Lately, everyone from Tony Blair to Daniel Yergin is calling for a “climate reset,” so I brought on clean-energy analyst Michael Liebreich to discuss his own, very different version. While others push expensive distractions, Liebreich argues that the inexorable growth of cheap renewables is already on track to displace fossil fuels, a “tortoise” strategy that will win without the need for crisis politics.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Yo, yo, this is Volts for October 31, 2025, “Michael Liebreich on a ‘pragmatic climate reset.’” I’m your host, David Roberts. All right, this is it, y’all. The last Climate Week pod. On the first night of Climate Week NYC, after a long day of events and more than a few early-evening beers, I sat down at Canary Media’s Climate Night Live event to talk with longtime clean-energy analyst Michael Liebreich about his call for a “pragmatic climate reset.”
As he notes, there have been a spate of high-profile climate reset pieces in the last few months, by everyone from Daniel Yergin to Tony Blair, all claiming to be pragmatic. However, while Liebreich finds plenty of fault with the climate movement, he argues that it would be economically and politically daft for the world to back off from what is now the cleanest energy available: wind, solar, and batteries.
We talked and squabbled and commiserated about all sorts of things ranging from the true nature of the political enemy to the futility of green hydrogen to the long-term potential for electrochemistry. It was a fun, free-wheeling conversation — and you might enjoy consuming an adult beverage yourself while listening. Please enjoy.
David Roberts
Hey, everybody. Hello! I wish I could play the Volts music, but you can all just imagine it in your heads. Welcome, everyone. We’re here today to chat about various things. Michael just wrote a couple of pieces framed as a “climate reset.” I thought we’d talk about a few of the themes he brought up in that. Maybe to start with, why is it that everyone all of a sudden thinks we need climate resets? There are at least four or five high-profile “we need to reset on climate” pieces floating around with different emphases. Maybe just start: what do you think is going into this?
What do you think is causing this outbreak of “reset, whatever”?
Michael Liebreich
It’s great to be here. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you, David. I was really bummed because I’ve been meaning to write a climate reset piece for some time and I write for Bloomberg. I don’t do anything else for them, but I do write. Those pieces take me a long time to give birth to and it took ages. Tony Blair, I got scooped by Tony Blair who came up with this climate reset and he said, “We got to be pragmatic. We got to do direct air capture, just like Climeworks is doing in Iceland, and we got to do lots of nuclear SMRs and we got to do post-combustion CC.” I’m saying, “This is bullshit.”
I had to do my reset then in the wake of Tony Blair. But why is it that there’s this spate of resets? I think that the society’s response, the zeitgeist, “What do we think of climate?” is suddenly up for grabs in a way that it hasn’t been for, I’m going to say, five or seven years. There’s been a consensus. Frankly, I think it’s been a fairly stultifying consensus, very conventional. It’s been very transgressive to disagree with it. Then suddenly you could say Trump’s election enabled a lot of people, by the way on the fossil side, to say, “We need a reset. The transition isn’t working. The grown-ups always knew it wouldn’t work and now we got to stop doing this silly stuff.” Everybody has a reset going, including me.
David Roberts
Yeah, in Tony Blair’s reset — I don’t know if people caught this piece — but it is surreal. Let’s just say it is bizarre to the point that I feel it needs a psychological diagnosis rather than analysis. It seems the consensus among very serious people, the Tony Blairs of the world, the center-right, center-left, third way types, is that wind and solar and batteries, which are getting cheaper all the time and have become the cheapest source of energy in the world, we need to give up on that silliness and instead focus on the two ways of reducing climate emissions that are the number one and the number two most expensive way to reduce climate emissions.
I just don’t know how to address that analytically. What are the... Are there economic forces at work? Who is generating this opinion? You can see that that’s crazy by just googling. What is happening that is bringing people around to this odd view?
Michael Liebreich
I think it’s symptomatic of a bigger disconnect or a bigger problem, which is that a lot of the most influential voices in this are entirely non — I’m going to offend some people — they’re entirely non-STEM educated. They don’t have a clue. If you don’t have a clue, then you just chase the latest shiny thing. There’s also a lot of misinformation out there. It’s quite clear that there are people who still think that all of the car EVs, all of their batteries, all of the minerals are dug out of one country, the DRC Congo, out of artisan mines run by and staffed entirely by children.
Of course, there is a huge problem of child labor in lots of industries. But the misinformation is being spread deliberately. Also, it has truthiness. If you are part of a group that does not like something, then you will believe any... “Is this news? I do not think this is news. Not here, not now.” The most absurd nonsense gets propagated as truth by a whole bunch of people pretending to be grown-ups.
David Roberts
But why is it — a lot of this sounds like big business whispering in Tony Blair’s ear — but solar and wind is big business. Solar and wind and batteries are big business, are they not —? When you travel internationally, you talk to a lot of rich people, powerful people, you talk to those circles. Are the wind and solar, are they just not big enough to be throwing their weight around in those circles? Why can’t they pay Tony Blair to write some geographic piece for them?
Michael Liebreich
I don’t think Tony Blair is being directly paid by a bunch of oil and gas companies. I don’t think it’s as simple as that. First of all, in terms of wind and solar being big businesses, on the technology side, they may be big businesses in China. There are almost no big manufacturers — none of solar, none of batteries — in the West, there are a few decent-sized wind companies in Vestas and Siemens Gamesa. But there are a couple of things. First, they’re not that big. Also, I hate to say it, but they don’t fight dirty and they don’t do the stuff — if you really wanted somebody to buy some politicians, they’re much too nice to do that. The dynamic is just extremely asymmetric.
David Roberts
Yeah, you would think they would be hiring some throat-cutters from oil and gas. You’d think, dude, it’s the same in the US. They’re soft and they talk, “We want bipartisan and everybody can come together,” and they’re begging to get a wedgie in the political scrum. Consequently, they do — they get wedgies.
Michael Liebreich
Yes. Also, there’s a misunderstanding of how to win arguments, which is, and this was something that I mentioned in my most recent piece, the second part of the pragmatic climate reset. I had a go at you for calling people who are deep climate contrarians — you called them, what was it? It was “ignorant and inattentive.” The problem is I’ve met a lot of climate contrarians and they’re not ignorant, they’re very knowledgeable, they know their stuff, and they’re not inattentive. They’re very concerned.
There is this idea amongst the Kumbaya crowd, of which you are a fully paid-up member in my book, at least, David, that says, “If only we could get these people the right information, they would somehow be cured.” It’s a complete misreading of what they’re doing, what their role is, what they’re concerned about, how the debate works, how you win the debate, how you win the politics, how you get stuff built. Even the thing of saying, “Can’t they just hire a nastier PR company?” You think that would work?
Do you think just that one move, as opposed to really understanding how the culture works? I hate to say it, but the climate community — and I don’t want to just associate it with Democrats here — but they’re just losing the arguments. Largely it’s because one side is trying to win with logic and the other side is just trying to entertain. It’s totally asymmetric.
David Roberts
Oh, my goodness. Let me just defend one bit of calumny there. I’ve long since abandoned the idea that if you get people good information, they will behave in rational ways. Believe me, I’m past that. But it does seem that one of the things I found that was missing from your piece, that is missing from a lot of these pieces, is they describe, “The public has decided X, Y, and Z,” saying, “wind and solar are too expensive or they don’t work or whatever.” What’s missing is the mediation between the phenomenon and those conclusions.
What’s mediating is a giant disinformation industry that is almost completely dominated by the right at this point. People are drawing false conclusions based on false propaganda, not because Democratic arguments aren’t good. They don’t hear Democratic arguments, they don’t hear good arguments, they hear caricatures of their opponents on Fox News, et cetera. I want to move on to a policy question. I think this gets to the difference between pure economics and, call it, perception. You and I agree that electrotech — let’s call it — solar, wind, batteries, VPPs, demand response, the whole network of networked electricity — is 90% of the solution and here today and worth pursuing and falling in cost and succeeding.
That story is true with the odd exception of EVs. EVs are the one bit of that technology that is going slower than predicted rather than faster than predicted. I think solar is spreading faster than anybody always thinks, batteries are spreading faster than everybody thinks, everything’s spreading faster. But EVs aren’t. Why?
Michael Liebreich
I don’t agree with that. I think that just depends on what forecast at what point for EVs. Also, I hate to say it, but whether you’ve also fallen into the same trap of believing that there’s an EV slowdown. One in two cars sold in China is an EV. 25% —
David Roberts
There’s China and there’s everybody else.
Michael Liebreich
Okay, 25% of cars worldwide being sold today are EVs. I don’t know what forecast you were looking at, but if somebody had told me when I was starting New Energy Finance... I remember, let me tell you, I went in 2016 when I was still with Bloomberg NEF — I was non-exec, I was chairing things, but I was still invited to the summit. I went to one in, I think it was Shanghai, and there was a very senior Chinese official who was on a panel with Colin McKerracher, the head of EVs at Bloomberg, who was moderating, and Colin asked this very senior official, “In 2040,” I think it was, may have been 2030 — story’s better if it’s 2030 — “What percentage of cars will be EVs?” This chap said, “80.” Colin said, “18? 1-8? 18? That’s huge.” The guy said, “No, no, no, 80. 8-0.” I was in the audience going, “Holy moly, he’s smoking something.” Of course, they are entirely on track to have 80% of sales.
David Roberts
Sales, not vehicles on the road.
Michael Liebreich
But that’s part of the misinformation or part of the problem. Right now, worldwide, 25% of vehicles being sold are electric and 4% of the fleet. When you look around, you don’t see EVs. Of course you do in California, of course you do in Norway. Go to most places, you don’t see EVs. They are being bought. But you’ve got an 18- or 20-year life of a car. The average age of a car on the road is 11 years. Most people think that means that cars last 11 years. They don’t. They last 22 years.
It’s just the maths. What do you expect to see? This is part of something that I covered in part one of my piece, which is if your view of the transition is radical and dramatic—”We’re going to just walk away from 50% of our fossil fuel. We’re going to cut emissions by 50% by 2030”—means walking away from 50% of all of our energy infrastructure in 12 years or whatever from when that, five years now. It’s not going to happen. It was never going to happen.
If you measure against that, of course you think that there is not... If you measure EVs against, “Well, I don’t see 25%, I don’t see 50%, I don’t see...” Of course you don’t, but you will because there is a transition going on and it is happening.
David Roberts
Well on the other end of the electrotech spectrum, I had another question for you. I agree, obviously, 80%, 90% is stuff we already have. Let’s pursue it. You make the point that some of these heavy industries that people are very concerned with and spend a lot of time talking about and worrying over are just not that big a global emissions source. If that’s all that’s left emitting in 2040, we’ll be well off, granted all that. But what I wonder is why do you not have faith in electrochemistry tackling, say, green steel or green concrete? If you believe that clean electricity is going to become super cheap and super abundant, why can’t we use that to create steel electrochemically?
Why don’t you think that’s solvable... Why don’t you think that’s in reach?
Michael Liebreich
Is this a hydrogen question masquerading as an electrochemistry question?
David Roberts
No, I don’t think you need hydrogen. Not all electrochemistry is hydrogen.
Michael Liebreich
No, I do, if the Boston Metal process can be made to work, it will beat any other way of making steel. It certainly will beat hydrogen. Why would you take electricity and make hydrogen to make steel? Why wouldn’t you just take the electricity and make some damn steel? I have an investment in a company called Magrathea Metals, which is doing electrochemically-won magnesium. Magnesium is a fantastic structural metal, it’s lighter than aluminium. If you can make it electrically rather than... Because the way it’s made now is in China, you bake rocks and it’s very cheap because the people who do the rock baking die young.
If you really want to sell your electrochemically made magnesium, you have a real challenge to do it cheaper than baking rocks. It is very hard. I invested and I am hoping that it works. I am a big fan of electric, a huge fan of electrochemistry. Let me just say one thing, which is if what you need is heat, then our biggest problem for high-temperature stuff is that natural gas is just really cheap and electricity is expensive. When it is a heat pump, then of course you have the multiplier of the coefficient of performance.
If you just need heat for metal annealing or ceramics or making clinker or whatever, then it’s much harder to do economically, purely electrically. I think it’s going to happen. Look, I’ve said, come 2100, I will guarantee you we will not be burning stuff.
David Roberts
Anywhere for anything?
Michael Liebreich
We might still be burning a little bit of bio stuff, maybe, who knows? But broadly speaking... The reason is, it is...
David Roberts
That’s all I wanted to hear, honestly.
Michael Liebreich
Look, it’s bad economics, it’s bad thermodynamics, and it’s bad pollution, climate, et cetera. I have to believe that, give us another 75 years, we will have figured out alternatives to pretty much all burning. Here’s a great example. You have a gas furnace, you are literally using a flame temperature of 1,950 degrees to heat your home to 19 and a half degrees. This is objectively, economically, thermodynamically, pollution-wise, stupid. It’s going to stop. It doesn’t matter how many people love their gas furnaces, it’s just not going to be a thing.
Now the question is, could we please do it a bit quicker than 2100 because there are some real consequences to moving slow.
David Roberts
Yeah, but that’s... Everybody, you say electrify everything and then you always get the person who says, “But what about this or what about that? We’re going to electrify almost everything.” I’m just, “No, it’s everything.” I’m putting my foot down. It’s everything.
Michael Liebreich
Here’s the thing. It is everything, whatever. The reason that I wrote this two-parter: one is saying anybody who says there’s no transition, they’re wrong. They’re faking the numbers, they’re using the primary energy fallacy, they’re confusing costs and investment, they’re doing all sorts of little tricks, and in Tony Blair’s case, they’re then correctly identifying the need for a reset, but then proposing a whole load of really stupid stuff as the solution. That was part one. Part two, though, is to say, can we stop doing stupid stuff?
We, the climate community, stop doing stupid stuff that is counterproductive. If you want to go fast, sometimes you just have to win like a tortoise, not win like a hare. Saying “electrify everything” — let me link it back to electrify everything, just to where we came, where I came from, just very briefly, if I might. The problem with saying “electrify everything” is that anybody who has a gas furnace or an internal combustion car immediately is going to be alienated. I just reframe it and say, can we just do... There’s this smorgasbord of cheap, effective things, affordable things, clean solutions.
It’s right in front of our noses. Can we just please do that and stop talking about hydrogen airplanes or all sorts of the last few percent? “Ah, what happens if there’s a really long Dunkelflaute? Haha, you didn’t think of that.” What then?
David Roberts
There’s always the Dunkelflaute guy along with these are the types of guys. I wanted to set you up because I do think this is an interesting conceptual shift that you write in the piece that I think will be new to people and is interesting to think about. A lot of the model for climate activism has been huge, pressing problem, very little time to solve it. We’ve got to do big, extraordinary, precedent-breaking things that we’ve never done in politics before. “We need extraordinary measures.” The point you make is just if clean electricity gets cheaper faster than demand rises over time, inexorably, fossil fuels will be pushed out slowly but steadily.
Which means we’ll miss that 2030 target, but we will hit the 2050 target. We won’t get 1.5 degrees, but we’ll have a good chance of coming in under 2 degrees without this sense of crisis rush — break with everything. We could, through normal politics, do this.
Michael Liebreich
You’re almost there. If I might just gloss it slightly. You said that if electricity gets cheaper, you’ve turned it into an electrotech point. What I did in part one of these two-part articles was I built a four-line Excel model — four-line, literally the simplest model of the global energy system ever built. Took me about 20 minutes. What it does is it says — okay, look, first of all, I’m not a degrowther, by the way, so I like humans and I like humans visiting their grandparents and I like them drinking cold beers and I like them having MRI scanners in Africa.
All of that needs energy. I’m with Chris Wright in that energy use correlates with human progress. The first thing is let’s all hope that the use of energy, that the economy keeps growing because that is what’s pulling people out of poverty and it’s providing the good things in life. If the economy grows at, line one, 3.3% per year, which is what it has been growing at globally, and then you say, “Well, there’ll be some real energy efficiency at the demand side,” let’s call it a percent, a little bit over a percent so that we don’t have to grow, the energy demand doesn’t grow at 3.3, let’s say it grows at 2%.
Then let’s start with the correct figure, not the primary energy figure, but the correct figure for clean energy services, which is one-third of everything is clean already — not 20%, one-third. Let’s start with that and then let’s grow the clean energy not at 2% demand, but at 5%. It may be that it’s getting cheaper, it may be policy, it may be whatever. Line three — line one is the economy, line two is the energy demand growth 2% — line three is then the clean energy growing at 5% per year.
I don’t do anything clever — “Oh, it might be a bit faster first of all, then it gets more mature,” I just go 5%, let’s just see what happens. Line four is fossil filling the gap, which is what it does in real life. If you can’t have wind and solar, then you use your fossil. That’s reality. Four lines and what happens exactly as you say, initially you don’t see very much — Ernest Hemingway, “How do you go bankrupt? First slow and then fast.” Fossil fuels lose. First slow and then it walks —
David Roberts
Yeah, this is the key point. It looks like we might not be winning in the first 20 years.
Michael Liebreich
It looks like exactly what we see out there, which is clean energy growing faster than energy demand, but not fast enough to absorb all the growth yet. That “yet” is the important word that all of these others — Dan Yergin and Michael Cembalest and Vaclav Smil and Bjorn Lomborg and Chris — are not thinking about in terms of... Essentially all I’m doing is saying there’s this theory of additivity. “Oh, clean energy only gets added.” The reason is because the smaller number, the 30% clean, is growing faster, but the bigger number is growing as well.
It’s just the question of what happens to the delta. It’s a four-line model.
David Roberts
I’ve always found that particular point baffling. Mathematically it has to go through addition before it gets to substitution. Of course it’s going through that phase. That doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically only addition. Just follow the numbers out into the future and it becomes substitution at some point.
Michael Liebreich
You’re taking one geometric series from another and then calling it additive. No, no, no, no, no, no. Geometric minus geometric does not end up being additive. The other thing I love about the additivity is where they say, “It’s additive because whatever we don’t use in the West, we use in the Global South.” Wait a minute, all of that peat and the charcoal — is that why charcoal use is growing in Africa? Is it because we stopped using it? I don’t see a load of people carrying charcoal to Africa from Europe.
It’s just BS. It’s post-facto rationalization of a position that these people want to hold. When I go after it, I think what’s really important is I’m not trying to persuade — I’m not going to persuade Chris Wright of anything or Bjorn Lomborg or... None of these people will be persuaded. What I’m trying to do is make fun of their ideas, to deny the territory to the average person who might read one of those other reset pieces and say, “This seems pretty sensible. This is what the grown-ups think.” It’s not what the grown-ups think.
It’s what people who can’t do four-line spreadsheets think. I’m trying to deny the followers to these flawed, flawed, flawed models. That’s my mission, that’s what I’m trying to do there.
David Roberts
But my response to your simple model was this makes sense. Clean energy is growing faster than energy demand. Eventually it takes over. Looks like not a lot of progress at first, but then you get a flippy point around 2040-ish.
Michael Liebreich
I call it winning the transition like a tortoise, not like a hare. The hare is the 1.5. We failed. The hare version has failed.
David Roberts
This to me raises questions about the politics of it. I wanted to run this question by you. One of my pet theories that I believe in, 57%, is that despite all our many efforts, climate is never going to be the central rationale for the behavior of large numbers of people. We can yell at them all we want. It’s negative, it’s unpleasant, it’s a danger. People don’t want to think about it. All these reasons — we’ve been yelling and preaching about it for 20, 30 years.
The number of people—I keep seeing these polls, “Great news. The number of people who believe that climate change is happening, it ticked up 3% in the last five years and we’re up to 52% now.” Jesus. I think that we needed to raise the alarm about climate change. Now we’ve got two positive stories to sell people on things they can pursue and want and desire and fight for rather than be scared of and avoid. One of them, which was the subject of a panel I was at earlier today, is about housing and urbanism and walkability.
We can give you better places to live. The other is this electrotech. I genuinely think we have a whiz-bang future of unlimited growth. I’m curious if you ever try this line on people you talk to: if we’re still hooked to fossil fuels, there’s a limit to the amount we can grow and we’re eating our seed corn and fouling our nest as we’re doing it. If you want to 5x the amount of energy humanity uses, 10x, desalinate the oceans for drinking water, go to Mars, do big things.
If you have a big vision of a bright future for humanity, only renewable energy can do that. Only solar power can do that. It is the only source, literally physically the only source of energy abundant enough to do that. We need to — as you know, you’re not a degrowther. The environmental movement has had this degrowth vibe following it around, still feels ambiguous about it. It still has not resolved in this movement. But I think there’s a world where we turn toward a bright, happy, human-positive, wealth-positive, growth-positive future.
Only clean energy can do that. I wonder, do all the powerful people get that?
Michael Liebreich
I don’t want to be a downer. I’m not buying that argument. It’s great. We’ve all had a few beers and we’re among friends and it sounds great and “Woo, let’s do it” and so on. Fine. But if you’re talking to the average person and you’re saying, “We can’t keep going. Things can’t keep going as they are for 200 years unless we do this wrenching, painful thing today,” I think you’re not going to get many votes in an election.
David Roberts
No, I’m saying we can offer you cooler, better stuff. A cooler, better life. A better life with better stuff in it. We have a bunch of big, bloated incumbents slowing down our progress towards those cool things.
Michael Liebreich
But you can heat your home near Calgary. I was there, there was a project in a place called Okotoks where they’re doing seasonal storage underground. They built this project and it’s so cool. It’s all electrotech like you wouldn’t believe. But it cost something like $100,000 per home and you can heat a home there for $200 a year. Good luck explaining that your cool electrotech thing is the future. Let me flip it around though. I’m not a million miles away. I was just doing my messaging consultancy on exactly how you phrased it.
You used a few words that are almost triggers. You said “we had to raise the alarm.” I’m not sure if raising the... We certainly had to understand the problem and we had to communicate the problem. But I think that then going down this route of, “We’re going to try and scare everybody to get action,” has been ineffective. People are not scared. We’ve just had the four hottest years in the history of hot years.
David Roberts
But you yourself said that the revolution, the transition, is underway. Who do you think did that?
Michael Liebreich
I don’t think it’s being driven by fear. There are a few people who will choose to be scared, but most people will not choose to be scared. Frankly, I was going to say four hottest years in the history of hot years. We just had the four global record harvests. A lot of people out there, we just have to understand, are not scared. I think the way we need to frame it for a lot of people, and particularly people on the right — and I count myself as a center-right, I’m not a mad extremist, but I am from the center-right tradition — I think that what you’ve got to say is, “Yes, there’ll be cool stuff and there’ll be better stuff. It might not all be cool and better, but when it is, please just use it.” That’s the first thing. But also we have a responsibility. This is a problem that is not going to go away. It’s going to get worse. Are the harvests going to collapse? Are you going to die of climate change? No. But it is your responsibility, particularly if you call yourself a conservative. There’s a clue in the name — conserve — which means when you have these long-term grinding problems that are not going to go away, it is your responsibility to do something about it, not destroy all of your energy infrastructure tomorrow.
But there is a gradient, there is a force field that says move towards the cleaner stuff, move towards solving the problem and make sure that after some decent interval of decades it is solved. I think that is a narrative that can resonate a lot more than this “we’ve got to sound the alarm.”
David Roberts
This is where I want to argue because you sound like you are designing a message for a room full of sensible people — you, which, God, if only. But the world is full of madness. Madness is loose in the country. It’s not fact-based, it’s not responding to facts, it’s not responding to calm messages. You need a counterforce that has some communication with the limbic system, that touches on the amygdala, that moves the hormones and gets people feeling about it. This idea that we should all just be calm and rational throughout until the future, I would love that.
But that’s not the humanity we live in.
Michael Liebreich
If I summarize my second part of the pragmatic climate reset piece, it’s not, “And then we hold town halls and try and persuade people not to be extreme and mad and contrarian.” I’m not going to use the worst words because I don’t think that’s productive. What I am saying is spend the next few years — there is a smorgasbord of stuff right in front of us that is affordable, that is cheap, and we should just be doing that. Certainly in the current environment we should be doing that all day long.
Frankly, the other point that I would make is when you look out there at these seas of rabid crazies that you seem to think we’re surrounded by...
David Roberts
Read the news, Mike.
Michael Liebreich
But you’re assuming that everybody who’s not you is them. I think that’s wrong. There are a lot of silent people who are not like that. I meet them even in America.
David Roberts
You meet a very specific, very select group of uniquely rational people.
Michael Liebreich
Two points about — supposing we are surrounded by a sea of... Some film where they have been zombified and become rabid. You are not going to appeal to their limbic system by claiming climate catastrophe. You are not going to get there. Point number one. Point number two is, do you ever think that in some way you made them rabid? You annoyed them so much, they became like that?
David Roberts
The answer to that is no.
Michael Liebreich
Nothing you’ve done. Nothing you’ve done.
David Roberts
The US conservative movement is long-standing, decades old, well-funded, has wanted what it wants from the beginning. Wants it no matter what I do. Of course, when it does shitty things, it’s going to say, “Hey, we did this shitty thing because you said your thing wrong, or you offended us, or you called us a name.” Of course it’s going to say that. But it wants what it wants. The right exists separately from us. It’s not a reaction to us.
Michael Liebreich
You just did exactly what I wanted you to do. I played you like a violin. Just the same way that you’re played like a violin by people who want you to start moving to the extreme, making extreme statements, being disparaging, calling people ignorant. What was it? No, it was the thing that you tweeted.
David Roberts
Fascist? I don’t know, I’ve used all the words.
Michael Liebreich
No, but around climate, you said that people were “ignorant and inattentive.” The problem with that is if you accuse people of being ignorant and inattentive, don’t be surprised when the next day you ask them to buy a heat pump and they tell you to go to hell. We do, in this community, have agency in that polarization. We can either make it worse or we can at least try. Again, I’m not talking about the real extremes, the people who are out there on social media tweeting every day about how solar power never earns back the energy used to make —
David Roberts
But, Michael, they’re not tweeting. They’re running the country. The people running the country think solar is a myth. They think wind causes cancer. They’re canceling almost-built offshore wind projects. These are irrational, crazy people. They’re not some fringe. They’re running things. They are on your TV.
Michael Liebreich
Who voted for them? Everybody who voted for them is as crazy as that? Every single 50%?
David Roberts
Not all of them. I’d say probably 30% of the US is full of crazy people who are not going to be calmed by your slow rational process.
Michael Liebreich
Now we’re just negotiating who we’re going to talk to. What you’re saying is that there is 20% of the country that is some swing, and they can be either alienated by you — but that’s the swing constituency. My point is you’re not going to — whether it’s 30% or 10% — that you’ll never, ever persuade — but there is a big chunk that takes cues from our messaging, from our behavior. That’s part of my thing. The reason I started in my piece, number one, is fix the politics because we have agency in the amount of opposition and the followership of the more contrarian brigade.
David Roberts
I would say what those people are responding to is not us. They are never exposed to us. What they hear is a caricature of us delivered by Fox News. We can say whatever we want. Fox News is still going to tell them that we’re crazy.
Michael Liebreich
Sorry, David. Millions of people have had their commutes disrupted by Just Stop Oil.
David Roberts
Millions?
Michael Liebreich
Millions, yes, because they keep on doing it over a period of years. Literally millions of people have been disrupted. Those are the people you then want to go and buy an EV or buy a heat pump. They’re predisposed by that experience to believe that all that stuff is crap and doesn’t work. They’ll believe any stupid stuff that’s propagated by the contrarians because you’ve annoyed them.
David Roberts
We’re going to have to leave it there with Michael being wrong about this.
Michael Liebreich
I enjoy being the token conservative in the room. I don’t know if anybody else...
David Roberts
We have to wrap it up. Thanks, everybody. Thank you for coming. Subscribe to Volts and to Cleaning Up.
Michael Liebreich
Cleaning Up.
David Roberts
Subscribe to both.
Michael Liebreich
It’s on every good podcast platform and on YouTube.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next time.
