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Marketplace All-in-One

The clean energy economy has a NIMBY problem (rerun)

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.5 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Hey Smarties! Make Me Smart is taking a little summer vacation this week. We’ll be back in your feeds soon. But for now, enjoy a rerun of one of our favorite episodes of the year so far.

To reach the Joe Biden administration’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, the country’s energy infrastructure needs a massive overhaul, and fast.

But many communities are not on board with the idea of a massive wind or solar farm in their area. Some counties are banning renewable energy developments before the planning can even begin.

“All those wind turbines and solar panels, and then all the transmission lines that you need to build … it has a big footprint. And that creates lots of land-use conflicts,” said Ted Nordhaus, founder of The Breakthrough Institute.

On the show today, Nordhaus breaks down climate NIMBYism, the threat it poses to our green-energy economy and what it might take to keep the green transition moving forward.

In the News Fix: Work as we know it is changing. Many U.S. companies are already using ChatGPT in one way or another, and the artificial intelligence chatbot is replacing jobs. Plus, workers in Asia and Europe are going back to the office at much higher rates than American workers.

Then, we’ll hear from listeners about how later school start times have improved their family’s mornings, the debate about what to call mocktails, and why Americans keep eggs in the fridge.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

    What have you been wrong about lately? We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question! Leave us a voice message at 508-U-B-SMART, and your submission may be featured in a future episode.

    Transcript

    Click on a timestamp to play from that location

    0:00.0

    Hey everyone, it's Kimberly here.

    0:02.5

    Make Me Smart is on a little summer vacation this week.

    0:05.4

    We'll be back with new episodes soon, but for now, we're revisiting a deep dive from

    0:10.2

    earlier this year.

    0:11.6

    It's about nimbyism and how it's affecting some of the clean energy projects across the

    0:16.4

    country.

    0:17.4

    All right, so with that, onto the show.

    0:19.8

    Oh, and there you go.

    0:22.7

    Engineers are always in charge, that's the name of the game.

    0:25.2

    Hey everybody, I'm Kyle, Rizzo, welcome back to Make Me Smart, we're none of us.

    0:29.5

    Is it smart as all of us?

    0:31.5

    And I'm Kimberly Adams.

    0:32.5

    Thank you for joining us on this Tuesday, which is the day that we do our weekly, deep dive.

    0:38.7

    And today we're going to get into climate nimbyism, or we might also say climate not in

    0:45.4

    my backyard ism, yes, that's it.

    0:48.8

    Anyway, the basic idea is this, that just like we see people fighting housing development

    0:54.6

    in communities of across the country because they don't want it in their area, there are

    0:58.8

    nimby's voting down big renewable energy projects, which we are going to need someplace

    1:05.4

    in order to build at a scale that makes us actually serious about fighting climate change.

    1:11.8

    So how bad is nimbyism impeding the fight for fight against, not fight for, you don't

    1:16.2

    want to fight for climate change, you don't want to fight against climate change.

    1:19.9

    And we're going to talk about what we can do about that.

    ...

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