4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2024
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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David Roberts website Volts.wtf :
What with climate change accelerating and US politics falling apart, it’s pretty grim out there. Yet alongside these doom loops, somewhat anomalously, something good is happening: the transition away from fossil fuels to clean, carbon-free energy is underway, and it is accelerating every day.
That transition has become an enormous, sprawling meta-story. It spans the entire economy, from heavy industry to tech to retail. It’s unfolding on every level of government, from local zoning boards to the federal government to international treaties. It involves technology, politics, policy, psychology, even philosophy. It’s a lot to track.
At Volts, I track it. I follow the news, read the trade publications and research reports, talk to the engineers and policy staffers, and think hard about the larger political and social context. Rather than the broad-and-shallow view offered by most publications, I sift through the flotsam for what matters and then go deep on it. The goal is not quantity of information but quality of understanding.
I have been reading, writing, and thinking pretty intensely about this subject matter for over 15 years now. Most recently, from 2015 to 2020, I was with Vox, a news and culture publication for which I still occasionally write. Before that, I was with Grist, a publication focused on environmental news, where I was hired in 2004.
Over those 15+ years I’ve written for other publications (like Outside) and appeared on a variety of TV shows, radio programs, and podcasts, like All In with Chris Hayes and On the Media and Pod Save America and Why Is This Happening? I’ve been quoted or cited by all kinds of fancy-pants people, from Al Gore to several US senators to pundits like Michelle Goldberg and Paul Krugman and Jon Favreau and Tom Friedman to media analysts like Margaret Sullivan and Jay Rosen to climate writers like Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben and David Wallace-Wells.
As for my pre-professional life, here it is in one paragraph: I grew up in a small town in Tennessee, went to a small liberal arts college in another small town in Tennessee, and then, when I graduated, lit out west. I spent a while in Montana getting an MA in Philosophy (with a minor in snowboarding), then went to work on a PhD at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton (three hours north of Calgary, which is three hours north of the border). Edmonton was too cold and academic philosophy was too bleak, so in 1999 I bailed and lit out to Seattle. After a period of professional drift but personal joy (including a wife and a child), I stumbled into the Grist job by sheer luck in 2004. (I happened to see it the first time I ever visited Craigslist.) Been writing ever since.
Now I live in Seattle with my wife, two teens, two dogs, and two cats.
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0:00.0 | Hello my friends this is another episode of Stand Up where I welcome another |
0:06.7 | amazing guest today it's David Roberts who writes the best newsletter and |
0:11.8 | podcast about clean energy and politics. |
0:15.0 | Volts.WTF David Roberts joins me today. |
0:19.0 | You are going to love it. |
0:20.0 | That is going to start at 17 minutes into today's show. I'm here with today's |
0:25.1 | episode just a little bit late. Hopefully I will get it up by 6 a.m. but last |
0:30.0 | night an unbelievable night gathered with several listeners in Kingston, New York where we were hosted |
0:37.2 | by Tarese, who is a longtime listener you might know from our hangouts if you ever join us but she hosted |
0:44.3 | Matt Carlson Maddie C who is on tour with his solo tour his house tour the |
0:50.3 | Shettio on the road tour and it was real fun because we had a little mini |
0:55.2 | gathering of listeners joining us shout out to Megan and Sandman and Cindy who brought |
1:02.2 | her husband and both of her sons. |
1:05.0 | They drove in all the way from Chicago and we had a great time. |
1:10.0 | The five of us and friends and family and it was it was awesome. |
1:14.6 | Maddie played a bunch of his originals and it was very very good. I was highly |
1:19.2 | impressed and you should definitely see him if he's in your neck of the woods but I was up late and so didn't get to do |
1:27.4 | won't have a big news segment because I was out supporting Maddie and having a great time myself and I will see you tonight at our |
1:36.1 | hangout. We'll talk all about it I hope at tonight's hang out at 8 East. If you are a paid |
1:41.3 | subscriber you should get a link to that. |
1:43.0 | I hope to see you tonight at 8. |
1:45.0 | I will give you some headlines from yesterday, |
... |
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