury a ton of carbon. Period. That’s not a performance standard. That’s just like, we say so because we say so. That would be a way to kickstart the carbon sequestration industry. You’re not paying them money. We’re actually serious about this.
We’re actually real.
Aldyen Donnelly: Please go for it. I think you’ll be surprised. In my world, I call that the no net new rule, no net new greenhouse gases.
David Roberts: Oh, good. We needed a good slogan for that.
Aldyen Donnelly: True story. Back in the early 2000s, I was doing some stuff with the city of Vancouver. I’m a past chair of their planning commission. And I decided I would take a risk of really, really angering the development community and suggested, you know, in our building permitting system at the city level, we should have a no net new rule. So I don’t care what the energy intensity per square meter and kind of square foot of building space you build, but it’s got to be net zero addition within the city boundaries. So whatever your increase in energy demand is, you have to figure out how to go Upgrade and modify existing building stock to no net new.
I do not care how you do it.
David Roberts: You can pull carbon out of your other buildings.
Aldyen Donnelly: Whatever you do. And these guys know about buildings. They’re the right guys to mobilize. And you can make as much profit as you want. It’s just no net new. And I gave that speech in, it was 2001, in front of a bunch of developers thinking I was going to get the coffee pot thrown at me. Do you know about once every six months for 10 years after that, three of the leading developers phone me up regularly to say, how are you going with the no net new? We figure that probably it’ll increase our development costs by maximum 10%, but we get where we want to get and we can probably negotiate a couple of other concessions out of the city to break even.
And they didn’t hate it.
David Roberts: And you’re not spending public money, right? Like this is the beauty of it. I want to redirect private money.
Aldyen Donnelly: Let’s go no net new. Come on.
David Roberts: Yeah, no net. I mean, I like this no net new. I’m going to apply it to all sectors now. But I absolutely think that should be the oil and gas producers should be required to do that as part of their social license. Like that should be part of their social license for operating is you only dig up as much as you bury. And I’d love to see it in the building sector too. I wonder how, I mean, I’m sure there are like technical issues I haven’t thought through, but I really love- That’s their problem.
I love that idea. But notice that particularly in carbon, you need really, really good tracking and reporting and verifying and monitoring, all of which require- Social trust, all of which very much implicates social trust. The key to any of this working is that there is a non-biased arbiter of where the carbon is and where it’s moving that can be trusted by all parties, right? To return to a previous theme.
Aldyen Donnelly: We’re running out of time, but you’re right about that. But I would want to offer the following. Whatever policy we’re all agreeing on or not, I think I learned a long time ago, is look at I have to step back and look at any policy recommendation I’m making and then say, okay, given that policy, is the last guy out of fossil fuels the big winner or the first guy out? Nine times out of 10, a policy that looks good to me until I ask that question. Oh, you mean like it incentivizes people to hold out for- If you implement this policy, is the guy who’s first to make at home the big winner in the competitive market Or is the guy who’s the last guy out the big winner?
Right now, if you look at the whole UN global cap and trade deal, we have created a construct where the guy who gets to be in the fossil fuel business the longest is the big winner. It’s the opposite of what we need out of our design.
David Roberts: Yeah, we do need to incentivize first movers. One point I’d want to make before we finish that I always want to make about this, which I feel like is on one hand sort of so obvious as to be not worth saying, but on the other hand, I feel like it’s sort of ignored and doesn’t really get acknowledged. So- Now, how much... You end up with carbon sequestration. How much carbon sequestration you sort of shove into your model to still get your happy ending. I mean, that’ll be an industry in itself.
But in terms of like, even if we’re burying a bunch of carbon, that’s not an excuse to continue generating it, right? That’s a panicked response to the carbon we’ve already emitted in the previous century. So there’s just no... Happy story about oil and gas production in a carbon neutral world. And I just feel like that’s so obvious. But like the entire Republican approach right now to climate policy is sort of based on this happy talk that oil and gas producers can be partners in this effort and that they can be healthy and profit from it and that we can all get along.
That’s just not true. Even if they start varying carbon, even if you do all these things everybody wants to do, even if natural gas, you know, does turn out to be necessary for a few hundred years.
Unknown speaker: I love it when people start that way.
Aldyen Donnelly: I don’t think it’s about killing the companies. You know, I’m old. I’m 65. When I was a kid, the first credit card my dad had was one credit card. It was the home oil credit card. And he used that credit card to pay the guy who drove up the tanker to fill the oil tank to heat our home and also used it to fill up his car at the gas pump. The big oil and gas companies are fuel companies. If we get this right, they’ll transition to energy companies, and they’re not going to be doing something new.
They’re going to go back to what they did, which is be integrated energy service companies, and they’re going to go back to competing in the electricity and heat markets. Back to the old model of being an integrated energy supplier, which is going to lead to real disruption in the regulated electricity market. So let’s start thinking that through.
David Roberts: And at the end of that road, though, they’re not going to be the sort of globe-bestriding giants they are today. There’s just like the nature of oil is like... So geography dependent and so geopolitics dependent and so dependent on giant, giant, giant capital expenditures that only a sort of rarefied number of companies can make. But the energy business of the future is going to be much more disaggregated and distributed in a matter of sort of like Aggregating tonnes of small stuff rather than finding one giant pool of oil into the ground, which just means that no one’s going to be able to have the same sort of market dominating position, I think.
So I totally think that the companies will exist, that they can find a way to transition through this, but they’re not going to be like an Exxon today.
Aldyen Donnelly: They’re not going to, in political economy terms and just sheer economic terms, they’re never going to match the sort of All I got to say is I hope you’re right, but a lot of it depends on how we react because this is those big companies moving into what we traditionally see as a rate regulated industry and we need to get ahead of that thought so we’re debating and thinking through what it means. But in every sector in all history, Long-term corporate survival relies on self-cannibalization. I mean, Coca-Cola bought Minute Maid orange juice.
That’s reality, so let’s just take that as a given. So what do we do given we know that’s the given here?
Ross Kenyon: I was reading your articles on this and I felt a little called out as naive or Pollyanna about it because we do try to see the silver lining and say oil and gas companies will become direct air capture companies. They will be storing carbon dioxide in the saline reservoirs. They have the talent. They have the technology. They will be making this transition, we think. And big ag companies will go from being gigantic emitters to practicing regeneratively at large scales and pulling this in.
David Roberts: That seems even more Pollyannish to me.
Ross Kenyon: It will happen to some degree. The degree to which it does and the time scales is different.
David Roberts: Yes. Well, that’s what I mean about the big caveman club, right? At a certain point, the time is so short that you don’t have time to be fancy. You need to send an unmistakable signal.
Ross Kenyon: Am I being a bit too rosy-goggled, Aldyen?
David Roberts: I think it’s really interesting to look at the auto business right now because we’re sort of seeing this play out in real time. Like are the big auto companies just going to become electric car companies in the future? Or are they so committed to certain ways of doing things and certain costs and certain sort of like commitments to their existing fleets that they’re just going to be caught flat-footed by companies like Tesla that can just do a pure EV play and build We leapfrog a lot of the sort of bureaucratic and organizational steps that giant companies will have to take.
And that’s sort of like, we don’t really know yet. Like that hasn’t settled out yet. Like Tesla’s kicking their A’s, but like all of them are getting ready to go big time into a little bit. So it’ll be really interesting to see sort of like what, like does Tesla become one of them? Does one of them eventually, does Elon Musk eventually sell to one of them? Like I’m very curious how that plays out because it’s sort of like a kind of a little bit of an advance look at what’s going to happen to lots of other industries too, right?
Sort of like big incumbents struggle to swing, to turn their ocean liners in a different direction Again, I wish we could re-find our history.
Aldyen Donnelly: I mean, we let American Motors go down. We let Kodak go down. We have a lot of history that tells us there’s change. Why have we forgotten that’s part of real life, even if we’re not talking about climate change?
Ross Kenyon: The companies that I named, too, are the sectors. Their reputations are not always so sterling, whereas those car companies or Kodak, did anyone have very mean things to say about them in their times of trouble?
Aldyen Donnelly: You know, as my grandmother used to say, life ain’t fair and then you die.
David Roberts: Well, let me ask you guys about this because here’s my big question I have, you know, I criticize Republican climate efforts and I get the same pushback every time, which is sort of, yes, it’s not enough. Yes, blah, blah, blah. But they’re like starting to move and they’re bringing oil and gas companies to the table. And shouldn’t you be on the sidelines just swinging your pom poms around and encouraging all this? And from where I’m sitting, it looks like Republicans have entered this fray. Not because they are suddenly gripped by the danger of climate change, but because they are suddenly gripped by the danger of climate policy to their giant donors.
That’s why they’re getting off the sidelines, right? That’s why they’re activating.
Ross Kenyon: Or being reelected.
David Roberts: To protect the interests of their giant oil and gas donors. So there’s a certain amount you can travel down this road that both serves your big oil and gas donors and serves climate change. Right. And it basically like it’s carbon capture, like it’s carbon capture and sequestration. So once they hit that, the end, you know, where they have to go right or left, which is. Are they serious about it? My guess is they are going to defend oil and gas companies to the final tooth and nail. And by allowing oil and gas companies to position themselves as helpful partners in this and allowing Republicans to position themselves as a helpful partner in this, you’re just increasing the political power Of entities that are going to fight you in the end.
And is that even if you’re getting some short term gain policy wise, political economy wise, you are strengthening people who don’t want you to succeed. So this is like faces you guys much more than me. Like to what extent are you nervous about empowering people that ultimately don’t share your longer term goals?
Aldyen Donnelly: You have to be disciplined and I think ask how do we encourage everybody to do the right thing and not get hung up on whether or not they’re doing it for the right reasons. And for me, the historical precedent that is a much simpler context is a very important lesson is that if you look at across the whole developed world and our big air pollution reduction success stories, lead out of gasoline, sulfur, out of diesel, ozone depleting substances out of the refrigerant chemicals, Every one of those precedents and many others, when our objective was to reduce emissions, we didn’t regulate emissions.
We regulated what we used to call the pollution precursor content in the supply chain. After me being a world-leading advocate for cap and trade, it took me 25 years to look back and say, guess what? The efficient way to get virgin fossil carbon, so you’re getting credit for recycled, out of the energy and building product supply chain, Is to order reductions on the sales portfolio average virgin carbon content in the supply chain. And every one of our success stories said to suppliers, take the pollution precursor out, did not allocate entitlements to emit to other guys out here.
Why aren’t we possibly considering the regulatory model that has always worked for us?
David Roberts: Well, here’s another example for your listeners to contemplate very much along the same lines, the same structure of the situation, which I’m writing a post about now, which is why I’m sort of interested in it, is this sort of fight over decarbonizing buildings, right? So the natural gas industry, natural gas utilities right now are saying... We can generate natural gas from landfills and biodigesters, whatever. We can create renewable natural gas, inject that into pipelines, thus lowering the carbon intensity of the gas. And in doing that, we can reduce emissions faster and cheaper than you can by trying to electrify buildings, by trying to switch out all these natural gas furnaces for electric heat pumps.
And so there’s just this sort of thicket of political economy questions like in one sense, if what you most care about is the cost effectiveness of that first increment of carbon reduction. They have a point. But if your ultimate goal is to get to zero carbon, there is no natural gas path to zero carbon. No one in the world thinks that there’s enough renewable natural gas to substitute for all the stuff we use for natural gas for now. So if your goal is just reductions in emissions, it’s one thing. If your goal is getting to Zero is the other thing.
And if you empower natural gas companies to become renewable natural gas companies, you just invest them and you’re getting some early and relatively cheap emission reductions. But at the cost of empowering entities that are four square against your larger goal, which is getting to zero, right? So we’re facing this dilemma over and over again is to what extent do we Allow these sort of bad actors to come into the fold and be partners. It’s just like there are ups and downs to it. If you empower them, they might use that power in ways you don’t like later on.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a real risk and one that I haven’t considered to the depth that I now realize that I should be thinking about the political economy of these decisions. Your original question, though, I might poke on a little bit because it’s framed in this way that Do you think this...
David Roberts: No, I think that the kind of person who is self-consciously a bad guy is very, very, very rare. Almost no one who’s doing bad things thinks of themselves as a person who’s doing bad things. They all have a story about why their bad things are good things. And I’m sure every one of these Republicans has a story they tell themselves about why what they’re doing is ultimately in the public interest or ultimately, you know, like... None of them are getting out of bed going like, what can I do today to defend the oil and gas companies?
It’s just that, you know, what is this stupid Upton Sinclair quote that’s become a cliche by now, but like you can’t talk someone out of a position when his making money depends on having that position and sort of like if – Being a Republican in good standing requires, practically speaking, being in the good graces of these giant companies, then you have an enormous incentive to make up a story for yourself where, lo and behold, you being good and defending the oil and gas companies, hey, they fit right together. Just like weird how that works out, right?
So no, they’re not like comic book villains. They’re just self-deluded like all of us human beings.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Well, that being the case, I may be naive or I am willing to accept the possibility that I may be naive. I hope that there’s enough of an upside where you can show companies or maybe they won’t exist in this exact configuration they’re in now. They probably will have to Quick, appear to be doing something.
David Roberts: I should add as a note, though, just so I don’t come off as excessively partisan, although I’m fine being seen as excessively partisan, but I should say that this notion of I’m telling myself that I’m fighting climate change, but if you analyze my actions from outside... It looks more like what I’m doing is like pushing universal health care, right? Or like trying to strengthen it. This is like on the liberal side, you know, there’s plenty of people on the liberal side who also are defending their more sort of proximate interests under the guise of climate change and telling themselves stories about what they’re doing.
This is not a thing that’s only conservatives are subject to, you know, it’s very like reducing carbon and eliminating climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Are you saying like the Naomi Klein sort of?
David Roberts: Literally all human beings are subject to these things. Reducing carbon and climate change is such an abstract, distant thing. So distant from our personal lives is very, very difficult. It takes a lot of intellectual and emotional self-discipline to stay focused on that and to make that the deciding metric of your decisions. It’s very easy to sort of convince yourself that your priors, your political priors, like I wanted universal health care before I ever knew climate change existed. Naturally, I’m going to be inclined to think that like ensuring people’s health care is an important part of getting comprehensive climate change.
I actually do think that, but I need to remain open to the fact that, oh, it’s awfully convenient for me that my priors line up with this. I need to have some degree of self-examination and self-criticism. We need to build that in. It’s not just... Conservatives have sort of worked themselves into this little epistemological bubble now where there’s no self-correction, no self-criticism left, no mechanisms of self-restraint left, but they’re not the only ones who are subject to that basic tendency. All of us need to check one another and check ourselves and make sure that we’re really focused on this big thing and we’re not just sort of letting ourselves think that We’re serving this big thing when actually we’re serving a lot of other things that are closer to us and more meaningful to us.
So I just wanted to make the point that it’s not like only Republicans have cognitive and emotional blind spots. It’s a human phenomenon.
Ross Kenyon: Sure. And this comes up all the time. And I respect when people do that. And I try to hold myself to that same standard. And we like Jonathan Haidt’s work, too. I’m sure you’ve read him. It sounds like you at least have for these moral tribes kind of comments that you’re making.
David Roberts: Yeah, I’m not a huge hate fan for reasons that are way too complicated to get into here, but that’s definitely the spirit of the thing. And also, I have a certain personality or temperament that’s going to incline me in certain directions rather than other directions. But are those necessarily objectively the best directions for climate? I just need... Someone to check me and self-correct. Like if there’s any reason that the conservatives in the US have spun off into lunacy, it’s that they took these institutions that are basically built to do that kind of collective self-correction and self-examination and sort of like...
Checking these tendencies, they divorced themselves from those institutions and created these sort of like funhouse mirror institutions, quote unquote think tanks, quote unquote science institutes, like quote unquote journalism outlets that were just purely devoted to telling them what they wanted to hear. Right. They took the self-correction and self-checking out of it and spun off into politics. La La Land, it’s just as important for everybody to keep those institutions that check us and that offer some like, you know, science being sort of the classic example, like individual scientists are humans. They’re subject to cognitive flaws and blind spots like everybody else.
But collectively, the operation, the procedure of science has this collective self-checking, this collective self-examination so that it doesn’t just spin off into like self-indulgence. And we all need to keep those institutions Healthy if we can. And we all need to like keep that role of institutions in mind. And we all need to keep in mind that we all of us are subject to sort of spinning off into these self-indulgent, you know, things that are just sort of serving our own priors. And we all need to like help correct and guide one another toward this sort of larger, more important goal.
Ross Kenyon: All right, I’m about to check you right now. This is a question that we like to ask and sometimes forget to ask, who’s the smartest person you disagree with? Or who’s like the best conservative or libertarian or someone that you just don’t like that you’re just like, ah, that’s a great point. I hate you.
David Roberts: Well, this is a tricky question because what is generally considered the other side for me, i. e. U. S. conservatism, No longer really has ideological positions as such. Their position is our demographic should stay in charge of things because we want to. So that’s not really like an intellectual proposition that one can agree with or disagree with.
Ross Kenyon: You’re not passing my check there, David.
David Roberts: But insofar as this sort of like libertarian instincts survive, they still... Nag me and check me and like they still like they still nip at my heels. Let’s put it that way. So like I think that the people at the Niskanen Center are like are just fantastic. I think so highly of them. I say I think so highly of what they’re doing. And it seems like Will Wilkinson and Jerry, all those guys at the Niskan Center seem to be doing what people ought to do, which is like, let’s go back to first principles and then let’s work up from there to where it gets.
Let’s not just sort of accept like what the conservative movement tells us. Let’s start back at our first principles and build up from there. And so like, for instance, like Will does all this work where like if you like freedom, even economic freedom. You look around the world like what countries have rate highly in economic freedom. It’s big welfare states, right? It’s like it’s people who they have low regulation relative to the US. There’s less meddlesome regulation. But there’s a lot more income redistribution. So that’s just one example. So the thing that worries me coming from that crowd is this notion of regulatory capture, this notion that once you start doing industrial policy, because I’m a big fan of industrial policy, and I do not think we’re going to solve this without it, but the threat of regulatory capture around industrial policy, the threat of the businesses you’re trying to encourage, You starting to encourage their welfare rather than the goal you originally took, right, is very real and is operative today and is worth.
So like that philosophy, I don’t necessarily share, but it’s got lots of good points that prevent me from sort of like 100% agreeing with myself. I only agree with myself like 90% on a good day. And that’s one of the reasons.
Aldyen Donnelly: I don’t want to be taking the last word, but I want to remind ourselves to not get stuck. First of all, I said go to the past and see what worked, and now I’m going to say the opposite, not get stuck in the past. Over the last 15 years, which OECD nations have now the largest private debt as a percent of disposable household income and the fastest growing private debt as a percent of disposable household income, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland are in the top seven who privatized their K-12 education and introduced the same voucher system that even the American conservatives rejected, Sweden.
Let’s be careful about maybe the thought that they’re getting it right.
David Roberts: Well, I think the lesson there is insofar as they’re getting everything right, it’s not necessarily because they’re doctrinaire leftists. It’s because they still have a foundation of social trust that they’re working on. They still have a citizenry that more or less feels like they’re all in it together. And if you have that in place, a wide range of different policies can work, right? And if you don’t have that in place... No policy, no matter how clever, can work. So I really think that like that is what distinguishes successful countries’ polities from unsuccessful ones is that more than anything else is the presence of social trust.
So I really think it’s incumbent on us as we’re witnessing the sort of like apotheosis of this movement designed to destroy social trust. Donald Trump out there deliberately trying to destroy it because he hates the idea of it. He wants loyalty to him, right? Loyalty to him and his tribe. And social trust works against that almost intrinsically. So we need to think about how to remember social trust, how to foster it, how to recover it. And when we pass policies and create institutions and reform institutions, we need to do it with that explicitly in mind.
And I think if we can like rekindle a little bit of that, we’ll find that like Lots of different ways of approaching this could ultimately work if we’re all in it together. And the one other point I’d make, maybe I guess by way of conclusion is climate has been so much the province of scientists and wonks for so long, mainly just because it took forever for the US political system to sort of take it seriously or take it on board. Only now is it really like Just starting to take it on board.
So like one thing that scientists and wonks have in common is they’re very like left brained. They’re very rational. They like things that are like neat and tidy intellectually and like sort of structurally. That’s why they all love frigging carbon tax. That’s why they all worship the carbon taxes because there’s just something sort of intellectually satisfying about how clean it is that you just tweak this one thing. Variable in the rest of the changes you want. Just cascade out of that without the government having to meddle and force it to happen.
It’s just like intellectually very appealing for a certain kind of person. And so I just think it’s worth remembering that this is a point I make over and over again is that if we are going to solve this problem, the scale of the problem and the speed at which we need to act more or less preclude the An orderly, intellectually satisfying process of getting there, like big collectives moving fast in ways that change fundamental social and economic sort of underlying structures is going to be messy. There’s going to be lots of wasted motion.
There’s going to be lots of Fighting and distractions. There’s going to be a lot of idiocy. There’s going to be lots of things that you have to do, even though they’re from a policy perspective suboptimal because you need to satisfy people’s anxieties and you need to satisfy these sort of social fears. It’s just going to be a messy, messy, ugly process. And we just need to remember that how bad... The problem is and how urgent and necessary changing it is and just maybe like increase our tolerance for messiness and accept suboptimal policies, accept half measures, just like get progress wherever we can, just like get over this idea that we’re going to solve it with like a spreadsheet.
You know, there’s going to be like one policy tool that like just rides to the rescue. It’s going to be it’s going to be messy.
Ross Kenyon: I fall victim to that too. I like the, I want the clean and orderliness of it, but we’ll have to talk about this some other time. I’m sure our paths will cross here in Seattle. I imagine you want to send people to Vox to view your work.
David Roberts: Sure, sure.
Ross Kenyon: Because you are Dr. Vox.
David Roberts: Fine. I prescribe to take a Vox, take a Vox article and call me in the morning.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, at DRVox. David Roberts, thank you for being here.
David Roberts: Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: And Aldyen, thank you for popping by as well.
Aldyen Donnelly: Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: And if you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or on Stitcher. Tell your friends and thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot to get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we’re doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we’d certainly appreciate your rating and review. You can keep up We are also now on Patreon at patreon.
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