Volts Community Thread #07

Open to all free & paid subscribers.

This is your monthly opportunity to share! Use the comments section in this community thread to:

• CLIMATE JOBS & OPPORTUNITIES: Share climate jobs/opportunities

• SHARE WORK, ASK FOR HELP, FIND COLLABORATORS: Share your climate-related work, ask for help, or find collaborators

• CLIMATE EVENTS & MEETUPS: Share climate-related events and meetups

• EVERYTHING ELSE: Discuss David’s Notes or anything else climate-related

• MAILBAG QUESTIONS: Ask a question for this month’s Mailbag (anyone can ask a question but mailbag episodes are a paid-sub-only perk). We request that you ask questions via these community threads. Volts has a form for those who are shy, but David prioritizes questions posted in the community threads.

🚨 To keep organized, please only “REPLY” directly under one of Sam’s headline comments, which are in all caps. Anything not posted as a “REPLY” under a category may be deleted, as will anything inappropriate, spammy, etc. Be nice! Check out our Community Guidelines.

Oh, were you working?

David’s Notes:

1. People really seemed to love the recent 5 superheroes/supervillains episode with Michael Liebreich! While I loved it too — I love all my children equally — I’m curious specifically why y’all liked it so much. What causes some pieces to blow up and others not remains mysterious to me.

2. More success stories! I’m hearing that Climate Cabinet got a significant donations bump after our episode with Caroline Spears. And Minnesota State Rep. Larry Kraft (a previous Volts guest) reports that the recently passed bill HF 5247, which requires the state to consider grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) during its planning process, was inspired by last year’s GETs episode with Julia Selker. Volts matters!

3. 💸 Paid sub exclusives: I’ll be doing a live event with WA Governor Jay Inslee on June 11th (tomorrow)! Paid subs got first dibs on the tickets, and it quickly sold out. And the newest mailbag episode covered e-bikes, fossil fuel subsidies, utility regulation options, and being wrong.

4. ✅ Community comments of the month: Jeff Seidman has created a useful Climate Solutions + Climate Careers website. Jeff comments:

Volties: I would love help building out this site and making it better! Feedback and suggestions on any part of it would be great; and if any of you is inclined to contribute a page (e.g., on any of the million possible climate careers I did not discuss on the careers side of the site), I’d love it. I’d also love help getting it in front of audiences (college students, HS students, others) who might find it useful.

And lots of discussion on Lorenzo Kristov’s bottom-up energy system idea, with too many good comments from Jeff, Robert, Eduardo, Fred and more.

5. You probably heard that New York governor Kathy Hochul put New York City’s congestion-pricing plan, which has been in development for over a decade now and was right on the verge of implementation, on an “indefinite pause.” This is grotesque malpractice — horrendous on the substance and on the politics. I’m probably going to do a pod on it soon but in the meantime read Rob Meyer’s agonized screed. This is a crucial test for the climate community; they need to show that they will stand up for smart urban policy.