I feel this was aimed at me! I still think there was/are attempts to pile too many goals/policies on "energy transition." But, wow, she clearly "worked the problem(s)" where she was. I get the idea that she was mostly working with big contractors on big projects. The workforce rules may have been much more difficult for small contractors & businesses to meet. One of the signs I saw was this post https://www.utilitydive.com/news/an-open-letter-to-the-department-of-energy-enough-with-the-technical-assis/641491/ from 2023 where state energy office folks complain about how much time they are taking to figure out acceptable plans & policies to meet IRA requirements as interpreted by those offices at DOE. If this is tying state energy administrators in knots, think how the contractors will feel when they finally need to "fill out the forms."
I want more "administrative capacity" like her, not like that. I want policies that require the least "administrative capacity" to carry out. Think Social Security. No drama! Compared with most any health biz.
David, think of your experience with medical costs in Germany. Those costs were not dropped by having 10,000s gov't administrators "efficiently" processing lengthy claims from 100,000s of health care office staff. Somehow they figured out how to not need most of them so money can flow directly to doctors and nurses, etc. And indeed somewhere in there are a few high-capacity green eyeshades saying "No, hospital x, you are not getting euros for that!"
I get your point that the Democrats should be hammering on the ridiculousness of GOP policy and be proud of their policies, not nitpicking each other to death. So yeah, I'm proud of "industrial" solar and wind, even though Kamala Harris was afraid to "say the names" (always "clean energy") and other Dems seem to be following in her footsteps. Do they think that's a good idea? She lost to Donald Trump!
Also, there is https://energyimplementation.github.io/ from former Biden DOE (and other agencies) staff dissecting their behavior and others who didn't really get the "whole of government" approach to "climate" policy. So it's not just pundits and followers inventing this critique w/o any input from practitioners.
Really interesting conversation. One angle I’d love to hear Dave explore more is the resistance inside clean tech itself to the labor-focused regulations and labor standards agenda that Betony Jones discussed on the podcast.
There’s a real tension here. The intent is understandable: make clean energy jobs better, more durable, and more politically resilient. But for many clean tech companies trying to deploy solar, storage, efficiency, VPPs, and grid-edge solutions quickly and affordably, these rules can feel like another layer of friction in a market that needs to scale asap.
The recent Open Circuit episode with Chris Larsen and Michael Brune on what climate can learn from crypto’s bare-knuckle politics was a useful counterpoint. Clean tech still often acts like good policy will win on the merits. It is not always the case. The sector needs to get much more serious about political power, coalition discipline, and defending deployment.
Would love to hear Dave interview Chris Larsen and Michael Brune on this. There’s a big conversation to be had about whether the climate movement is optimizing for perfect policy design or for actually winning and building at the speed the moment requires.
I think one disconnect is that it sounded like she was working on say, hydrogen or CCS or battery plant construction, which are built in $500M+ chunks with big contractors who already are dealing with dangerous conditions and specialized skill and huge mobilizations with huge consequences of explosions or falling off scaffolding 100' up.
Building a solar farm requires lots of laborers who will might drop a $200 panel, so it's defensible that they don't get $100/hr. Then as you get down into $20K residential projects some "compliance" starts costing far more per job, than with the $200M job.
The whole "community benefits" thing is interesting. Not always "affordable" and IMHO community "impacts" are often vastly overstated.
I think the reality is that good governance is complicated. It's an answer people hate and they (NYT) like to sound smart with Abundance. Obviously, the labor department needs to be putting out a data hub that everyone can easily interface with, but that's not a politically sexy thing to implement and sell. When it does happen, it will be a huge effort and nobody involved will get credit (politically).
Trump has left so much space for Dems to be bold. Will they take the opportunity?
Speaking as somebody who is inside "the Abundance crowd", as a member of the Abundance Network ( https://www.abundancenetwork.com/ ), I find David's characterization of what "abundants" have to say pretty alien. I would like specific citations to who he's talking about, and in what essays or news clips. He even acknowledges in the episode that the "administrative capacity" aspect of Abundance is in the original book by that title. It's present in other books that make similar arguments -- Why Nothing Works (Dunkelman), Stuck (Applebaum), On the Housing Crisis (Demsas), Public Citizens (Sabin), Neighborhood Defenders (Einstein et al.).
If you want to range out into the Abundance Extended Cinematic Universe, take Scott Alexander, who is _much_ more libertarian or conservative-leaning than the median Abundant Democrat. He had a quite-good piece titled "Bureaucracy is not Measured in Bureaucrats", making the point that just downsizing government is not what you need, you need to make sure government is doing _the right tasks_, and then has enough people to execute on those tasks. ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats )
The original "everything bagel" column from Ezra was specifically about the everything bagel from the film Everything Everywhere All at Once ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6ie3PEmAr4 ). He mentions in the column that a _proper_ everything bagel, where it doesn't really have _everything_, just a variety of well-selected things, is the best kind of bagel, and that a thoughtfully-crafted industrial policy is going to resemble _that_. I don't think David even _really_ disagrees with the critique that the Biden administration's coalition management strategy and lack of clear prioritization led to problems.
So I find myself puzzled what we're even fighting about here.
My _suspicion_ is that he is getting a distorted perspective from people in the populist wing of the Democratic party who have decided that they want to _purge_ the party of people with whom they have disagreements. I often find myself frustrated by arguments between the Two Matts -- Stoller and Yglesias -- because I think both of them have good points at times, but get out over their skis at other times, and there is the potential for a really good synthesis between the points they're making. But definitely Stoller, and his friend David Dayen, offer caricature / straw-man level arguments against Abundance, which seem to be what David is actually reacting to. I say this as somebody who still likes Stoller and Dayen enough that I have a monthly donation to The American Prospect, and subscribe to their podcast and Stoller's Substack. But, like, Stoller and Dayen would be horrified by the recent Volts episode talking about how properly implemented, data centers could drive more-affordable electricity. They're just _hostile_ to the hyperscalers in an almost-reflexive way. (I do think Stoller and Dayen are more-correct than some of the more-neolib writers like Yglesias about the need for vigorous public utility regulation, though, and particularly the "cost of capital = rate of return" argument.)
Chris Hughes' book Marketcrafters seems to me like a good jumping-off point for the synthesis we need between the neo-Brandeisian populist wing of the party, and the neolib Abundance wing.
Since I was ranting earlier about wind/solar-"hushing" it popped into my head again while reading two posts on Canary. One about the Antora thermal battery in South Dakota, the other about Denver/Xcels's somewhat odd, IMHO, decision to convert some/all buildings on the steam loop to a thermal energy network with heat from some/all of sewage "pumped" with electric heat pumps to usable heat at the buildings.
The first case is really all about wind power. The article goes on and on about the "rate" (16 mentions) but only mentions wind twice. (60% of SD's generation is wind, 30% of SD's generation is exported. SD is swimming in wind power when it's windy.) So the rate is cheap when wind is over-producing. The storage is charged when wind makes the rate cheap. Wind, wind, wind.
Colorado is 30%+ wind electric, 10%+ solar, 1300ish MW of wind under construction. In winter, we're getting towards 50% wind, Xcel maybe higher. The reason building electric heat pumps are clean is wind, wind, wind.
If you have any juice at Canary, can you ask 'em gently to be clear what makes, heat, energy, electricity, clean?
When assigning blame for Trump II, do not forget that when Trump and his lawless supporters were being prosecuted & convicted of multiple felonies and his political career was on life support, BigOil&Gas, the Saudi Prince, Silicon Valley TechBro Masters of the Universe, and his corrupt Slaveholder Court ALL boosted him back from Oblivion, so he could take another bite out of the US Treasury in return for stalling the US renewable energy transition and any regulation of unlimited TechBro ambition. Monopolist's money had way more impact than anything that Democrats did or failed to do to promote their industrial policies.
When evaluating rapidly deployed, widely distributed industrial policies with durable social, climate & affordability benefits, consider this:
China has already established the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) public charging network, totaling over 21 million charging points. This reflects a nearly 48% year-over-year growth, widening a massive gap with the United States (~200,000 public stations) and the European Union (~910,000 public chargers). And, France & South Korea have now mandated solar canopy parking lot Virtual Power Plants at ALL existing parking lots over 80 spaces, nationwide, within 3 to 5 years, largest lots first. That's how you electrify, reduce & stabilize transportation costs and peak demand residential & small business utility rates, everywhere, really FAST!
The level of detail that Betony Jones describes for the Biden/DoE is very impressive. No wonder the ignorami of the Trump administration, the motto of which is: Make Dumb even Dumber, quickly divested itself of such expertise.
Let's hope that error, among others, is soon repaired.
We need more people like Betony Jones in government. President Biden was the working man’s President and he knew how to make govt work to better the lives of people.
Companies complain about regulations to avoid paying fair labor wages & provide decent & safe work conditions to increase their profits: meanwhile CEO pay is out of control when compared to average worker pay and on top of it CEO’s don’t even pay their fair share of federal income tax on their outrageous pay . Meanwhile, we have big govt & surprise , surprise it is brought to us by the corrupt fascist GOP with the gutting of regulations to benefit corporations that they favor. Under the current GOP regime, which stupidly cancelled most of President Biden’s green projects, we are becoming a war-mongering banana republic going after other nation’s resources.
I feel this was aimed at me! I still think there was/are attempts to pile too many goals/policies on "energy transition." But, wow, she clearly "worked the problem(s)" where she was. I get the idea that she was mostly working with big contractors on big projects. The workforce rules may have been much more difficult for small contractors & businesses to meet. One of the signs I saw was this post https://www.utilitydive.com/news/an-open-letter-to-the-department-of-energy-enough-with-the-technical-assis/641491/ from 2023 where state energy office folks complain about how much time they are taking to figure out acceptable plans & policies to meet IRA requirements as interpreted by those offices at DOE. If this is tying state energy administrators in knots, think how the contractors will feel when they finally need to "fill out the forms."
I want more "administrative capacity" like her, not like that. I want policies that require the least "administrative capacity" to carry out. Think Social Security. No drama! Compared with most any health biz.
David, think of your experience with medical costs in Germany. Those costs were not dropped by having 10,000s gov't administrators "efficiently" processing lengthy claims from 100,000s of health care office staff. Somehow they figured out how to not need most of them so money can flow directly to doctors and nurses, etc. And indeed somewhere in there are a few high-capacity green eyeshades saying "No, hospital x, you are not getting euros for that!"
I get your point that the Democrats should be hammering on the ridiculousness of GOP policy and be proud of their policies, not nitpicking each other to death. So yeah, I'm proud of "industrial" solar and wind, even though Kamala Harris was afraid to "say the names" (always "clean energy") and other Dems seem to be following in her footsteps. Do they think that's a good idea? She lost to Donald Trump!
Also, there is https://energyimplementation.github.io/ from former Biden DOE (and other agencies) staff dissecting their behavior and others who didn't really get the "whole of government" approach to "climate" policy. So it's not just pundits and followers inventing this critique w/o any input from practitioners.
Really interesting conversation. One angle I’d love to hear Dave explore more is the resistance inside clean tech itself to the labor-focused regulations and labor standards agenda that Betony Jones discussed on the podcast.
There’s a real tension here. The intent is understandable: make clean energy jobs better, more durable, and more politically resilient. But for many clean tech companies trying to deploy solar, storage, efficiency, VPPs, and grid-edge solutions quickly and affordably, these rules can feel like another layer of friction in a market that needs to scale asap.
The recent Open Circuit episode with Chris Larsen and Michael Brune on what climate can learn from crypto’s bare-knuckle politics was a useful counterpoint. Clean tech still often acts like good policy will win on the merits. It is not always the case. The sector needs to get much more serious about political power, coalition discipline, and defending deployment.
Would love to hear Dave interview Chris Larsen and Michael Brune on this. There’s a big conversation to be had about whether the climate movement is optimizing for perfect policy design or for actually winning and building at the speed the moment requires.
I think one disconnect is that it sounded like she was working on say, hydrogen or CCS or battery plant construction, which are built in $500M+ chunks with big contractors who already are dealing with dangerous conditions and specialized skill and huge mobilizations with huge consequences of explosions or falling off scaffolding 100' up.
Building a solar farm requires lots of laborers who will might drop a $200 panel, so it's defensible that they don't get $100/hr. Then as you get down into $20K residential projects some "compliance" starts costing far more per job, than with the $200M job.
The whole "community benefits" thing is interesting. Not always "affordable" and IMHO community "impacts" are often vastly overstated.
I think the reality is that good governance is complicated. It's an answer people hate and they (NYT) like to sound smart with Abundance. Obviously, the labor department needs to be putting out a data hub that everyone can easily interface with, but that's not a politically sexy thing to implement and sell. When it does happen, it will be a huge effort and nobody involved will get credit (politically).
Trump has left so much space for Dems to be bold. Will they take the opportunity?
Speaking as somebody who is inside "the Abundance crowd", as a member of the Abundance Network ( https://www.abundancenetwork.com/ ), I find David's characterization of what "abundants" have to say pretty alien. I would like specific citations to who he's talking about, and in what essays or news clips. He even acknowledges in the episode that the "administrative capacity" aspect of Abundance is in the original book by that title. It's present in other books that make similar arguments -- Why Nothing Works (Dunkelman), Stuck (Applebaum), On the Housing Crisis (Demsas), Public Citizens (Sabin), Neighborhood Defenders (Einstein et al.).
Certainly it's there in Recoding America, the book by Jen Pahlka, who is one of the most important Abundance thinkers ( https://www.abundancenetwork.com/who-we-are/ ), and she writes about it on her Substack frequently ( https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/serious-state-capacity-notes-for ).
If you want to range out into the Abundance Extended Cinematic Universe, take Scott Alexander, who is _much_ more libertarian or conservative-leaning than the median Abundant Democrat. He had a quite-good piece titled "Bureaucracy is not Measured in Bureaucrats", making the point that just downsizing government is not what you need, you need to make sure government is doing _the right tasks_, and then has enough people to execute on those tasks. ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats )
The original "everything bagel" column from Ezra was specifically about the everything bagel from the film Everything Everywhere All at Once ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6ie3PEmAr4 ). He mentions in the column that a _proper_ everything bagel, where it doesn't really have _everything_, just a variety of well-selected things, is the best kind of bagel, and that a thoughtfully-crafted industrial policy is going to resemble _that_. I don't think David even _really_ disagrees with the critique that the Biden administration's coalition management strategy and lack of clear prioritization led to problems.
So I find myself puzzled what we're even fighting about here.
My _suspicion_ is that he is getting a distorted perspective from people in the populist wing of the Democratic party who have decided that they want to _purge_ the party of people with whom they have disagreements. I often find myself frustrated by arguments between the Two Matts -- Stoller and Yglesias -- because I think both of them have good points at times, but get out over their skis at other times, and there is the potential for a really good synthesis between the points they're making. But definitely Stoller, and his friend David Dayen, offer caricature / straw-man level arguments against Abundance, which seem to be what David is actually reacting to. I say this as somebody who still likes Stoller and Dayen enough that I have a monthly donation to The American Prospect, and subscribe to their podcast and Stoller's Substack. But, like, Stoller and Dayen would be horrified by the recent Volts episode talking about how properly implemented, data centers could drive more-affordable electricity. They're just _hostile_ to the hyperscalers in an almost-reflexive way. (I do think Stoller and Dayen are more-correct than some of the more-neolib writers like Yglesias about the need for vigorous public utility regulation, though, and particularly the "cost of capital = rate of return" argument.)
Chris Hughes' book Marketcrafters seems to me like a good jumping-off point for the synthesis we need between the neo-Brandeisian populist wing of the party, and the neolib Abundance wing.
airhorns for administrative capacity! :P
Good episode!
Since I was ranting earlier about wind/solar-"hushing" it popped into my head again while reading two posts on Canary. One about the Antora thermal battery in South Dakota, the other about Denver/Xcels's somewhat odd, IMHO, decision to convert some/all buildings on the steam loop to a thermal energy network with heat from some/all of sewage "pumped" with electric heat pumps to usable heat at the buildings.
The first case is really all about wind power. The article goes on and on about the "rate" (16 mentions) but only mentions wind twice. (60% of SD's generation is wind, 30% of SD's generation is exported. SD is swimming in wind power when it's windy.) So the rate is cheap when wind is over-producing. The storage is charged when wind makes the rate cheap. Wind, wind, wind.
Colorado is 30%+ wind electric, 10%+ solar, 1300ish MW of wind under construction. In winter, we're getting towards 50% wind, Xcel maybe higher. The reason building electric heat pumps are clean is wind, wind, wind.
If you have any juice at Canary, can you ask 'em gently to be clear what makes, heat, energy, electricity, clean?
When assigning blame for Trump II, do not forget that when Trump and his lawless supporters were being prosecuted & convicted of multiple felonies and his political career was on life support, BigOil&Gas, the Saudi Prince, Silicon Valley TechBro Masters of the Universe, and his corrupt Slaveholder Court ALL boosted him back from Oblivion, so he could take another bite out of the US Treasury in return for stalling the US renewable energy transition and any regulation of unlimited TechBro ambition. Monopolist's money had way more impact than anything that Democrats did or failed to do to promote their industrial policies.
When evaluating rapidly deployed, widely distributed industrial policies with durable social, climate & affordability benefits, consider this:
China has already established the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) public charging network, totaling over 21 million charging points. This reflects a nearly 48% year-over-year growth, widening a massive gap with the United States (~200,000 public stations) and the European Union (~910,000 public chargers). And, France & South Korea have now mandated solar canopy parking lot Virtual Power Plants at ALL existing parking lots over 80 spaces, nationwide, within 3 to 5 years, largest lots first. That's how you electrify, reduce & stabilize transportation costs and peak demand residential & small business utility rates, everywhere, really FAST!
The level of detail that Betony Jones describes for the Biden/DoE is very impressive. No wonder the ignorami of the Trump administration, the motto of which is: Make Dumb even Dumber, quickly divested itself of such expertise.
Let's hope that error, among others, is soon repaired.
We need more people like Betony Jones in government. President Biden was the working man’s President and he knew how to make govt work to better the lives of people.
Companies complain about regulations to avoid paying fair labor wages & provide decent & safe work conditions to increase their profits: meanwhile CEO pay is out of control when compared to average worker pay and on top of it CEO’s don’t even pay their fair share of federal income tax on their outrageous pay . Meanwhile, we have big govt & surprise , surprise it is brought to us by the corrupt fascist GOP with the gutting of regulations to benefit corporations that they favor. Under the current GOP regime, which stupidly cancelled most of President Biden’s green projects, we are becoming a war-mongering banana republic going after other nation’s resources.